When it rains, it pours. Or at least it feels that way during a really stressful week at work when you've already worked nine hours and there's no end in sight.
I was going to have a post next week about how SDCC's Hotelpocalypse goes... and then we got the word that they're changing things this year. Usually we just have to completely stress out and then hit the website at a specific time and then try to get your list of six preferred hotels in as fast as humanly possible. If you can't do it in 30 seconds, you probably didn't get anything. This year, they're still doing that, but with a randomized waiting room, so that you have no control over when you get to start typing and you have to be ready to go immediately when you're able. It's also happening on a Tuesday, which means work will be an issue. I'm one of those people who's sort of sickeningly optimistic about change. If I have a life motto, it's probably "Let's see how it turns out first." But I'm really worried about not getting a hotel, or getting something very far away. So that was that.
And then today Nick and I decided that since his job is picking up, we can't do South Dakota. It's too far a drive in a short amount of time with his schedule right now. Which means we're going to try again this summer sometime and we're going to Nashville next weekend instead.
Let's see how it turns out! (See what I did there?)
31.3.16
16.3.16
Planning post: South Dakota
Years ago, one of my besties moved to Idaho for a year. She and some of our friends packed her up and drove her all the way out there, and then drove back without her. So now that I'm less than a month away from my next road trip, of course those friends were the ones to ask, "What are you going to do in South Dakota?"
Nick and I decided to go on a whim, basically. He drove there a few years back with a friend, by way of LA. Meaning they drove out to LA, had lunch with me, and then continued on to Mt. Rushmore, all in five days. This'll be another crazy road trip for him, because we're going to head out after work, drive as far as we can before stopping for the night, move on to Rushmore, and then drive back. It's a fourteen hour drive, and we're totally going to do it in a weekend. I get a lot of weird looks about that, but I figure the people who give them are just gonna have to get used to me.
We're still in the planning stages, and to be fair with a fourteen hour drive any plans we make could very well have to get scrapped, but people have been surprisingly forthcoming with recs on what to do. We're definitely going to see Mt. Rushmore because I never have, and also because there's enough walking that I should kick ass in the Weekend Warrior Fitbit challenge my friends are going to get hit with. Custer State Park was recced if we want to drive around and see buffalo, with the warning that they might charge your car. I want to avoid that part but I've gotten it into my head that I need to see some bison. I've heard mixed reviews about Bear Country USA, but they'll be closed when we're there anyway. I've heard that we have to see the badlands, and on the way don't forget to stop at Wall Drug and the Jolly Green Giant statue.
I want to do all of it. Whether we can remains to be seen. Good thing I still have three weeks to obsessively look at websites and try to plan in my head! If you've got any more recommendations, drop 'em here and I will thank you.
Nick and I decided to go on a whim, basically. He drove there a few years back with a friend, by way of LA. Meaning they drove out to LA, had lunch with me, and then continued on to Mt. Rushmore, all in five days. This'll be another crazy road trip for him, because we're going to head out after work, drive as far as we can before stopping for the night, move on to Rushmore, and then drive back. It's a fourteen hour drive, and we're totally going to do it in a weekend. I get a lot of weird looks about that, but I figure the people who give them are just gonna have to get used to me.
We're still in the planning stages, and to be fair with a fourteen hour drive any plans we make could very well have to get scrapped, but people have been surprisingly forthcoming with recs on what to do. We're definitely going to see Mt. Rushmore because I never have, and also because there's enough walking that I should kick ass in the Weekend Warrior Fitbit challenge my friends are going to get hit with. Custer State Park was recced if we want to drive around and see buffalo, with the warning that they might charge your car. I want to avoid that part but I've gotten it into my head that I need to see some bison. I've heard mixed reviews about Bear Country USA, but they'll be closed when we're there anyway. I've heard that we have to see the badlands, and on the way don't forget to stop at Wall Drug and the Jolly Green Giant statue.
I want to do all of it. Whether we can remains to be seen. Good thing I still have three weeks to obsessively look at websites and try to plan in my head! If you've got any more recommendations, drop 'em here and I will thank you.
13.3.16
Flashback post: LA to Chicago
Hello! I have not been posting because I moved last weekend! For the last week my life has been trying to get things set up and desperately trying to find vegetarian takeout and making daily trips to Target. Overall though it was the easiest move I've ever made, which is probably because I'd thrown a ton of stuff away and had very little furniture to speak of.
Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move.
Last year I basically blew up my life and moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. Thanks to U-Haul being the god damn worst, we ended up leaving way later than planned and that meant we were going to have to take an extra day on the drive right from the start. But my friend Michelle made part of the drive all the time, and Sarah's family had just done the same drive we were going to do and had been giving warnings about things, so we figured it shouldn't be that big a problem.
I actually said goodbye to this, voluntarily, like a crazy person.
The above was taken at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of California. We'd heard that for long stretches of the drive we'd be going without anywhere to stop, so if we had an opportunity to stretch our legs or stop for gas and snacks, we took it. This rest stop was notable mostly because a) I got to pet a puppy, and b) when we found the vending machines there was a lady taking out the trash who warned us, "You're not getting the coffee from there, are you?" Of course not, for as much as I adore coffee (and this trip kicked my addiction into hardcore overdrive), there's always been something creepy to me about those machines that just spit coffee into your cup. She then proceeded to say, "Because one time I was cleaning that and I saw these little black things crawling all over it. My bosses tried to tell me they were coffee grounds. I've been around a long time, I know what ants look like!"
Vindicated on the coffee machines.
We decided to hit up Vegas, which we've both been to, but we stopped there for one specific reason. Years ago on another cross-country road trip, Sarah introduced me to a restaurant chain called Islands that I love, and the Vegas location is as far east as they go. There wasn't really time to hit up anything else, and considering driving on the Strip is one of the scarier experiences of my life there was no way I was taking a trailer up there. The trailer unfortunately became a very big reason for why not to do certain things.
