Road Trip: Prep, Pack & Moving Day!
Prepping the Move for Our Epic Road Trip
Over our last six years together, this move would bring us to five total moves. We should be pros at this by now, right?
Wrong. We had drastically underestimated what was ahead of us. The effort of moving more than half of our lives into a storage unit while squeezing the rest into our car for an 8-day road trip to Mexico to start a new life in Cabo was no easy task.
The early stages of this were daunting, stressful & overwhelming. We did not really start on the actual packing effort until one month before move-out day. However we had been cleaning out for months prior, purging stuff we didn’t even know we had and donating the unnecessary material things we had not touched in years. We sorted our life tons of piles - “Keep: Storage, “Keep: Goes to Cabo”, “Trash” &“Donate”.
Everything was going well until Kennedy and Kyle saw Leigh’s “Keep: Shoe collection” pile(s)….
Kennedy judging and concerned there’s no more floor space for her to lay.
Finding the balance of “what stays” vs. “what goes” was difficult in many situations:
Do we need to pack Christmas decor?
What about our favorite coffee mugs?
Should we bring a sweatshirt or two in case it gets cold at night?
Does it get cold at night?
Umm… what about our bar cart and all of our cocktail making accessories? Wait, that won’t fit in the car, right? Maybe we should find a way. No, that’s ridiculous and we can get by without that… right? The thoughts and questions lingered on…
Needless to say, we had a ton of back and forth on “what do we WANT to bring?”, “what do we NEED to bring?” and the “what will FIT?”.
We don’t know what we used to do without Amazon, but thank god for them. We ordered so many great items that helped us get organized and maintain our sanity. Our packing life savers:
All-weather Storage “trunk” with safety lock
Car Top Carrier for extra space
Clothing coming to Mexico? Vacuum sealable storage bags to the rescue. We even measured out the car top carrier dimensions on the floor with tape to do “mock packs” to help determine what would fit. We figured the back of the car would offer space for 2 plastic bins, and we had a large, lockable plastic bin on the back tailgate rack for a handful of miscellaneous things.
As piles were finalized, lids were snapped on top, labeled, and were ready to go to storage. Thankfully we got a storage unit weeks before our moving-out day (pro tip), which allowed for a few pre-moving day runs. This helped to make us feel more ‘accomplished’ as the clutter started to disappear and we began to see what was actually left.
We talked about doing a “test run” where we’d load the car to see what was realistically going to fit, but that went out the window as time was flying. The hardest part of all of this was thinking… “well, after the movers are gone and the car is full, what if we have items leftover?”. The car would be full, the movers would be off the clock, yet we hadn’t even considered the overhead of something valuable/large in size were not going
Again, it was stressful but we had to keep reminding ourselves we were doing this for a reason. It wasn’t about the stuff. It was about the experience. If we forgot something, or needed something later, there would be ways to get it. Stuff is just stuff at the end of the day, so as long as we had space for each other (& Kennedy), that’s really all that mattered.
Moving Day: Monday, September 23rd, 2019
The moving day was finally here, but boy did it end up being “one of those days”.
You always try to prepare and get ahead of moving day. Yet no matter how good you feel going into it, it hits you like a ton of bricks as soon as you’re out of bed (continuously) until the last item is packed away or unloaded.
However, this time, whatever was not ready in the “Mexico pile” was going in our storage unit. We tag-teamed the day, as Kyle spent most of the morning with the movers and Leigh focused on a full day of work… from the floor of our empty office.
Up and down, back and forth, to the storage unit and back. 9 hours and now 90% of our belongings were stacked into a 10’x15’ unit.
The movers left, the cleaners polished the last appliance, and suddenly it was just us. 5pm… and all that remained was a clean, empty apartment and our pile of belongings that were supposed to fit into the Highlander. It was weird.
After a few grocery cart runs up and down the elevator, we got it all down to the car. Now… let the Tetris strategy begin to pack everything we had guesstimated should fit.
Only a few rearrangements and we manage to pack full every empty space. Each spot within the car was utilized to perfectly fit the item before and after it. All while making sure we had a secure, padded, comfy section for princess Kennedy and her bed.
A few random things left behind for our lovely building neighbors but we fit most and still had a view out the rear window (luckily considering we had 42 hours of driving ahead of us). WE DID IT. We were ready to go. With not much time to stop and soak it in, it was adios Lido Condominiums, it’s been real! We packed in and headed out for a short 40 minute kickoff drive to Arvada, Colorado to stay with our family for the evening.
We watched the sunset on the patio around the fire pit after a delicious home-cooked meal. Kennedy and Koda had their typical backyard play date, rolling in grass, chasing squirrels, and pretending they aren’t in love with each other. We all teared up talking about the fact the two may never see each other again. More cocktails, please. We enjoyed conversation late into the evening, clearing most of our pre-trip jitters and capping off an amazing last evening in Colorado.