As many of you know, we recently moved from Washington state to upstate New York. Like the insane people we are, we drove. This is our story and some things I learned along the way.
Our original plan was to leave on Tuesday, September 7th. But after an incident with Les's employer and a lot of rain we decided to take an extra day and do a better job of packing our truck and trailer and cleaning our house. We packed our entire lives into a compact car, a 1978 pickup truck and a small U-Haul trailer. As a result, a lot of stuff was left behind, donated to Goodwill or given away.
We set out around 10 a.m. from Ardenvoir, Les and Jet in the truck hauling the trailer and me with both cats and Luna in the car. It had been raining for about three days, but seemed like it was clearing up. It wasn't.
The first day went pretty well. We stopped once in Spokane for gas and made it almost all the way across Idaho without stopping again. This made me happy as I have quite the dislike of Idaho, northern Idaho in particular. It smells like cow poo and the people are just plain strange. The one place we did stop, I was hooted at and complimented on my (ankle-length) skirt from a passing pickup truck.
Once we hit Montana, it started raining again.
And I don't mean a little bit of sprinkling, I mean full-blown, can't-see-three-feet-in-front-of-you pouring. There were actual white-out conditions whenever there were two big vehicles around, I've never seen that from rain before. Add to that the construction we encountered where they direct you across the median and have two way traffic on one side of the freeway for 30 and 40 mile stretches and you have the reason I really hate to drive.
Our goal for the night was between Butte and Bozeman, we only made it to Missoula. We stopped around 10:45 at a KOA and pitched a tent in the rain. We woke up pretty early but getting everything reorganized and taken down took a lot longer that we thought. We weren't on the road again until a little after 9 a.m.
By the time we got to Butte, Les decided it was raining so hard that we needed a bigger tarp. We stopped at a Wal-Mart and he went in and bought a new, bigger tarp. While putting it on and securing it down I discovered there was no gas cap on the truck. So Les went back into the Evil to buy a replacement. He came back out some 20 minutes later with the box for the correct cap, but that isn't what was in the box. He went back into the store and came out with a replacement, it didn't fit. Since we had been sitting in the parking lot of the Evil for two hours at this point we decided to just chance it and keep going. We stopped for gas before leaving Butte and, wouldn't you know it, there was a NAPA just across the street. So Les went in and got the correct part. That was two and a half hours in Butte after getting a late start and being behind to boot.
Then there was a lot more of Montana, a lot more rain and a lot more driving on the wrong side of the freeway. In Crow Agency, Montana, we left the freeway to take a federal highway that cuts a corner of I-90. We found this route in the GPS and we were told about it by the ex trucker/KOA nazi who checked us in in Missoula. But this road was, shall we say, less than pleasant. It was very rutted, for those of you in Carbon County, picture the last quarter mile of Airport Road coming back toward Wal-Mart 20 years from now. The wheels of the trailer were riding in the ruts and the chains were throwing sparks, but there was no way of fixing it. We stopped three times on this road because Les thought there was something wrong with the trailer. Finally, around 1:30 a.m. we came to a rest area in the bottom corner of nowhereville Montana and slept in the cars.
We woke up before dawn and hit the road again, this time much quicker with no wet tent to deal with. We stopped for gas in the first town we hit in South Dakota and made a wonderful discovery. We had no debit card, yay! Les used the cash we had to fill up the truck while I dealt with the stupidest customer service rep on the face of the planet. Now, I have worked customer service, I know how hard that job is, but she was terrible. I told her the story, we were moving from Washington to New York and we were currently somewhere in the middle. I asked her to find me the closest branch so I could withdraw some cash, she did not have the mental capacity to understand that I was somewhere other than either my old address or my new address. She found me a branch in Wenatchee and one in Rochester, but wouldn't listen when I told her I was more than a thousand miles away from either of those places. It was the second most frustrating conversation I've ever had. (Ironically the most frustrating one happened last time we moved and was over the phone as well.)
We continued on our way, eventually finding a wi-fi hotspot and doing the customer service rep's job for her. This is where the waiting an extra day to leave came in handy. Because it just happened to be my payday and my paycheck is automatically deposited into an account we did have debit cards for. So that situation wasn't as bad as it could have been. I did take Les's wallet away from him though. I only allowed him to keep his license and that went in the glove compartment with the registration and the insurance card. Even now, I have qualms about letting him carry his wallet or money around.
About halfway across the state of Iowa (in the middle of the night) the headlights in the truck stopped working unless Les held his foot down on the brights switch, which is located on the floor. He drove for more than an hour like this. We stopped for the night, if you could call it that, on another detour around the corner of the freeway around 2:45 a.m. at the city park in Nashua, Iowa. Again we crashed in the cars, but this time we let the cats out of their carriers into the truck and I got to sleep in the car with both dogs.