This sums Vegas up pretty well through.
We weren't able to get through Arizona by nightfall. You're in Arizona for maybe half an hour, but it felt pretty harrowing as the driver, going around mountains in the dark through construction zones with a trailer I was still learning how to drive with, and I'd barely slept the night before so that made it worse. But we got to St. George, UT for the night, and set out the next morning around 6 am, just in time for the sunrise.
We thought Utah would be the hardest state. We were warned about the mountains and the steep grades, and I was still getting the hang of driving with a trailer on my car. I had to learn about shifting gears, and we kept pulling over at the many, many, many rest stops so the car wouldn't overheat, though it was really, really, really gorgeous and worth every stop. Utah was also where we ran into some of the more mundane problems. We stopped at a gas station, which was set a couple miles off the exit, and to get there and back we had to avoid the baby kamikaze bunnies that kept darting out into the road. I'm very proud to say that I didn't hit a single one, but I don't want to ever play Frogger with tiny adorable fuzzy creatures ever again. That may have also been the stop where we tried to find the gas station in the middle of a huge state park and took a wrong turn, ending in me having to do a three point turn on a dirt road while hauling a trailer that wouldn't let me back up without it creating a 45 degree angle with my car. After I managed that, I could do anything on this trip.
Which was good, because then the trailer lost a wheel. See the above linked post! It really could have been a lot worse, and we were only fifteen minutes away from the hotel we'd booked at dinner. Nick and I tend to wait till later in the day when we have an idea of how far we might be able to get/how tired we are/what the timing's like and then find something on Priceline. This trip included calls to every hotel we checked out, asking "Can we park a trailer there?" Some places didn't have the space for it. Some hotels would let you park across two spaces so we could just pull out and drive the next morning. We had the new, empty trailer hooked onto my car already, so this particular hotel in Rifle, CO had us pull around to park on the side of the building, which was new. Still, they were happy to accommodate us and that's the important part.
I proudly proclaimed that California was the prettiest of all the states, and then I drove through the postcard that is Colorado. It's gorgeous. When we left, we had to drive through a mountain or two, and while there was construction going on, that just meant we could go slower to see the gorgeous scenery! Since we had to drive in the right lane the whole trip, we were driving right next to the Colorado River, where you could see fish jumping up out of the water, or see people bringing kayaks in. As for what we did in Colorado, well, there wasn't much we could do. We'd wanted to stop in Denver, but a stop for gas taught us that the city is rife with traffic circles, which suck to do with a trailer, so we had to skip that. We did stop in Eagle, Co for breakfast at the Eagle Diner and it was so good. I like stopping at roadside diners on long trips, and this was by far the best I've been to. Sarah had also told us that there were rest stops where you could stop and dip your toes in the river or stop and watch mountain goats, and we couldn't really do that.
If we thought Utah was the difficult state, Colorado blew it out of the water. We'd been warned about mountains, but not how high they are. Vail is 11,000 feet up. I drive a Nissan Versa. We had a trailer carrying my whole life on the back of us. It was a stressful day, because my car did not want to go up those mountains and it was a challenge to get it up to 25 miles an hour. I had to put my car in a lower gear and put the hazard lights on as a slow moving vehicle while cars whizzed past us doing 80. At one point when I could smell gas we pulled off to the side of the highway because I was worried about the engine, but there's really nowhere to stop. We were on a mountain, with nothing but a guard rail between us and the tops of the trees below, and my extremely light car would shake every time someone passed us. We were only there for a few minutes before I got scared enough to say screw it and keep going. We did that all the way up through Vail, where we finally hit a rest stop.
There was an honest to god babbling brook next to us. There was some kind of biking event going on, too, so there were a ton of people on bicycles stopping for a break, and I'm pretty sure they'd been going faster than us. That's right, if my car was having problems getting up to that elevation, people did that on bicycles. Bicyclists are badass.
I really wanted to stop and see mountain goats. And when Nick and I go back to Denver to do it right (date TBA) we'll absolutely do that. But the car ride was a mostly tense silence, where I think we were both worried that the car might give up. (Though the trip so far had been so stellar and problem-free!) At one point I started telling the highway "Just go down. JUST GO DOWN." And when we did start on the downgrade, it was still steep, so we still had to be careful. It was a huge relief to get to Nebraska.
The warnings about Nebraska had been (I'm paraphrasing) "It's the most boring drive you will ever do," and "don't have a gun in the car because you will want to turn it on yourself." We didn't have a tough time, though, partly because Colorado was so fraught with car terror, and because we hit a storm. There was a lightning storm in the distance where we thought we might be able to pass it up without getting hit with it, but then we started seeing lightning on the other side of us. It was raining pretty good, and at one point we hit construction and went down to one lane. Sorry, everyone driving behind us! I was not gonna speed in a storm with a trailer on my car! Deal with it! Our choices were to sit on the side of the road and wait out the storm that didn't want to seem to end, or keep on going and try to pass it up. So we tried to pass it up.
We did it, and after stopping for dinner at a roadside hotel somewhere in the middle of Nebraska where when I asked if they could make something vegetarian they acted like they'd never been asked that question before, we continued on. When we got back on the road it was dark. So that helped with the whole boring drive thing. We stayed at the Ramada in Kearney, NE and I honestly love this place. The decor is completely 70's, and while the place was a maze (we had to go back at least once to ask the front desk "We're going where?" and we had a map), we also got to pass up a pool and bar in the middle of the place. I'm not sure this is a good thing; it was really humid and smelled of chlorine, and there was carpeting all around, but my god was it wonderful. There was also a tiki bar type thing. Check out the pictures on the website, it's there.
