And...We're Off...

Miles and I got up at oh-dark-30 this morning (also known as 5:30am). We are sharing the truck with another couple that is moving from Seattle to Brooklyn so the plan was to have Mike pick us up, drive us to the Penske station to get the truck and then we would follow him to his place to load their stuff before driving to our place and loading ours. He called right on time at 6:30 saying he was at Starbucks across the street getting breakfast. We decided to meet him there and I reached for the door handle and it fell off in my incredibly strong grip. We couldn’t get out of our apartment until we jimmied the door open with Miles’ keys. And that is how the day started.

Miles with his BIG truck...

Picking up the truck was no problem. It honestly went very smoothly. We followed Mike to his place in Bellevue. Changing lanes was a little scary, but we made it there without incident. We had all his stuff loaded by 9 which was amazing and we headed to our place to load our stuff. We did hit some traffic getting back to our apartment but by 11:30 we had everything in the truck and it was the perfect size. We had lunch and cleaned our apartment so it wouldn’t stick when I get back to Seattle in a month. Getting the car onto the car lift thing was a little rough as the car is too low and it scrapped the bumper a tad. I actually had to lift the front in order to winch down the cord holding the tire (again, notice my extreme strength).
Right before we left the owner of my apartment building shows up so I tell her about the door handle and I go back to the apartment that we have already locked up…we were about to drive away…to let her son fix the problem. I was waiting for him to get his tools, so I figured I would take one more look around to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. And what do you know, all of Miles’ travel clothes (some of his favorites) are sitting in their plastic bag in the closet just waiting to be left. Thankfully our apartment manager was doing work on the apartments because otherwise we would have had to re-live the Italy incident in which Miles left all his travel clothes for our ten day trip locked in the school and we had to go find shirts and shorts in Rome with our limited budget.

Even with all this we were on the road by 1:30. We were hoping to be all loaded and on our way by 3pm so we were really happy that we had eaten lunch and set up my stuff in the apartment and after all that we were over an hour ahead of schedule.

Miles freaking out at the size of the truck.
Miles managed to get us to the freeway and we had gone about a mile and a half on I-5 when this woman pulls up next to us and signals for me to roll down my window. Turns out the tires on the car were smoking. So we pull over and immediately a cop shows up. No problem really. We just had left the emergency brake on, thus dragging the car for a couple miles before realizing the problem. With tires still smoking 5 minutes later we were off again and what do you know, the truck can get to 50 mph (something we had not been able to do with the emergency brake on in the Mazda).

So far the rest of the trip has been without incident. But, then again we have 7 more days of driving and we are bound to have some problems. We went 45mph up the pass and maintained a steady 55mph the rest of the way to Coeur d’Alene, which is where we are now. The first two motels we tried to stay at were over $150 for their cheapest room but the Super 8 motel across the street turned out to be a bargain at $65+tax and that includes free Wi-Fi. The truck is even parked in such a way that we can drive straight out of the parking lot. This is good, as we can’t go reverse in the truck. It won’t let us.

Hopefully my next update will be tomorrow and much shorter due to fewer incidences of stupidity.