Our Journey To Cincinnati - Part 2: The Long Road Ahead - August 31st-September 4th, 2018

It was Friday night, August 31st, and we were in our first hotel, the Embassy Suites in Temecula. I said in my "Part 1" blog that we wanted to make it to Palm Springs, but being the moving labor showed up so late, neither of us had the energy to drive that far. It was our goal to make it to Albuquerque by Saturday night, Tulsa by Sunday night, and Cincinnati by Monday night. This equated to roughly 3 10-hour days on the road. But after being delayed by 2 hours to begin with, we knew we had to alter those plans and make up for lost time somewhere along the way. Luckily, we had only booked 1 hotel, and that was the one in Cincinnati. We knew we were going to get to Cincy by Monday night, by golly! Also, in all our meticulous planning for the move, the fact that we were moving on Labor Day Weekend was lost on both of us until our friend Andy at trivia pointed it out. After that, I was slightly worried about heavier traffic. I didn't let that bother me too much because it was too late to change anything now! Below, I will be portioning out this blog into days.

Saturday September 1st:
After our plans changed on Friday, we decided that the best thing for both of us was to sleep until we woke up. We thought that being well-rested for the days of driving ahead was better than being on a strict schedule. Being we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Temecula the first night, we had a great made-to-order breakfast the next morning to fill us up. We had omelettes, bacon, eggs, sausage, muffins and fruit to load up on. I must say, it was a hearty breakfast! We packed up tour stuff in the hotel, and were on the road at 8:03 am, PST. Robbie drove the first portion, from Temecula to Phoenix. We also stopped in between in a city called Blythe, which is right on the border of California and Arizona. We stopped to fill up on the cheap Arizona gas! In Phoenix is where we ate lunch (at Culver's) and switched drivers. I drove the second shift of the day, from Phoenix, up to Flagstaff, and across to New Mexico. We knew at this point we weren't going to make it all the way to Albuquerque by nightfall. Just into New Mexico is a town called Gallup, and we decided to stop there for the night.

On the road at 8:03 am PST!!

Leaving Southern California in our rear-view mirror! 

Good-bye California and Hello Arizona!

The river into Arizona!

Robbie's portion of the drive from CA to AZ was nothing new to us, as we had driven that several times before, but everything after Phoenix was brand new to us. The first of the few interesting things we saw along our drive was in Phoenix. Alongside the freeway was an old abandoned amusement park, and llamas were out roaming free in it. I almost had to do a double-take! After I took over, the drive Phoenix to Flagstaff was beautiful! The landscape completely changed from arid desert to lush greenery and hills. The drive from Phoenix to Flagstaff is also where we ran into our first traffic of the roadtrip. When we stopped for lunch, it was about 1:30 pm PST, so people were still on their way to their Labor Day Weekend fun, and anyone in their right mind would want to head up north to beautiful and much cooler Flagstaff. The traffic lasted for about 15 miles, and during that 15 miles we were probably averaging a speed of 10mph. It was slightly frustrating being I just wanted fly on that freeway! It was also on this stretch that we received a call from 1-800-PACKRAT. They advised that they were getting calls from our HOA because one of our neighbors was complaining about how our container was breaking the pavers in our shared driveway/court in Temecula. First of all, we didn't stress about this at all because 1) the container was on the street, and 2), we knew exactly who this neighbor was, and he complained about EVERYTHING! We were both sure he was just pissed that the labor movers were noisy a bit after our HOA Quiet Hours the night before and he wanted to make it known. We assured 1-800-PACKRAT that everything was up to code and to ignore the complaints. About an hour later we got confirmation that the container had been picked up without an issue! Yay! After Flagstaff, we started on I-40 east, and we were going to be on that for a long time, until Oklahoma City! Driving through the eastern part of AZ was much like driving through the western part, flat and boring. But, at least traffic was free-flowing! In fact, traffic on the I-40 was almost non-existant at this time. I set my cruise and went on my merry way. At some point in Eastern Arizona, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a bunch of wispy clouds behind me, and one took form of an angel. I couldn't help but think that my dad was watching over us on our big move across the county! Thank you for keeping us safe! We could definitely tell when we crossed the border into New Mexico. The landscape changed from flat and boring to 'plateau city!' It was very pretty, specially with the setting sun bouncing off the sides of the plateaus! Western New Mexico also started the train brigade! On this night only, we had to have seen 4 different trains, and that was only for 20 miles! I was worried that New Mexico was going to be boring, but it started out just the opposite. When we knew we would be stopping in Gallup for the night, Robbie made a reservation at the Hilton Garden Inn just off the freeway. We checked in around 8:00 pm MST, and we realized we hadn't eaten yet! Luckily this hotel had room service, so we ordered, and it was some of the best room service meals we had ever eaten! We were definitely full after eating our feast! We pretty much just tried to relax and get to sleep early for much of the same tomorrow.