When we left in the morning, it was straight on to Iowa. That was the drive that killed us. We weren't in Nebraska too much longer, but there's really nothing in western Iowa. There's very little to look at except the occasional farm, and we had to wait something like two hours once we said we were hungry to find an actual place to eat. There was a little farm to table place somewhere along the way but they had a very set menu and we didn't need nearly as much food as they would have to give us, so unfortunately we kept on till we found a Perkins'. And then we got to see Sarah! Much like we started my move to LA with an overnight at her house, we ended my move back with the same. Her dad told us that since Sarah and her mom had been telling him about our adventures, he'd tried to keep track of us in case he had to come rescue us. Oops.
This was our shortest day on the road because we actually had a person to hang out with, and we had to leave early the next day for the very last leg of the trip, and the one that bugged me the most. I've driven to Cedar Falls a lot. I can make the trip in four hours. And it was killing me that because of the trailer it was taking six. It made the trip feel even longer than it was, and all I wanted to do was get home. But even when we got to Illinois, we had to move the stuff out of the trailer and into the new U-Haul storage unit, which was differently shaped than I thought. The trailer was 5x8, the unit was 8x5, meaning it went upwards instead of back. This meant that once again I had to decide to ditch things like my desk because they wouldn't fit, which was really annoying when we'd had to move that stuff three times already in a matter of days. But we did it, and that's it.
For as many problems as there were though, it was a good trip. I really love traveling with Nick, and this was the most time we'd gotten to spend together just us in a long time, and we got to see some really great states and come up with at least one place I definitely want to see again. Plus I'm the sort of person who sees a challenge and feels accomplished when she gets through it, and this trip had A LOT OF CHALLENGES. Besides, anything's worth it if you get a good story out of it.
Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move.
Last year I basically blew up my life and moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. Thanks to U-Haul being the god damn worst, we ended up leaving way later than planned and that meant we were going to have to take an extra day on the drive right from the start. But my friend Michelle made part of the drive all the time, and Sarah's family had just done the same drive we were going to do and had been giving warnings about things, so we figured it shouldn't be that big a problem.
The above was taken at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of California. We'd heard that for long stretches of the drive we'd be going without anywhere to stop, so if we had an opportunity to stretch our legs or stop for gas and snacks, we took it. This rest stop was notable mostly because a) I got to pet a puppy, and b) when we found the vending machines there was a lady taking out the trash who warned us, "You're not getting the coffee from there, are you?" Of course not, for as much as I adore coffee (and this trip kicked my addiction into hardcore overdrive), there's always been something creepy to me about those machines that just spit coffee into your cup. She then proceeded to say, "Because one time I was cleaning that and I saw these little black things crawling all over it. My bosses tried to tell me they were coffee grounds. I've been around a long time, I know what ants look like!"
Vindicated on the coffee machines.
We decided to hit up Vegas, which we've both been to, but we stopped there for one specific reason. Years ago on another cross-country road trip, Sarah introduced me to a restaurant chain called Islands that I love, and the Vegas location is as far east as they go. There wasn't really time to hit up anything else, and considering driving on the Strip is one of the scarier experiences of my life there was no way I was taking a trailer up there. The trailer unfortunately became a very big reason for why not to do certain things.
We weren't able to get through Arizona by nightfall. You're in Arizona for maybe half an hour, but it felt pretty harrowing as the driver, going around mountains in the dark through construction zones with a trailer I was still learning how to drive with, and I'd barely slept the night before so that made it worse. But we got to St. George, UT for the night, and set out the next morning around 6 am, just in time for the sunrise.
We thought Utah would be the hardest state. We were warned about the mountains and the steep grades, and I was still getting the hang of driving with a trailer on my car. I had to learn about shifting gears, and we kept pulling over at the many, many, many rest stops so the car wouldn't overheat, though it was really, really, really gorgeous and worth every stop. Utah was also where we ran into some of the more mundane problems. We stopped at a gas station, which was set a couple miles off the exit, and to get there and back we had to avoid the baby kamikaze bunnies that kept darting out into the road. I'm very proud to say that I didn't hit a single one, but I don't want to ever play Frogger with tiny adorable fuzzy creatures ever again. That may have also been the stop where we tried to find the gas station in the middle of a huge state park and took a wrong turn, ending in me having to do a three point turn on a dirt road while hauling a trailer that wouldn't let me back up without it creating a 45 degree angle with my car. After I managed that, I could do anything on this trip.
Which was good, because then the trailer lost a wheel. See the above linked post! It really could have been a lot worse, and we were only fifteen minutes away from the hotel we'd booked at dinner. Nick and I tend to wait till later in the day when we have an idea of how far we might be able to get/how tired we are/what the timing's like and then find something on Priceline. This trip included calls to every hotel we checked out, asking "Can we park a trailer there?" Some places didn't have the space for it. Some hotels would let you park across two spaces so we could just pull out and drive the next morning. We had the new, empty trailer hooked onto my car already, so this particular hotel in Rifle, CO had us pull around to park on the side of the building, which was new. Still, they were happy to accommodate us and that's the important part.
I proudly proclaimed that California was the prettiest of all the states, and then I drove through the postcard that is Colorado. It's gorgeous. When we left, we had to drive through a mountain or two, and while there was construction going on, that just meant we could go slower to see the gorgeous scenery! Since we had to drive in the right lane the whole trip, we were driving right next to the Colorado River, where you could see fish jumping up out of the water, or see people bringing kayaks in. As for what we did in Colorado, well, there wasn't much we could do. We'd wanted to stop in Denver, but a stop for gas taught us that the city is rife with traffic circles, which suck to do with a trailer, so we had to skip that. We did stop in Eagle, Co for breakfast at the Eagle Diner and it was so good. I like stopping at roadside diners on long trips, and this was by far the best I've been to. Sarah had also told us that there were rest stops where you could stop and dip your toes in the river or stop and watch mountain goats, and we couldn't really do that.