We got a slightly later start on what was supposed to be the last day of driving, partly for sleep reasons and partly so Les wouldn't need his headlights. Around 6:45 a.m. we hit the road with the end in sight. The dogs were really feeling it. Luna, who had spent the first three days looking out the window, slept facing me almost all day. When she wasn't sleeping, she was making a face into the mirror that said, “Can we be done now, please?” The cats were also much more vocal than they had been since the first few hours of the trip. It was slightly slower going than we thought, we were under the assumption that the truck was going to be slowed down more by crossing the Rockies when in fact the wind on the plains posed more of a problem. I made it through the south end of Chicago by following right on Les's bumper. We got to Indiana and Les stopped to fix the light switch in the truck, I was really surprised that it only took about 20 minutes and $9. The gas cap situation was much worse.
At that point we had the GPS avoiding toll roads, it would have gotten us all the way here on free roads, but it was adding like three hours to our time. So we sucked it up, found at ATM and hit the Indiana Tollway.
It was a terrible road and I didn't think we should have to pay for the privilege of driving on it. We hit night rates for most of the states, so we didn't wind up paying that much in tolls. We decided around Ohio that we were just going to push through, we would make it without stopping for the night. When we stopped to buy gas we got our first energy drinks of the trip. We pulled over at a rest area for 30 minutes. Les took the dogs while I slept. When I woke up I drank half the energy drink and we continued on through Pennsylvania. Once we hit the New York Tollway it was pretty much smooth sailing. It is the nicest road I have ever driven on and I didn't have any problems paying $3 for it. We stopped at the first travel plaza in New York shortly before dawn and I took the dogs and Les slept for 30 minutes. When he woke up he drank the rest of the energy drink and we continued on.
We arrived around 9:30 a.m. local time and as soon as we got the animals settled in,
we slept until the cable guy arrived at noon. The final tally was 2,728.8 miles in 90 hours (only 14.5 of were used for sleeping) and 13 states. Our house is on the east shore of Conesus (pronounced con-NEE-shus for some reason) Lake. It is fully furnished and so most of our stuff is in a storage unit right now. It is also about 1/3 the size of the house we just moved out of so it is taking a little getting used to for everyone.
Les is working in a town about 13 miles away, a much shorter commute than what either of us had in Washington. He is liking his new job, for once he is not the youngest person in the office. His boss is actually a few moths younger than him for once. He is getting familiar with the system of government here, it is a little different from anything they have out west. I am waiting to look for a job until we have a little bit of money to build a kennel for the dogs. We can leave them alone for a few hours at a time, but we have qualms about leaving them inside by themselves for too much longer than that.
We have noticed several things that are different here that we weren't really expecting. Almost no one has a fenced in yard, we haven't really figured out a reason for that but the few fences we have seen have been between property lines and don't enclose anything. There is almost no Hispanic population here, Les's Spanish is pretty much useless and it took us a week and five different grocery stores to find corn tortillas. It is very green and we can't wait for the leaves to start changing. The cost of living is drastically lower, we are constantly surprised at how cheap things are. It is very quaint and even more quintessentially small town than Chelan was.
So, thing I learned on this trip in no particular order.
• I can drive long distances when I have to, but I still prefer not.
• I am capable of backing up with only mirrors.
• Montana is a bitch, if you ever have the opportunity to NOT to drive across it, I highly recommend you take it.
• Sleep is highly overrated.
• My animals all have very different, and interesting, taste in music.
• Les can't be trusted to hold onto anything that isn't pinned to him.
• Driving all the way across America does not make you more patriotic.
• South Dakota isn't as bad as I thought it would be, there are a lot more people than I was led to believe.
• Sian hates Fergie! At first I thought it was just the bass in the Black Eyed Peas songs, but any time she heard Fergie's voice, she started hissing.
• The state sport of Iowa is tailgating. There could be four cars on a mile-long stretch of highway and they would all be six inches from each other.
• Sleeping in a tent is horrible, I don't know why anyone does it voluntarily. I would much rather sleep sitting up in the driver's seat than in a tent.
• A lot more truckers than you would think have little, tiny dogs. I find this amusing.
• Going a week without makeup may save time, but you get treated a lot differently (except in Idaho, I'm sure I don't have to tell you why).
• Once you hit South Dakota people will start giving you weird looks when they see Washington plates.
• Shoes suck. I drove barefoot for more than 2,000 miles.
• A 1978 Chevy Scottsdale is the most resilient vehicles I have ever come across. It made it the whole way only needing one part and to be jump-started if it had been running for more than 12 hours. I consider that petty good for a vehicle that is older than both of us.
• If you ever go to Indiana, pee first. Every single restroom I tried to use in that state was out of order.
