Junk in the Trunk, Part One: The Longest Day Ever!

Slowly but surely, I'm working on trying to get everyone caught up with our goings-on of the past few weeks. So here is part one of the story of our move back down to the lovely south:

As Dave mentioned, as soon as it was time to move, spring weather had burst forth upon Boston, yet we were stuck inside, cleaning and packing up a million boxes. I'm not going to lie, I was more than a little pissed. But at least we got to have the windows open, infusing a little fresh air into the stuffiness and dust left behind from the winter.

We worked all day Friday and Saturday of that week, preparing for the big move on Sunday. Saturday evening we had done about all we could do, and we went out for our one last night in Boston. We ended up going to the Skywalk Observatory at the top of the Prudential Center, so we could have one last view of the beautiful city lights. Here's a look at Fenway park from above:

After the skywalk, we went to our favorite neighborhood bar, The Hill Tavern, one last time. We were supposed to just have dinner and a few drinks, and then head home early so that we would be ready to leave by 10AM Sunday morning. But in the usual Dave and Bean style, we went out with a hearty "BANG!" Instead, we stayed out till 2AM, drinking more than we should have, but we sure did have a great time, and that's all that matters, right? Here's a picture of our favorite spot, complete with our favorite bartender and friend, a big ass dude who you definitely want on your side:

Sunday morning, April 22, 2007, was a little rough to say the least. I'm pretty sure we didn't even get out of bed until 10AM.... Oooops! And then to top it all off, what we thought was going to be just a couple hours of packing up the Durango we rented and a brisk cleaning of the apartment, turned into six and a half hours of packing hell.

Problem #1: When we first moved to Boston, we got extremely lucky by renting a Dodge mini-van with the all important "Stow-N-Go" seating. In this van, the back seats tuck down under the floor of the van, creating a perfectly flat cargo area for us to pack all of our crap in. However, the car rental place didn't have one of these vans for us to rent, so we ended up with a Dodge Durango, which is still a pretty large vehicle, but the seats do not tuck under the floor, only fold down flat. Therefore, we probably lost half of the packing space we originally had. (Sidenote: We did explore the option of an actual cargo van rental, but we did not find any that would allow a one-way trip.)

Problem #2: It is inevitable that no matter where you live, you will accrue more stuff than when you originally moved in.

Because we knew we had more stuff than would fit in our vehicle, we had already shipped our six biggest boxes with nonbreakable items in them. Apparently that wasn't enough. After cramming every possible inch of space in the Durango with anything that would possibly fit that we couldn't throw away, we ended up with this:

It certainly bears a striking resemblance to this, doesn't it? After all that, we still had to ship four more boxes, and had to throw away quite a bit. Some of the casualities included: both the bathroom and the kitchen trash cans, the dish drainer, numerous cleaning supplies, and David's beloved vacuum cleaner (which I swear was a decrepit old thing from the 80's that never worked right anyways, but David will tell you otherwise... even so, I still felt a little sad to leave it behind).

Finally, at 4:30pm, we said goodbye to our beloved Charles River Park, and headed towards Washington, D.C., where we had to make it that night, because we had already made a hotel reservation there for the evening. The drive started off OK, despite both of us being tired, hungover, and generally frazzled from the trauma of packing the shit out of the Durango and leaving much later than we had hoped.

We made it through the expected New York traffic without too much of a delay, and by the time we were almost through New Jersey, we were hungry and ready for another break. We stopped at one of those easy-access traveler's rest areas that are common in the northeast. They are accessed directly from the highway and have gas plus a variety of fast food, that I'm sure was designed for a quick and easy stop for travelers. Apparently the "quick and easy" part does not apply in New Jersey.

It was about 10:00 at night by that time, and the only thing that was open was the Burger King. Long story short, we spent about 40 minutes there, by the time we hit the bathrooms and finally got our food! We next had to get gas. First of all, we didn't get the memo that it's against the law to pump your own gas in NJ. We had to wait in line at the full service gas station, and by the time it was finally our turn, the guy comes up to us and says, "It's going to be just a few minutes. We are in the middle of a shift change." I swear I saw smoke coming out of Dave's ears, and I was really afraid his head was going to explode! It was at least fifteen minutes later, when we left that damn rest stop, and David proclaimed, "We are never stopping in New Jersey again!"

Little did we know, just around the corner, they were doing a little bit of Sunday night road work... Here's what we saw:

A sea of breaklights, spanning to the horizon. By the time we got through all that traffic, it was probably around midnight, and we still had two more states to drive through!

We ended up at our hotel around 1:30AM, defeated and exhausted beyond belief. We crawled into our bed, and both immediately fell asleep.

And that was only Day One of driving! Day Two to follow tomorrow....