If we thought Utah was the difficult state, Colorado blew it out of the water. We'd been warned about mountains, but not how high they are. Vail is 11,000 feet up. I drive a Nissan Versa. We had a trailer carrying my whole life on the back of us. It was a stressful day, because my car did not want to go up those mountains and it was a challenge to get it up to 25 miles an hour. I had to put my car in a lower gear and put the hazard lights on as a slow moving vehicle while cars whizzed past us doing 80. At one point when I could smell gas we pulled off to the side of the highway because I was worried about the engine, but there's really nowhere to stop. We were on a mountain, with nothing but a guard rail between us and the tops of the trees below, and my extremely light car would shake every time someone passed us. We were only there for a few minutes before I got scared enough to say screw it and keep going. We did that all the way up through Vail, where we finally hit a rest stop.
There was an honest to god babbling brook next to us. There was some kind of biking event going on, too, so there were a ton of people on bicycles stopping for a break, and I'm pretty sure they'd been going faster than us. That's right, if my car was having problems getting up to that elevation, people did that on bicycles. Bicyclists are badass.
I really wanted to stop and see mountain goats. And when Nick and I go back to Denver to do it right (date TBA) we'll absolutely do that. But the car ride was a mostly tense silence, where I think we were both worried that the car might give up. (Though the trip so far had been so stellar and problem-free!) At one point I started telling the highway "Just go down. JUST GO DOWN." And when we did start on the downgrade, it was still steep, so we still had to be careful. It was a huge relief to get to Nebraska.
The warnings about Nebraska had been (I'm paraphrasing) "It's the most boring drive you will ever do," and "don't have a gun in the car because you will want to turn it on yourself." We didn't have a tough time, though, partly because Colorado was so fraught with car terror, and because we hit a storm. There was a lightning storm in the distance where we thought we might be able to pass it up without getting hit with it, but then we started seeing lightning on the other side of us. It was raining pretty good, and at one point we hit construction and went down to one lane. Sorry, everyone driving behind us! I was not gonna speed in a storm with a trailer on my car! Deal with it! Our choices were to sit on the side of the road and wait out the storm that didn't want to seem to end, or keep on going and try to pass it up. So we tried to pass it up.
We did it, and after stopping for dinner at a roadside hotel somewhere in the middle of Nebraska where when I asked if they could make something vegetarian they acted like they'd never been asked that question before, we continued on. When we got back on the road it was dark. So that helped with the whole boring drive thing. We stayed at the Ramada in Kearney, NE and I honestly love this place. The decor is completely 70's, and while the place was a maze (we had to go back at least once to ask the front desk "We're going where?" and we had a map), we also got to pass up a pool and bar in the middle of the place. I'm not sure this is a good thing; it was really humid and smelled of chlorine, and there was carpeting all around, but my god was it wonderful. There was also a tiki bar type thing. Check out the pictures on the website, it's there.
When we left in the morning, it was straight on to Iowa. That was the drive that killed us. We weren't in Nebraska too much longer, but there's really nothing in western Iowa. There's very little to look at except the occasional farm, and we had to wait something like two hours once we said we were hungry to find an actual place to eat. There was a little farm to table place somewhere along the way but they had a very set menu and we didn't need nearly as much food as they would have to give us, so unfortunately we kept on till we found a Perkins'. And then we got to see Sarah! Much like we started my move to LA with an overnight at her house, we ended my move back with the same. Her dad told us that since Sarah and her mom had been telling him about our adventures, he'd tried to keep track of us in case he had to come rescue us. Oops.
This was our shortest day on the road because we actually had a person to hang out with, and we had to leave early the next day for the very last leg of the trip, and the one that bugged me the most. I've driven to Cedar Falls a lot. I can make the trip in four hours. And it was killing me that because of the trailer it was taking six. It made the trip feel even longer than it was, and all I wanted to do was get home. But even when we got to Illinois, we had to move the stuff out of the trailer and into the new U-Haul storage unit, which was differently shaped than I thought. The trailer was 5x8, the unit was 8x5, meaning it went upwards instead of back. This meant that once again I had to decide to ditch things like my desk because they wouldn't fit, which was really annoying when we'd had to move that stuff three times already in a matter of days. But we did it, and that's it.
For as many problems as there were though, it was a good trip. I really love traveling with Nick, and this was the most time we'd gotten to spend together just us in a long time, and we got to see some really great states and come up with at least one place I definitely want to see again. Plus I'm the sort of person who sees a challenge and feels accomplished when she gets through it, and this trip had A LOT OF CHALLENGES. Besides, anything's worth it if you get a good story out of it.
11.3.16
Why U-Haul is dead to me
Hello! I have not been posting because I moved last weekend! For the last week my life has been trying to get things set up and desperately trying to find vegetarian takeout and making daily trips to Target. Overall though it was the easiest move I've ever made, which is probably because I'd thrown a ton of stuff away and had very little furniture to speak of.
Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move. But first, I'm going to tell you about why parts of it were hell.
Last year I basically blew up my life and in August moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. I was getting a trailer hitch installed on my car, which was supposed to be a two-hour process, so we decided to hang out there while it was being done. We waited an hour, then got bored and headed over to the Norm's across the street to get drinks. When we got back, they still weren't done. When I scheduled my trailer pickup, I was told I had to get the hitch installed at one location and then would get the trailer itself at another one nearby. So now that I was going to be late in picking it up I had to call location #2 to let them know. Everything's cool.