Driving north in Arizona, much prettier landscape!

Flagstaff!

The wispy clouds where I saw the guardian angel (not these specific formations, but much like it)!

Crossing into Mountain Time Officially! Hello New Mexico! 

The start of "Plateau City!"

The trains had a beautiful backdrop!

Sunday September 2nd:
After our wonderful room service on Saturday night in Gallup, we were hoping they did a breakfast, but alas, no luck. They did have a restaurant on property that served breakfast, but it was ridiculously over-priced for the type of food that was on the menu. We decided to hit up a gas station for some breakfast donuts and apple fritters! I took the first shift of driving for the day, which meant I was going to be driving all the way through New Mexico! Cool! Shortly into our drive on Sunday, we crossed the Continental Divide, too! Later, we stopped in Albuquerque to a McDonald's in hopes to get an early lunch. We pulled in right at 10:30am MST, right when they would be starting to serve burgers. Come to find out, they don't start serving lunch items until 12:30 pm! I've never heard of a McDonald's starting their burger service so late! Bummer! So, we went across the street and tried our hand at a brand new fast food place called Church's Chicken. We went through the drive-thru, and all they had on their menu was chicken. Let me just say, I would drive back to Albuquerque for another one of those chicken sandwiches I ate! It was so delicious, and it satisfied my cravings for sure! The gal working the window, though, was another story. I swear they found her that morning off the street and had no one teaching her the ropes. Robbie ordered a meal deal, which normally comes with a drink and fries. When we got to the window to pick up our food, the lady only gave him the entree without the fries or drink. When Robbie asked for the other items, she was like, "oh, you didn't specify if you wanted fries and a drink." Haha, he ordered a meal deal! Oh man! Other than that, Albuquerque was a beautiful city to drive through, and super clean! As we curved through the roads of downtown, there was pretty architecture all over the place. Eastern New Mexico unfortunately wasn't as pretty as the western part of the state. If any of you have seen the show "Breaking Bad," now I understand how they could die in the NM desert without anyone finding them! There was a whole lot of nothing! One takeaway, though, from NM, they loved their Indian Art, and they made sure everyone on the I-40 East knew about it. The same billboards flashed every 5 miles advertising for the same store selling the same jewelry/art! We knew for sure that we were in Navajo country! We ended up stopping in a city called Tucumcari, NM to get gas and switch drivers. Robbie drove from just west of the Texas border all the way to Tulsa!

The Continental Divide!

I know the Dixie Chicks sang about Wide Open Spaces. Eastern New Mexico must've been their inspiration!

Adios New Mexico!

