Robbie was offered a job in Cincinnati towards the beginning of August, without even having been there! All interviews were over the phone and through Skype! Ahh, technology! Robbie accepted the offer, and a week later, the weekend of August 18th, we flew out to Cincinnati to see it for ourselves. In all our research before we came, the city was very attractive to us. It had everything we needed, we would be back in the midwest and closer to family/friends, and Cincinnati is literally the center of the sports world! As we were in Cincinnati, our excitement for the city was confirmed! This is the city we knew we were moving to! Below are some pictures of our time spent in Cincinnati!
When we got off the plane and were waiting for our shuttle, it was raining! It was a glorious sight!
Driving into downtown Cincinnati from the Kentucky side.
Seeing our future city from a downtown observation deck!
Over Robbie's right shoulder is Great American Ballpark where the Cincinnati Reds play baseball. We will be visiting that ballpark a lot being the Brewers play there like 9 times each year!
Cincinnati is the Queen City!
The Riverfront Park was awesome, with a life-size piano that you play with your feet (like in the movie "Big"), and a life-size chess and checkers set! There was also water features for kids to play in, and huge 2-person swing sets!
Going back to California was a drag because after just visiting our future home, all we wanted to do was get there! We decided that Labor Day Weekend was going to be our target moving date! That was close, just 2 weekends away! At this point in time, Robbie had parted ways with his job in California, so he hit the ground running the week of August 20th by calling for quotes on moving companies, car transportation (we didn't trust our car to make the drive from CA to OH), and moving labor. We approached this move from every angle, from packing a U-Haul and having someone drive it to Ohio, packing a PODS, going with a local company vs. a national company. After all this, we realized it was going to be really expensive to move our 3-bedroom house across the country. Then we had the brilliant idea to sell our furniture to cut down on space and cost! So, the weekend before our move, our friends helped us post our couch, dining room table, guest bed, and refrigerator on a local buying/selling/exchange group they were a part of. By the following Tuesday, all of those items were gone from our house, and we made some extra cash as well! We were both excited to just buy all brand new stuff for this brand new chapter in our lives. Now, being we sold most of our big and bulky items, the cost of the move dropped by over half of what Robbie was originally being quoted. So then, our next problem to solve was: how are we going to store our belongings from the time we move from California to the time we move into our new house? Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that, when we were visiting Cincinnati for the first time, we bought a house???!! ! Well, we did, but there will be more on that in my next blog. All you need to know now is that our closing date was temporarily set for October 12th. Also while we were visiting Ohio for the first time in Mid-August, we looked for temporary living. All normal apartments had a minimum of a 3-month lease, and that was way too long. So, we got in contact with a Corporate Housing agent, as a referral from one of the apartments we visited. The Corp. Housing agent set us up in a furnished apartment close to Robbie's new work. We have a day-to-day lease here, and they just need a 14-day notice of when we will move out. Not too bad!
So, getting back to moving logistics, after we secured our temporary housing, we figured our stuff could just be stored in Cincinnati until we were ready to move from our temporary apartment to our new house! Robbie then discovered the moving company called 1-800-PACKRAT. After researching the company, like all the others, we decided they were very reputable with several positive reviews, so we called them, and scheduled our container. We had never moved with a container before, so we were in for something new. The container we ordered was 16x9x9. Also, the container needed somewhere to sit while it was at our house and waiting to be packed. The house that we were in in Temecula was at the end of a court, and technically the court wasn't considered a street, and also, we didn't have a driveway. So that posed an interesting question, one that we went to the HOA with. They allowed us to put cones in the street to reserve parking for the container. Not only did we need space for the container, but also for the truck to unload the container. So, a day before it came, we put cones out in the street reserving parking for the next 48 hours (that was how long the container was going to be there, from drop-off to pick-up). At this point, we were all set with the moving company.
Then we had to secure our car transportation. This was also a big problem to solve too. We had to ask the right questions to these transportation companies like, the biggest one being: how long until it's dropped off in Cincinnati. Our car that we were having shipped is the only car we have, so we wanted to know how long we had to have the rental car for. The transportation company said it would be delivered within 10 days of pick-up, so that sufficed. Car transportation was booked!