5:00 comes. We've been there three hours. I had to keep asking whenever one of the guys comes to the front of the store to ask what's going on, and only one told me anything. He said that they were having problems drilling the necessary holes into my car, and they were having trouble getting someone else to come help, but they'd get it.
6:30 comes. Nick is liveblogging this all to Facebook and keeping time in the running time of the movie Hitch. We'd been there for two Hitches so far. I had to call the other location, which closed at 7, to find out what to do if they couldn't finish the job in time and I basically got "Well, you can pick it up tomorrow." As we were planning on being on the road around 6 am the next day, this was a problem. When the guy who'd been working on the car finally came out of the garage and said, "I'm not going to be able to finish the job tonight. But tomorrow, if you-"
Have you ever had one of those moments where you lose all control over yourself, and you can just feel the words coming out of you? I had that. I remember barking, "NO. WE HAVE BEEN HERE FIVE HOURS. YOU ARE GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK IN THERE AND FINISH THE JOB," and that was about it. I was shaking with rage and by the time I finished, the mechanic turned to the other guy and said, "Call the other location and bring the trailer over here," and then turned back to me, saying, "I'm going to get this finished for you tonight." And then he offered me his chair. Nick can back me up on alllll of this.
They moved fast, with the mechanic going back to the garage and the other guy immediately getting keys to go to the other location. I should note that for most of the day there weren't other customers (though lines would build up at times because no one was working the counter), and Nick and I were alone in the U-Haul store, sitting on the floor or on boxes, and as soon as we were alone again I started nervous giggling with adrenaline. Nick said he was going to help me, and then saw I was busy striking fear into the hearts of U-Haul workers and sat back and let me go.
The guy took a long time to get back with the trailer, and it was getting dark. We could hear a lot of cursing and tools being thrown from the garage, but still there were no updates about what was going on. I was starting to panic now, wondering if we could still leave at the scheduled time tomorrow, and oh god what if this was a sign that I was making a terrible mistake and shouldn't move. And when he did come back with the trailer, he ended up closing down the shop with us still inside and left for the night, leaving the one mechanic who'd taken an entire workday to get nothing done. After nightfall it was a lot of being bored and tired and hungry, locked in a closed U-Haul store, like a low-rent version of that Saved By the Bell episode where they locked themselves in the mall overnight. At one point the alarm started going off for no reason, and the mechanic let us out, and then once we were outside asked for help in getting wires through the car, or to make sure the lights were working the way he needed. Yes, we ended up helping out on the work for my own car.
We got out of there at just before 10:30, which was about eight hours after we got there for a two-hour process. I still wanted to leave in the morning, so we actually tried to get some of my stuff out of my second floor apartment and into the truck. But we were both exhausted, we were both injured (I'd had a door opened on my wrist and sprained it, then sprained my knee and ankle after not noticing a giant water spill at Target, and Nick had fallen at the airport and spent a good portion of the day with ice in his sock for his own sprained ankle, and why yes klutziness does run in our family), and it was dark, and I was having panic attacks. But because Nick's the best brother ever, anytime I'd lose it and start flailing around or crying because this wasn't going right, he stayed very calm, and he basically talked me into calling it a night. Since we'd gotten to my place so late, there was nowhere I could park a car with a trailer, but there was a church parking lot next door that was empty. I left a note on it literally reading "Please don't tow me," and walked back to my apartment. We'd disassembled my bed so I let him have the couch and curled up on the floor with a blanket and pillow.
That was the night I learned you can have anxiety attacks in your sleep. I remember having dreams about my car getting towed or the trailer that had some of my stuff getting broken into. I got four hours of "sleep" and when I woke up I was still shaky and exhausted and we had to take the rest of my apartment apart and get the trailer packed up. It was a very long process, since a lot of what I'd planned to do the night before involved getting the last of my stuff packed and cleaning the apartment, which I wasn't really able to do because we couldn't get out on the road till several hours after I planned. I decided to toss a lot of stuff rather than taking the time to pack it up. Nick ripped apart some of my cheaper furniture to put in the dumpster. I had time to shower because I was sweaty and gross, I dropped off my keys at the rental office, and then we were out.
If you think the U-Haul saga ended there, though, you are mistaken! See, we had some minor problems with the fact that if I tried to back up, the trailer would turn so that it would be at a 45 degree angle with my car and then it wouldn't go any further. It made it difficult to park at hotels a lot of the time, but I managed with it. And then when we were driving through Colorado, I noticed a noise. At first I thought it was just that sound you hear on certain kinds of pavement, but when I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that the back driver's side wheel on the trailer was shaking, so I figured we were getting a flat. Luckily there was a rest stop up ahead, and I pulled off to check it out. As I made the turn into the rest area proper, there was a loud BANG and the car shook, and I thought that was it, we'd had a blowout. When we got out of the car, we hadn't exactly had a blowout. The entire wheel was missing from the trailer. The tire hadn't just gone missing. We're talking the axl was dragging on the ground, and caused dig marks into the street.
I called roadside assistance, half-laughing because come on now I mean really at this point, and we were lucky that a cop happened upon us. He'd had something like this happen when his family was on vacation, and he asked where this started and drove around that section of the freeway to look for the wheel. He didn't find it, and while I was on the phone with roadside assistance by the car I saw Nick and the cop heading away from the car, towards a group of people. It was a group of tourists that had been walking around, and happened to find the wheel. It had popped off the car. And flown. A hundred feet away. Into a bush.
True story.
Yep, after the whole mess with the hitch two days before, they'd given us a trailer with bald tires, rust and holes in the metal. Roadside assistance kept trying to tell us if we could find the bolts they could just repair the tire, not understanding that all but two of the bolts had been ripped off the trailer and were lost to the ether. We found other bits and pieces of metal that had just been shredded. The other side of the trailer also had much of the same balding/rusting thing going on, and the cop took one look at it and said it was too dangerous to have been given that, and if I hadn't pulled off and the wheel had popped off while driving someone could have been killed. Thanks, U-Haul!
