Monday, June 23, 2008

Introduction

My family and I are moving from East Lansing, Michigan, to Gilbert, Arizona (a city just southeast of Phoenix). My husband and I are taking new jobs at Arizona State University, beginning July 1st. This blog is the story of our actual move.

See, most of our household goods, furniture, etc., got moved the traditional way -- on a moving truck. But to actually get US from here to there is a little more tricky. Not only do we need to move three daughters (ages 17, 15, and 10), but we also need to move all of our animals.

How many is all? Well, let's see. Nine I think. They are:
  • Josie, the epileptic beagle (on meds to control seizures)
  • Frinka, the 17 year-old cat in chronic kidney failure (so he's on lots of meds)
  • Moochie, the 11 year-old cat who has to eat frequent small meals due to previous intestinal surgery (after he ate a bunch of thread)
  • Mistey, the skittish 5 year-old cat
  • Pepe, the long-haired Peruvian guinea pig
  • Patch, the other long-haired Peruvian guinea pig
  • Apollo, the blue and white parakeet
  • Athena, the green and yellow parakeet
  • Lazarus (also known as Bit), the killer goldfish
So, the question was, how to transport two adults, four kids (our three plus a friend who is spending a month with us in Arizona), and nine pets? On an airplane? Uh, no. I couldn't see trying to put that menagerie on a plane. Drive our van? Nope, not enough room. Plus, we'd have to stop to sleep along the 2,000 mile trek, and what hotel would let us bring our mini-zoo inside?

Then I had a brainchild: how about we see if we can rent an RV, one way from Michigan to Arizona? An RV would give us more room, plus it's sort of a moving hotel where we could just pull into a campground for the night and all of us, people and animals, sleep in the RV.

So that's what we did. We have a 30-foot RV rented from CruiseAmerica.com. And we take off tomorrow for our trip westward.

A friend coined the phrase "land ark" to describe our RV, and it fits. So this blog will be our adventures on the Land Ark. Today is Day 0, which I'll explain when I write a post for today. And tomorrow will be Day 1.

Stay tuned -- it's likely going to be quite an adventure, a la Chevy Chase's "Vacation" movie variety...

Kathleen

1 comment:

Mark Luebker said...

I had the good (?) fortune to be the one who actually drove the rental RV back to East Lansing from Mentor, OH.

The first hour or so was absolutely terrifying as I tried to get used to the size of the vehicle, the unusual configuration of the four mirrors and the unsettling inability to check my blind spot by looking over my shoulder. If not for a cell phone and Kathleen in a car behind me, I probably would have just pulled to the side of the highway and homesteaded there.

It got easier as the hours passed, even during a storm, which had the effect of making EVERYONE on the road drive as tentatively and as carefully as I'd been driving.

The land ark hugged the pavement like a brick, and handled just fine, even in the worst of it. In the end, the biggest problems were finding a radio station to keep me entertained and figuring out how to park the darn thing in our too-short East Lansing driveway.

BTW, after we got to Arizona and were turning in the vehicle up in Mesa, we discovered that the company actually has a video that goes over all the things one needs to know in order to travel successfully in one of these units. Unfortunately, the place where we picked it up in Mentor didn't have that video, just a salty old mechanic with 9½ fingers who walked us around the vehicle pointed to this and that, and said things like, "...or it'll explode under there."

Still, we DID get here without exploding.