The last 2 things we had left to book was the actual moving labor, and the car rental. Usually when we rent a car, it's with Enterprise because they pick us up, and it's for longer weekend road trips (the car that we own is a little iffy if we run it for too long. It's good for rides of up to around 4 hours) and we usually bring it back to the same location. This was a little different because we were bringing it back to a different location, and one-way drops are more expensive than if the drop-off was at the same location. So, first we looked at Enterprise Rentals, and they were God-awful expensive. Then we shopped around to different vendors and settled on renting from Hertz for a third of the cost of Enterprise! Score! We ended up renting a full-size SUV. It was our plan to take with us all our clothes and my work equipment. Car Rental was booked. That same day, we secured our labor. It was our plan to have the labor get to our house after I was done with work on August 31st, so that was a requirement. We settled on a local company who's window was from 5p-7p that day! Perfect! Everything was booked!
Now, that entire last week in California was such a blur. In between packing the rest of our belongings, we also saw our weekly trivia friends on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night for one last big trivia extravaganza. Temecula has multiple locations that did trivia, and we met 2 others weekly to play. Robbie and I had been playing trivia since earlier this spring, and we gained 2 other trivia friends, Jaclyn and Andy, along the way! We wanted to go big or go home on this last week! As busy as we were, I'm so glad we were able to see them each night! We also spent a few nights with our first friends we made in Temecula, John and Lauren. They have been such good friends to us the last 2.5 years! Our friendships we made throughout our stay in Temecula was by far the hardest thing to leave!
On Thursday August 30th, our car was scheduled to be picked up. Robbie got a courtesy call on Wednesday that everything was set, but on Thursday he got a whole different phone call. The transport company called at around 2pm on Thursday (1 day before we were going to be moving), and said they weren't coming out to pick the car up, and they weren't certain when they would actually be able to do it. Obviously, we were both upset and stressing really hard over it! The transport company said they could give a window of 9a-9p on Friday! Ha! When Robbie stated his displeasure with that window, they brought the window down to 12p-3p. That was a little better, however we needed a back-up plan. If they flaked once, they were bound to do it again! Everything to this point had gone so smoothly, and that this point, I was almost in tears. Neither of us could even remotely understand how a company could just not show up on a job that we paid very generously for. I mean, this is why they are in business! Moving is one of the most stressful times in anyone's lives, and here we were, just about 24 hours before our house was going to be empty and we had only a semi-empty promise. So, the "Plan B" ideas we had were these: cancel the car rental and drive our own car out there (I did not like this idea because a lot of terrain we were going through was a desolate desert, and I didn't want to run the risk of breaking down in the middle of nowhere), bring the car to a friends house and have them pick it up there whenever they came (we both didn't like this plan because someone had to be home in order for them to pick it up, and that was a huge ask for anyone), and our final idea was to just sell our car to a Used Car Lot in Temecula and buy a new one when we got to Cincinnati. We liked this option the best. We actually went as far as calling a Used Car Lot, explaining our situation that this was a contingency plan, and bringing the car to the Lot to see what we could get for it. Mind you, this was Thursday night, one day before our move! At this point, I was just going with the flow. I came to terms with everything and I knew I couldn't do anything about anything. I, surprisingly, stayed calm through all of this! The guys at the Lot completely understood our situation and said to call tomorrow when we knew what was up with the transportation company. I felt like a huge weight was lifted off our shoulders now that we had a Plan B. Thursday night, we finished packing nearly everything but our bed, our shower stuff, and my office.
