The Story of Our Big Moving Day

Well, I'd like to apologize to my readers (all five of you) for not having written any new posts in the last week or so.  In my defense, I have been a bit busy.  But now that we are all moved to Pendleton, I can finally fill you in on all the details of Moving Day.

All ready to go!  I kinda wish now that Jim had taken this picture so that you could see Peter here instead sitting with his family, but I just didn't think of it at the time.  Rats.

The overwhelming characteristic of our Moving Day experience was that it all went so incredibly smoothly.  There was no last-minute scramble to throw things in boxes or just pitch loose items in the back of the moving truck.  We had time to go out to breakfast, visit with friends who stopped by to help load the truck, and in the evenings after the kids went to bed the grownups played pinochle (a Willis family tradition).

I would like to take this opportunity to take full credit for the complete success of our move.  Thank you, thank you.

Here I am packing up the last of the kitchen items.  I really wish I had sucked in my gut for this picture, but it's too late now and I don't have time to photoshop it, so there you go.

So on Monday, Peter and his dad went and picked up the enormous U-Haul truck that we rented.  We had reserved a 20-foot truck, thinking that was all the space we'd need, but the rental place was out of that size and so they upgraded us to a 26-foot truck for free.  That meant we had ample space to pack a lot of furniture items that we had planned on leaving in our house in Salem and coming back for later.

This is Peter backing up the truck in front of our house, with Jim directing him.  The boys thought it was pretty awesome that our truck had a picture of a pirate ship on fire on the side of it.

We started loading things at about 8 am I think, and thanks to the help of some good friends and family, we had just about everything loaded up by mid-morning.  We all took a break and went out for breakfast at the Original Pancake House in South Salem.  Everyone ate massive quantities of pancakes, eggs, potatoes, bacon and coffee, and then we went back to the house to finish loading.

We even put the kids to work!  That's Peter's brother Dan on the left.  He came down from Portland to help us load up and to help us eat pancakes and eggs.

The truck was loaded by the early afternoon.  Then it was cleaning time.  Our renters, Morty and Gigi, were moving in the day we were moving out, so I felt compelled to clean things up for them.  I had plenty of time to clean the whole house, and after a few hands of pinochle we went to bed for the last time in our house.


The next morning we got up bright and early, loaded the last of our things on the truck, and headed out.  Peter drove the U-Haul (with our cat, Ginger, loose in the cab with him, which made for many a hilarious moment), I drove our car with the boys, and Jim drove his pickup.

This is Micah holding the box that we had prepared as a sort of cage for Ginger.  I shoved her in there and it took her about seven seconds to tear her way out of it.  So she got to ride loose in the truck.

Our first stop was at the gas station to fill up all the vehicles (ca-ching!) and then we hit the road.  There really isn't a lot to tell about our drive across the state.  We stopped once at a state park just east of Troutdale, and again at Arlington.  The boys did very well in the car, Jim didn't fall asleep once while driving, and Peter only got scratched up one time by our very nervous cat.


We pulled in to town about about 3:30, and there was a whole raft of people waiting at Jim & Peg's house to help us unload.  Peg had arranged for some youngsters to be there to carry things into the house and upstairs to where our rooms are.  They very quickly unloaded everything that was going into the house, and then loaded up some boxes that we had been storing at Jim & Peg's.  Then we took a break while I phoned around town to find a storage unit.  I finally found one that had some room, so we drove the truck up to the storage place, signed some paperwork, and commenced to fill two small storage units as full as we could with almost all of our worldly possessions.

This is most of the crowd who helped unload.  I didn't even know most of these kids!

Needless to say, we were pretty exhausted by the end of the day.  But we were in such good spirits!  Never once did we get cranky with each other during the entire move.  Not once did I lose my cool and snap at somebody (which, I admit, is prone to happen when I'm stressed out).  We were actually having fun as we packed all our stuff into those storage units.  A friend who was helping us unload even commented that he was impressed at how stress-free our move was.  

Again, I'd like to take full credit for that.