Chapter Twenty-Nine
And Move It Out
May 17, 2009—Moving Day: Work, work, work, and finally we had an empty apartment and a full truck. It was time to take this show from St. Louis to Kansas City.
We drove off in our caravan—I drove the Echo (with Gunilla) in front, and Lena and Jenny were in the U-Haul behind me. We communicated with our Motorola walkie-talkies and it worked perfectly. It felt like I was towing a trailer with a 500 foot tow rope; I'd change lanes and the U-Haul would change lanes.
At lunchtime, we stopped at JJ’s Barbecue for some pulled pork and beef brisket. Here is a picture of the friendly waitress taking our order.
Oops, no, wrong picture. That’s a picture of the menu. That’s right, you just point to one of the animals on the wall and say “I’ll have that.”
After another hour of driving, both the drivers were getting sleepy, which called for strawberry shortcake and several cups of coffee. The dessert, split three ways, hit the spot.
We finally arrived at the new apartment. Unloading would have been easier than loading, except that we had one major problem: the couches were too big to make the turn around the landing up the stairs, and were also too wide for the doors to the apartment. After a lot of thinking cap work (picture Betty Boop’s “Grampy”) we realized that they had to be dismantled somehow. I only had to remove eight bolts to get things apart.
We eventually got everything into her new apartment, and slept soundly through the night.