Roadside assistance was sending a tow truck over, and so the cop and tourists left us. As the sun came down and we realized that luckily the hotel we'd already booked for the night was only about fifteen minutes away, the tow truck driver showed up. There were two very nice guys who worked for a U-Haul/tow place nearby, and they got the trailer off my car and brought it on over to their shop. There we learned that it was too late and too dark for anyone to help us, and roadside assistance said the earliest they could get a team out there to help us move would be at least noon the next day. We'd already lost a day thanks to U-Haul being incompetent assholes, so we agreed to be reimbursed $100 and move everything ourselves. We left the trailer and all my stuff at the U-Haul place, went to our hotel, and at 7 am before they were open, we were back at the U-Haul place to unload the old broken dangerous trailer and put everything in the new one.
RIP Deathtrap trailer. You will not be missed.
And if you think that is the end of the U-Haul saga, you are still mistaken! When I got to Illinois I had to file complaints and claims for reimbursement that never went anywhere. I'd call to follow up and find out that it'd been closed without notice. They'd reopen and promise someone would give me a call and then I wouldn't get a call. I'd call them and find out it'd been closed. Apparently the manager of the store where I'd gotten my trailer hitch installed refused to do anything about it and would just shut it down every time the complaint came through for him to deal with. He was quoted as blaming me for the whole thing, insisting that if I had pulled off as soon as I heard a noise (which I'd absolutely pulled off at the safest possible opportunity; curving around mountains is not a safe place to stop on the ride of the road) there wouldn't have been a problem. It ended with me getting a friend to give me the number to a lawyer and then leaving one more message on U-Haul's Facebook page threatening that the next time they heard from me it'd be through a lawyer. That's when I started getting calls, and after two months of fighting with them, I got reimbursed fairly. Also, I found out that there was video from inside the U-Haul store, and while I'm not sure there was sound, someone had had to watch the video to prove that we'd been there as long as we said we had, and so someone definitely got to see me rip the mechanic a new asshole.
In short, use Budget for all your rental needs.
Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move. But first, I'm going to tell you about why parts of it were hell.
Last year I basically blew up my life and in August moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. I was getting a trailer hitch installed on my car, which was supposed to be a two-hour process, so we decided to hang out there while it was being done. We waited an hour, then got bored and headed over to the Norm's across the street to get drinks. When we got back, they still weren't done. When I scheduled my trailer pickup, I was told I had to get the hitch installed at one location and then would get the trailer itself at another one nearby. So now that I was going to be late in picking it up I had to call location #2 to let them know. Everything's cool.
5:00 comes. We've been there three hours. I had to keep asking whenever one of the guys comes to the front of the store to ask what's going on, and only one told me anything. He said that they were having problems drilling the necessary holes into my car, and they were having trouble getting someone else to come help, but they'd get it.
6:30 comes. Nick is liveblogging this all to Facebook and keeping time in the running time of the movie Hitch. We'd been there for two Hitches so far. I had to call the other location, which closed at 7, to find out what to do if they couldn't finish the job in time and I basically got "Well, you can pick it up tomorrow." As we were planning on being on the road around 6 am the next day, this was a problem. When the guy who'd been working on the car finally came out of the garage and said, "I'm not going to be able to finish the job tonight. But tomorrow, if you-"
Have you ever had one of those moments where you lose all control over yourself, and you can just feel the words coming out of you? I had that. I remember barking, "NO. WE HAVE BEEN HERE FIVE HOURS. YOU ARE GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK IN THERE AND FINISH THE JOB," and that was about it. I was shaking with rage and by the time I finished, the mechanic turned to the other guy and said, "Call the other location and bring the trailer over here," and then turned back to me, saying, "I'm going to get this finished for you tonight." And then he offered me his chair. Nick can back me up on alllll of this.
They moved fast, with the mechanic going back to the garage and the other guy immediately getting keys to go to the other location. I should note that for most of the day there weren't other customers (though lines would build up at times because no one was working the counter), and Nick and I were alone in the U-Haul store, sitting on the floor or on boxes, and as soon as we were alone again I started nervous giggling with adrenaline. Nick said he was going to help me, and then saw I was busy striking fear into the hearts of U-Haul workers and sat back and let me go.
The guy took a long time to get back with the trailer, and it was getting dark. We could hear a lot of cursing and tools being thrown from the garage, but still there were no updates about what was going on. I was starting to panic now, wondering if we could still leave at the scheduled time tomorrow, and oh god what if this was a sign that I was making a terrible mistake and shouldn't move. And when he did come back with the trailer, he ended up closing down the shop with us still inside and left for the night, leaving the one mechanic who'd taken an entire workday to get nothing done. After nightfall it was a lot of being bored and tired and hungry, locked in a closed U-Haul store, like a low-rent version of that Saved By the Bell episode where they locked themselves in the mall overnight. At one point the alarm started going off for no reason, and the mechanic let us out, and then once we were outside asked for help in getting wires through the car, or to make sure the lights were working the way he needed. Yes, we ended up helping out on the work for my own car.
We got out of there at just before 10:30, which was about eight hours after we got there for a two-hour process. I still wanted to leave in the morning, so we actually tried to get some of my stuff out of my second floor apartment and into the truck. But we were both exhausted, we were both injured (I'd had a door opened on my wrist and sprained it, then sprained my knee and ankle after not noticing a giant water spill at Target, and Nick had fallen at the airport and spent a good portion of the day with ice in his sock for his own sprained ankle, and why yes klutziness does run in our family), and it was dark, and I was having panic attacks. But because Nick's the best brother ever, anytime I'd lose it and start flailing around or crying because this wasn't going right, he stayed very calm, and he basically talked me into calling it a night. Since we'd gotten to my place so late, there was nowhere I could park a car with a trailer, but there was a church parking lot next door that was empty. I left a note on it literally reading "Please don't tow me," and walked back to my apartment. We'd disassembled my bed so I let him have the couch and curled up on the floor with a blanket and pillow.