Friday was the big day! There were only a few hours between waking up and emptying the house! I worked a full day on Friday while Robbie took down our Sleep Number bed (it's a lot harder than you would think) and all the rest of the essentials. Then we got a phone call from the car transport company saying that they were on their way to pick up our car! Hallelujah! They loaded our car and took it away around noon, then Robbie was on his way to get the car rental. We had the car pick-up time set for 2pm on Friday, so this was a little earlier than what we planned. Robbie called Hertz and the agent informed him that a Full Size SUV wasn't ready to rent yet, but they did have a Toyota Sienna minivan that they would rent to us for the same price! The agent said it had much more cargo space that an SUV, and it was about the same on gas mileage as well. We gladly accepted, and Robbie came back as a soccer dad! Haha! My mom had a minivan while I was growing up, and that is the vehicle I learned to drive in, so I was going to be very comfortable driving that car across the country! After Robbie picked up the car, he loaded it with all our stuff that was coming with us, then got all the boxes situated for the movers that were coming in a few short hours! Meanwhile, 4pm quickly came around, and I was done with work! It took me about 45 minutes to pack up all my equipment, and we were set! John and Lauren came over again to say one final good-bye, which was super nice of them! By this time, it was approaching 5pm and the moving labor was due at any moment! At this point, everything was packed up, and I mean everything. There wasn't even a place to sit because we sold our dining room table and chairs! We decided to jump in the car and get some food to kill time. On our way, we called the labor, and they said they would be out between 6:30-7pm. The moving labor phone chain worked like this: whenever we contacted the laborers, we were calling the boss of the company, then he would call the actual laborers to get an ETA, so it was like one big game of phone tag. Also, when we scheduled the labor, we thought the movers were going to be there between 5p-7p, not anywhere in between. No one explained that over the phone, so we just assumed that the 5p-7p window was ours. We were a little miffed by this new time window of 6:30-7p, but it gave us time to eat, and have our final walk-through with our landlord in Temecula. 7:15pm rolled around (which was outside of our original 5p-7p window) and no one was at the house yet. Robbie made another call to the boss, and he said the movers were just finishing up another house nearby, and should be at ours within a half hour. Very vague. Also, "nearby" could mean anything. To get from 1 end of Temecula to another on a Friday, it could take nearly a half hour! Somehow, Robbie got the actual movers' phone number, so at 7:45p when no one was at the house, he decided to call. One of them answered and said they were in Murietta just finishing a job, and that they should be here within a half hour. Now, we were starting to sense a pattern. By 8:15p when we were still waiting, Robbie called the boss again, but this time the boss didn't pick up. Robbie left a firm message stating how unhappy we were with all of this, kind of like the same thing he said when the car transport company flaked on us the first time. The boss finally called us back at about 8:30p and pretty much blamed us for why the labor was late. He said things like "you shouldn't have booked the last slot of the day if you didn't want this to happen," and that "his workers had been at this since 6am and to cut them some slack." I kid you not, I heard it all through Robbie's phone! What the boss should be doing is hiring his workers in windows according to the jobs they have that day, and to make bigger windows for each house. If the boss knew that he was overworking his labor, he shouldn't have made a 5p-7p window an option that day! At 8:45p, we had conceded, yet again, realizing there was nothing we could do but wait. As we were planning our move and we thought our labor window was from 5p-7p, we had planned to start the drive and make it to Palm Springs by Friday night so we didn't have any CA city driving to do early Saturday morning, and we would be 2 hours on our way! Clearly, that plan wasn't happening anymore. So, near 9p, I called a hotel in Temecula to make a reservation for the night. It was such a bummer that we couldn't get a 2 hour head start on Friday! Finally, at 9:12pm, the movers came rolling up to our house, covered in sweat and reeking to high-heaven! Now, being our shipping container was on the street and it had gotten dark out, we needed to shine light into the container so the movers could see what they were doing. Luckily there was a spot open right on the other side of the container and looking into it, so we had the minivan headlights be their light while they moved our stuff. I was in charge of staying in the van to make sure all our stuff made it in there properly. Also being it was so late and we just wanted to get going, Robbie helped with the process as well. He started putting boxes out on the garage for easier transport to the container. Luckily the labor had come prepared with huge dollies, so like 8 boxes could be carted into the container at once. I must admit, the movers were very efficient, and their packing skills were top-notch! Finally, at 10:34pm, the movers packed their last box! Who knew, in all our planning, the labor would be our biggest hiccup! But alas, the house was empty, and we were set to go! Robbie and I made one last trip through the first "house" we ever lived in. I thought this was going to be an emotional time for us, but it wasn't at all. Both of us were so exhausted at this point, so we just locked the door and left this house in our dust! By 11:30pm on Friday, August 31st, we were settled into our hotel in Temecula, ready for the road ahead! And that is where my next blog will pick up!
Our moving container, as it was being filled!
Part 2 of our journey to Cincinnati will be all about the road to Ohio! Look for it in the next day or 2!
California was good to us. Even though we hated it more than we loved it, we needed to be there in order for us to get to Cincinnati! Everything happens for a reason, and there is always a plan for us!
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