It has been an eventful week but we are emerging from the other end of it as Minnesotans. It was a pretty bumpy ride though (literally and figuratively).
Through this move I learned quite a few things:
1) Always check your flight information as soon as you get to the airport.
Jamie attempted to fly to DC on Friday evening after work. His flight was scheduled to make it in around 12:50am. Sadly, that late hour turned out to be much earlier than he actually ended up making it into town. Perhaps it was the fact that he wasn't traveling with me, but he took a much more laxed approach (I tend to be a bit of a worry-wart). This meant that upon arriving to the airport early, he grabbed dinner before checking the gate information for his flight. (Edited to add: Jamie wanted to make sure I let you all know that we had checked his flight status on the way to the airport and it was on-time -- lulling him into a false sense of security) By the time he arrived at his gate, he learned that the flight was delayed an hour and a half and that they had been calling him to board an earlier flight direct to DC.
This turned out to be the first of many bumps in the road.
Jamie figured that with the delay he would miss his connection and would therefore be stuck in Chicago. Instead, he booked a flight to Newark (the only other flight going to the East Coast) and I rented a car for him online. This would get him to DC around 4am.
We later learned that the flight from Chicago was also delayed and he would have made his connection and gotten in a few hours earlier. Sad times.
2) We are leaving behind some pretty generous people in DC.
Working off of only a few hours of sleep, we got started packing and loading our house bright and early Saturday morning. Our friend, Leah, had been graciously holding a ton of our stuff in her extra bedroom and Scott agreed to meet us there. We were joined for some seriously heavy lifting/packing by Dan, Garth and Andrea, Katie and Matt, and Dave and Tracy. Needless to say, we could not have gotten it all done without all those extra hands and big hearts.
Scott actually was with us for a marathon-esque 16 hours. (We got a little loopy around dinner time.)
That crazy amount of devotion and lifting/packing/organizing more than makes up for his part in the next bump in the road...
3) Never ever leave the key in the lock.
Around 1am we put the last items in the truck. The sound of that door sliding down was music to our ears. The latch closing was even sweeter. We awaited the satisfying click of the padlock...but it never came. Rewind several hours earlier when Scott told us casually that he left the key in the lock so that we wouldn't lose it in the chaos. Strange, I thought, did he mean the house key? Sadly, that question was answered when we didn't get the satisfying click. In the time since that the key was left in the lock, the sliding door had been opened and closed a few times, breaking the key off in the lock in the process.
We were stuck, at 1am, with no way of locking our truck with all of our worldly possessions contained inside, in the middle of the District of Columbia, and no means of purchasing another lock that would fit our truck.
We hit the internet looking for solutions, we WD-40'd and banged that lock, we broke out the needle-nose pliers. No luck. Instead we just had to laugh at how ludicrous the situation was after so many hours of labor. To me, it was the perfect way to end our time in DC with Scott. Scott who -- let's be honest -- is the hardest part about leaving DC.
Jamie and I pushed our air mattress up against the open window so that we could hear if someone opened the truck and took turns getting out of bed to check on it throughout the night before our 7am departure. In the end the truck was fine and the next day, Jamie and I hopped into our GIANT moving truck and set off for Minnesota. We learned a few more lessons along the way...but I'll save them for the next post.
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