That was the night I learned you can have anxiety attacks in your sleep. I remember having dreams about my car getting towed or the trailer that had some of my stuff getting broken into. I got four hours of "sleep" and when I woke up I was still shaky and exhausted and we had to take the rest of my apartment apart and get the trailer packed up. It was a very long process, since a lot of what I'd planned to do the night before involved getting the last of my stuff packed and cleaning the apartment, which I wasn't really able to do because we couldn't get out on the road till several hours after I planned. I decided to toss a lot of stuff rather than taking the time to pack it up. Nick ripped apart some of my cheaper furniture to put in the dumpster. I had time to shower because I was sweaty and gross, I dropped off my keys at the rental office, and then we were out.
If you think the U-Haul saga ended there, though, you are mistaken! See, we had some minor problems with the fact that if I tried to back up, the trailer would turn so that it would be at a 45 degree angle with my car and then it wouldn't go any further. It made it difficult to park at hotels a lot of the time, but I managed with it. And then when we were driving through Colorado, I noticed a noise. At first I thought it was just that sound you hear on certain kinds of pavement, but when I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that the back driver's side wheel on the trailer was shaking, so I figured we were getting a flat. Luckily there was a rest stop up ahead, and I pulled off to check it out. As I made the turn into the rest area proper, there was a loud BANG and the car shook, and I thought that was it, we'd had a blowout. When we got out of the car, we hadn't exactly had a blowout. The entire wheel was missing from the trailer. The tire hadn't just gone missing. We're talking the axl was dragging on the ground, and caused dig marks into the street.
I called roadside assistance, half-laughing because come on now I mean really at this point, and we were lucky that a cop happened upon us. He'd had something like this happen when his family was on vacation, and he asked where this started and drove around that section of the freeway to look for the wheel. He didn't find it, and while I was on the phone with roadside assistance by the car I saw Nick and the cop heading away from the car, towards a group of people. It was a group of tourists that had been walking around, and happened to find the wheel. It had popped off the car. And flown. A hundred feet away. Into a bush.
Yep, after the whole mess with the hitch two days before, they'd given us a trailer with bald tires, rust and holes in the metal. Roadside assistance kept trying to tell us if we could find the bolts they could just repair the tire, not understanding that all but two of the bolts had been ripped off the trailer and were lost to the ether. We found other bits and pieces of metal that had just been shredded. The other side of the trailer also had much of the same balding/rusting thing going on, and the cop took one look at it and said it was too dangerous to have been given that, and if I hadn't pulled off and the wheel had popped off while driving someone could have been killed. Thanks, U-Haul!
Roadside assistance was sending a tow truck over, and so the cop and tourists left us. As the sun came down and we realized that luckily the hotel we'd already booked for the night was only about fifteen minutes away, the tow truck driver showed up. There were two very nice guys who worked for a U-Haul/tow place nearby, and they got the trailer off my car and brought it on over to their shop. There we learned that it was too late and too dark for anyone to help us, and roadside assistance said the earliest they could get a team out there to help us move would be at least noon the next day. We'd already lost a day thanks to U-Haul being incompetent assholes, so we agreed to be reimbursed $100 and move everything ourselves. We left the trailer and all my stuff at the U-Haul place, went to our hotel, and at 7 am before they were open, we were back at the U-Haul place to unload the old broken dangerous trailer and put everything in the new one.
And if you think that is the end of the U-Haul saga, you are still mistaken! When I got to Illinois I had to file complaints and claims for reimbursement that never went anywhere. I'd call to follow up and find out that it'd been closed without notice. They'd reopen and promise someone would give me a call and then I wouldn't get a call. I'd call them and find out it'd been closed. Apparently the manager of the store where I'd gotten my trailer hitch installed refused to do anything about it and would just shut it down every time the complaint came through for him to deal with. He was quoted as blaming me for the whole thing, insisting that if I had pulled off as soon as I heard a noise (which I'd absolutely pulled off at the safest possible opportunity; curving around mountains is not a safe place to stop on the ride of the road) there wouldn't have been a problem. It ended with me getting a friend to give me the number to a lawyer and then leaving one more message on U-Haul's Facebook page threatening that the next time they heard from me it'd be through a lawyer. That's when I started getting calls, and after two months of fighting with them, I got reimbursed fairly. Also, I found out that there was video from inside the U-Haul store, and while I'm not sure there was sound, someone had had to watch the video to prove that we'd been there as long as we said we had, and so someone definitely got to see me rip the mechanic a new asshole.
In short, use Budget for all your rental needs.
2.3.16
Flashback post: Tijuana, Mexico
For as much as I travel, until less than a year ago I'd never been out of the country. It's one of the things that's always really bugged me, especially when I'd know people who wouldn't even drive forty minutes into the city who would travel halfway around the world and I was just hanging out here. I still haven't done enough to remedy this, though there's talk of some stuff, and I keep looking at flight prices to Jamaica and going "Ooooh" for next year. But for my first venture out of the US, we go to Tijuana. Which barely counts.
If you live in LA, going down to TJ for the day is a definite thing. Plenty of people told me stories of having ditched school to hang out there instead, or how they had some wild night back in high school. The older you get, the less common this seems to be to do. But hey, I was moving and I'd never been, so screw it. And I worried like crazy before this trip. I worried about whether I needed to change my dollars into pesos (not really, no). I worried about cell service (it sucked, I didn't have service till we were in line at the border). I worried about my credit card getting canceled because of transactions in another country (call your credit card company or bank before the trip so they know). I worried because everyone was warning me about how dangerous it is.
