Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

03-05 October

The Monster lumbered its way to our storage shed, arriving some five minutes after the office closed there. It was certainly interesting to see Don maneuvering the thing around the narrow rows of the facility. I had to admire him, and felt reassured that when we did eventually get an RV he could drive it. It was a bit of a system shock when we filled it up with diesel though: $60 plus. We never put that much fuel in any of our vehicles, and this one was getting a ludicrously low number of miles per gallon.

We bumped into the owner anyway and inquired about what was available. The guy suggested a 10×10 shed. I don’t know what we were thinking because when I sat down and did the math we were carrying over 200 square feet of stuff in the truck. We opened our existing shed up and half-heartedly unloaded a few boxes into it. The facility closed at seven and we hadn’t made any progress, which was hardly surprising. We did notice that the big unit next to ours was empty, however…

I called U-Haul again and they laughed. “Again? You guys are just having so much fun with our truck, aren’t you?”

In the end we decided to go find a motel room and sleep. First though we had to get emergency cat supplies: food, a dishpan for a litter box and some litter, for a start. Don had forgotten his clothes in the shed and because we had been wearing the same stuff for four sweaty, physical days we were both pretty rank. I got him new jeans and underwear. Then a salad, which promptly fell off the pile of stuff we were hauling into the room and spilled all the good stuff (the trimmings) onto the ground.

Finding the motel was challenging. We needed a pet-friendly place and the first one that we tried had no truck parking. They directed us to another, a few miles down the road, which also had no truck parking though there was another one across the freeway that did, but poor directions coupled with extreme tiredness had us lumbering ten miles up the freeway and unable to find the thing. We did eventually get there, and lugged everything in. We showered, ate lettuce leaves and fell asleep as soon as we lay down.

The next morning, I examined my body in the stark lighting of a motel dressing niche and discovered bruises all over. It looked as though I had rolled down a mountain. Don, too, was battered and bleeding. We had been through the wars all right.

Returning to the storage area, we had a discussion and decided to simplify things by taking the unit next door. It had been vacated only three days previously and was ready to go. I sacrificed a paper plate and marked it with the areas of our home: kitchen, bathroom, etc. Don seemed enchanted with my efficiency; I just wanted to salvage something from the chaos. ;) Then we unloaded the piles to those areas. Getting Arnie out was tricky because we had mislaid the hex key required to reattach the handlebars so steering was non-existent.

There was another call to U-Haul. This time the guy sounded worried. He had rented the truck on Friday, and today was Thursday the 4th of October. I almost threw up when the fridge, which had not quite dried out before we put it in the truck, swung open, and spent an hour cleaning it, swearing that I needed to buy a copy of the Flylady book (and I did, too) and that I would never live like this again.

Suddenly it was five thirty and we had one and a half hours to unload what was effectively half a storage shed. Oops! We raced and rushed and suddenly were plunged back into the nightmare of the last few days. The neat system of stacking was lost and the remainder went in willy-nilly, but we did it. We would even have been on time if we’d not mislaid the lock (it was caught in the chain that opens the door). Only as we drove away in a curiously light-seeming truck (I guess we really did have tons of stuff) did we realize that we had nothing long-sleeved, the truck’s heating did not work, and we’d left the cat litter locked up.

There was another trip to Target in my immediate future, and during it I found a t-shirt on sale with a tree full of crows. :)

Speedy, who had sat patiently in her carrier all through this, started getting antsy and so I popped her out of the cage to see what would happen. She sat on my knee and perked happily at everything. We were enchanted.

Because I had a shift on Friday, we had to go back to the Bay Area and begin the Great Vehicular Shuffle. First we drove back to our old home, which now had a lock on the gates and a sign saying that the park was closed. Peeking through the bars, I discovered a small fluttering business card tucked into the fence: an ancient business card from one of my astrology sites that I’d run nearly ten years previously. It seemed like a final goodbye, the last bit of humanity in the mobile home park.

As we got ready, a very sleepy site manager poked his nose out from where he had been sleeping in the cab of his U-Haul, parked on the street.

Don drove the truck and I followed on Beastie so that we could leave the Monster at the U-Haul. Then we went back to collect the van (and cat) and checked into a motel in Sunnyvale. We settled the cat with her food and litter box and carried on with the vehicle dance. We rode two up to Don’s bike, and then went side by side back “home.” By now it was past 1 in the morning and way past time for bed.

And yes, I was utterly zombified at work the next morning. ;)

Just a few random posts

• 6th-7th November (0)
• 23 October 2003 (0)
• Queen of the Snarfs (0)
• 7th May - Los Angeles Cityscape (0)
• 36/48 Hm. Getting there. (7)

Comments