It was during this day that we made up for lost time on Friday. As we were driving through the panhandle of Texas, there is a restaurant called "The Big Texan" right along I-40 that we were going to stop and eat at for lunch on Sunday. When I was on a 4-H Exchange Trip to Kansas, we went there to eat, and that is where I had Rocky Mountain Oysters for the first time, except, I had no idea what I was actually eating! Not a funny joke! But, being our plans were altered at the beginning of our road-trip, we decided against stopping there, and instead to make up for lost time. With this decision, we were now back on track! After Amarillo, we came across the Leaning Tower of Texas. It was only a water tower, but it was leaning to one side. It was even verified by Google. Very weird. Also in Texas, there was a huge cross next to a church. We are talking probably 100 ft. tall, and we could see it for a few miles. We came across the same thing in Indiana, too! We made it through Texas in record time, and entered into Oklahoma! Oklahoma is where we got our first drops of rain, and it was only a light sprinkle. But, off in the distance we could see a big storm cloud, and a rainbow, too! Oklahoma is what you would expect. A lot of farm land, hay bales, flat land, and cattle! When we were about an hour west of Oklahoma City, I found a place to eat, a Wendy's just off the freeway and just west of OKC in a city called Yukon. What I didn't know when I found that Wendy's however, was that it was on a road called Garth Brooks Blvd! It was kismet! Garth Brooks is my favorite Country music singer, so it was perfect that we found this road in the middle of our cross-country trek! When we stopped at Wendy's, we wanted to get our food to go from inside, so we could wash up and use the bathroom. The service was super slow at this establishment! We were the 2nd one's in line to order, and we didn't get our food for 20 minutes! And there was only 1 other person behind us as well! In the middle of waiting, all of us were kind of looking at each other like, "what the heck." The gal behind the register then said, "it's a lot harder than it looks." We all just chuckled after that! Haha! After dinner, I found a place to rest our heads for the night, the Embassy Suites in Tulsa, just off the freeway. The drive between OKC and Tulsa was tricky. It had gotten dark and there was roadwork on the freeway for about 10 miles, and there were cement barricades on either side of the car. I'm glad I was in good hands and Robbie was behind the wheel. I would not have been comfortable driving through that. That evening, we got settled into our room around 9:15 pm CST and hit the hay!

Hello Texas! And Hello Central Time Zone!

The Leaning Tower of Texas. No joke!

The big giant cross. Everything IS bigger in Texas!

Hello Oklahoma!

We saw lots of cattle!

Monday September 3rd:
Today was the day we get to Cincinnati! On this day I remember it feeling more real! We again had a great made-to-order breakfast, and we were on the road by 8:45am. I again took the first driving shift of the day, taking us through the rest of Oklahoma and to St. Louis, MO. The drive through the rest of Oklahoma was super easy! When we crossed into Missouri is when we ran into traffic, most likely people going home from their Labor Day Weekends in the Ozarks is what we assumed. Not only was there a lot of traffic, the freeway through Missouri was super windy. There would be pockets of traffic, then it would start flowing again, and that happened around 3 or 4 different times. By the time we stopped for lunch and gas in St. Louis, I was exhausted. One interesting thing to note on this portion of the drive was that we finally finished the Alphabet Game! We started playing the Alphabet game just outside of Temecula, and it took us until Missouri to get that elusive letter X. There wasn't much in the way of billboards through the California desert, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. I was driving and all the sudden Robbie was like, "an X, right there!" He eventually won that game, but we played the best of 3, and I ended up winning the series. Also during that portion of the drive, we played "Countries of the World Alphabet Game." This version took it to the next level where we had to think of different countries that started with letters in alphabetical order. That required more thought. We also played a geography game where one person would say a country, and the other person would have to think of a country that starts with the last letter of what the first person listed. For example, I would start with the country of Spain, and Robbie would have to think of a country that starts with the letter N. This went on for a good amount of time and it was really fun! Eventually I had to stop playing and focus on all the traffic.

Hello Missouri! My least favorite state!

The Mississippi River

St. Louis marked the last time we stopped before our final destination of Cincinnati! Robbie drove this last portion of the trip. As we crossed over into Illinois, the landscape started to look more familiar to midwestern living! We saw lots of farms and cornfields! It was also in Illinois that we watched the Brewers beat their nemesis, the Chicago Cubs. It was a thrilling come-from-behind 4-3 win, as the Brewers walked it off! Fitting that this happened as we were driving through Illinois! It was very exciting when we reached Indianapolis and we started seeing signs for the Cincinnati freeway exits! I was very emotional at this time because I just thought about all we did to make this happen! All the packing, all the logistics, all the driving, and now finally we were close! It was just an hour and a half drive from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, but it felt like a longer stretch. Both of us just wanted to get there! Just north of Cincinnati we ran into a bit of roadwork that lasted about 13 miles, and it was much like the same as the roadwork in Oklahoma, except this time it was still light outside!

Hello Illinois!

