Moving Lessons

Well, we've made it to SoCal. Through the flooded El Paso. And past all those snipers in Phoenix (I guess the news is that there is only one sniper while a second killer is mere murderer).

And did learn few things about moving on our own:

1. Getting those containers were a good thing. Cheaper than hiring full-blown movers. Less hassle than renting a truck since we would have to haul our SUV and then figure out how to send one person ahead (legally it can only seat 3 people and we are a family of 4) and still pay for all those gas [plus mileage I believe]. Also, we don't have a place to move into yet so we would have had to rent storage space, dump our stuff there and then rent a truck again to reload and re-unload. With the containers, we just keep them in storage (and pay a bit more for the convenience) and wait until we find a place and call them up for the delivery.
   
2. Having the weekend to load up the containers were good too. I only wish we requested it be delivered on Thursday rather than Friday.
3. You can never have too many boxes. We ran out [we've been saving many over the months leading up to the move] and we restored to stuffing things into garbage bags: not a wise thing to do when you have too much trash and can't tell trash from goods.
4. We had too many stuff so had to end up borrowing U-Haul trailer. We didn't have any reservation but it was easy enough to get one-way rental. We didn't plan on having this trailer so some things we valued but wanted to carry directly, we had put in the container first so we couldn't take them out and reposition them in the trailer. It was good thing we got a trailer since some items like household cleaners and other poisons aren't allowed on the containers.
   

In the whole thing, my only regret was not having the added options on my Expedition to handle towing (bigger engine, oil cooler, towing package): we could have rented a bigger trailer and we could have gone faster through the desert [we kept the RPM of our engine below 3000 so going uphill was pretty slow] -- instead, we drove in pace with many semi's. But then again, I wish we owned a Suburban rather than Expedition but that's a whole different story.

One thing we did notice was that there seemed to be less larger SUV's and pickups on the road this month compared to Christmas'05 (and few years before then). Maybe the $3+ gas prices are finally impacting the spending habits of Californians?

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