We saw cornfields for the first time in Illinois. I'm sure not a lot of people in CA knew what the phrase "knee high by the 4th of July" meant!

Hello Indiana! And Hello to our newly adopted Eastern Time Zone!

Definitely keeping right!

Throughout our road-trip, I had taken a picture of each State Welcome Sign when we entered a new state, as I'm sure you've noticed above. The Welcome To Ohio sign was the most important one for obvious reasons. When we were approaching the Ohio border, it had turned dark, which made it harder to get a picture, plus I didn't know where the sign would be (on the side of the road, above the road, etc). The Welcome to Ohio sign literally came out of nowhere all the sudden. I ended up getting a picture but it turned out really blurry. At first I was a little mad that it didn't turn out clear, but then I actually enjoyed the fact that it turned out blurry, because that is how the past 2-3 weeks have felt to us, including this cross-country drive. I was going to go back and take a clear picture, but then decided against it. The blurry picture will always be the original, and I'm just fine with that!

The city if Cincinnati is right on the border of both Indiana and Kentucky, so after we crossed the border into Ohio, we were pretty much here, we just had to navigate our way to our hotel, the Drury Inn, where it all began. We ended up staying at the Drury Inn on our first trip to visit Cincinnati to tour the city. We loved everything from the food they offered (a hot breakfast each morning and a full dinner every night), to the staff (we had a faulty air conditioner in our first room, so the GM himself upgraded us and moved us to a different room), and to the facilities (the hotel had an indoor/outdoor pool and hot tub)! We ended up becoming Drury Inn and Suites members, and plus, they have many locations across the midwest! So, when we stayed there the first time, we made a reservation right then and there for this date, when we rolled into town as residents! When we checked in, the gal at the front desk recognized us, and the next morning when we were eating breakfast, the GM even recognized us! Also, the gal who made our reservation knew us, too! Great hospitality all around!

We got into our room shortly after 9pm EST, and we had enough time for a few minutes to relax in the hot tub, since the pool didn't close until 10pm. After the hot tub, we ordered a pizza and happily went to bed in our new city! It was so nice to sleep in on Tuesday morning and not have to drive 10 hours that day! All we had to do was drive to our apartment sometime that day! We actually got a call that morning from the car transport company saying they were ready to deliver our car that day. So we ended up leaving the hotel for our apartment at around 10am, and that was it! We had made it to our destination with minimal hiccups along the way!

Making a big move from CA to OH puts a lot on your plate, but actually getting there is a whole other animal. We were both looking forward to the drive because that meant all the packing was done and all we needed to do was drive there! This drive was a whole day longer than what our move from Minneapolis to Las Vegas was 7 years ago! It turned out to be a great road-trip, though. We even brought some 90's nostalgia with us! We listened to the whole N'SYNC and Justin Timberlake catalog at Robbie's request on Saturday, and the full Backstreet Boys catalog on Sunday at my request! The long drive didn't seem so long at the end of it!

Below are some driving statistics we kept track of:

-Days of driving: 3
-Time Zones: 4
-States crossed: 9
-Hours driven: 32
-Counties crossed: 65
-Miles driven: 2,127
-Counties crossed in each state: OK with 13, IN with 12, MO with 11, NM with 7, TX with 7, IL with 7, AZ with 6, CA with 1, and OH with 1

-Our route from Temecula, CA to the Drury Inn and Suites in Cincinnati: I-15 North, I-215 North, CA-60 East, I-10 East into Arizona, AZ-303 North, Lake Pleasant Pkwy/New River Rd (to avoid traffic in Phoenix), I-17 North, I-40 East into New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, I-44 East to Tulsa, then into Missouri, I-55 North into Illinois and crossing the Mississippi River, I-70 East and crossing into Indiana, I-465 loop in Indianapolis, I-74 East towards Cincinnati and crossing into Ohio, I-275 North, I-75 South

Our Journey To Cincinnati - Part 1: The Logistics - August 2018

Surprise! We moved to Cincinnati! When, you might ask? The answer to that question is: fast and recent! Let me start from the very beginning. I am going to be writing 3 different blogs, breaking our move up into 3 different parts. This blog post is all about the logistics!

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!