Personally, I think you need to watch yourself anywhere you go, not just Mexico. Take precautions. Don't leave your purse open, don't put all your money in one place, be aware of your surroundings, don't go alone. I was warned not to be out after dark, and to watch for pickpockets and muggers, and that I was absolutely going to get sexually harassed. I didn't have any negative experiences with the people. Everyone I met there was perfectly nice, and I never once feared for my safety or belongings. So, be aware that there are risks, but know that nothing will probably happen to you.
The other thing I seriously worried about was the fact that I don't speak the language. I, like many Los Angeles residents, speak Spanglish, which is different. I can ask how to find the bathroom and find myself peppering my sentences with Spanish words, and I can tell you in Spanish how sorry I am that I don't speak Spanish. I suck at learning them. I grew up in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and went to a predominantly Polish school and I retained nothing. Sure, I could memorize words in French or German or Swahili to sing them in choir (all things that happened!), but memorizing isn't learning. And I really didn't want to be the ignorant American who shows up to another country and expects everyone to cater to me. Luckily, Tijuana is so tourist-based that there was only one instance where I ran into someone who didn't start by speaking English to me. We went for ice cream because it was hot like fire oh my god and needed a break, and the people there had no idea what I was asking for. So it meant trying to use my very rudimentary Spanish skills and a lot of gestures, and using that to make a successful transaction. If it's something you worry about, too, at least make an effort to learn the language. Not only will you help you, but people tend to be more willing to help you when they see you're trying.
So, with that out of the way, my friends Emily, Kelsey and I headed down one Sunday in May to help me expand my world beyond national borders.
Um. Avoid driving.
Everyone is trying to get in and out of Mexico, basically. Traffic piles the hell up. (Also, do not watch Sicario before driving to Mexico.) Rather than get stuck in gridlock and border checks, we started in San Diego and took a trolley that got us right up to the border. There's a little area with a McDonald's and bathrooms where you need to pay to use them. And then you just walk across. There's a long walkway, covered with barbed wire and with armed guards walking around, but to get in they didn't check anything. We just walked under the sign that said "MEXICO" and there we were. Easy enough.
What do you do in Tijuana without a plan? Wander, mostly. There was a big gorgeous church we got to check out, but being Sunday it was definitely too busy to do any real exploring. We saw some traditional dancing on a stage. We went into shops. Things definitely are cheaper there, so it can be a good place to find goods at a discount, or yes, cheap prescription drugs that don't require a prescription. When you walk around down the lines of shops, most of them had people calling out to us promising a free tequila shot if we came in. There are also a lot of little restaurants who boldly advertise margaritas because they know why Americans are coming here.
Also they paint donkeys to look like zebras and charge you to take pictures with them. Idk.
There wasn't a ton of stuff to do, though. We planned on sightseeing and walking around, but the streets were not laid out like the maps we saw. And when we'd try to find a landmark on said maps, those landmarks seemed to have been left off. It was a giant hassle, and when we started walking figuring we'd come across something, we ended up walking around in residential neighborhoods and through construction sites until we managed to turn around and find our way back. I also managed to get severely dehydrated and sunburned over the course of this. It was so bad I ended up going home sick from work the next day. Did it stop me from getting drinks at a little restaurant right by the border? Nope, it did not! We'd been there all day and hadn't actually had Mexican food in Mexico, so we stopped in. The food was pretty good, and even though they accidentally brought four margaritas and two tequila shots that we shared at the table, I'm pretty sure the reason they were offering tequila at every store was because it was watered down.
The border into the US was hell, though. There are stalls for food, and people selling trinkets in the line, because you'll be there for I think two and a half hours. And here's a secret: if you have a passport card, you get to go in the middle line, which we saw most people just walking through. The giant line is for passport books. Unfortunately we didn't figure this out until we were about 80% through the line and one of us didn't have the card so we would have had to wait anyway. (And no, I'm not sure if this works the same if you're walking into Canada. I might have to test it.) And when I had to show my card and they asked where I was going, I was so caught off guard I answered, "The US?" Eh, they let me in anyway.
So that was Tijuana for me. Would I go back? I definitely want to go back to Mexico, but I've got my sights set on Mexico City at the moment. Tijuana's fine, but it was a lot like downtown Los Angeles to me, and the border was so much hassle when I could just pop on over to Olivera Street.
Also I didn't know how to end this because the only thing I was coming up with was "And having popped my international travel cherry, I'm free to slut it up by seeing the rest of the world" but my mom reads this blog. Hi, Mom.
If you live in LA, going down to TJ for the day is a definite thing. Plenty of people told me stories of having ditched school to hang out there instead, or how they had some wild night back in high school. The older you get, the less common this seems to be to do. But hey, I was moving and I'd never been, so screw it. And I worried like crazy before this trip. I worried about whether I needed to change my dollars into pesos (not really, no). I worried about cell service (it sucked, I didn't have service till we were in line at the border). I worried about my credit card getting canceled because of transactions in another country (call your credit card company or bank before the trip so they know). I worried because everyone was warning me about how dangerous it is.
Personally, I think you need to watch yourself anywhere you go, not just Mexico. Take precautions. Don't leave your purse open, don't put all your money in one place, be aware of your surroundings, don't go alone. I was warned not to be out after dark, and to watch for pickpockets and muggers, and that I was absolutely going to get sexually harassed. I didn't have any negative experiences with the people. Everyone I met there was perfectly nice, and I never once feared for my safety or belongings. So, be aware that there are risks, but know that nothing will probably happen to you.
The other thing I seriously worried about was the fact that I don't speak the language. I, like many Los Angeles residents, speak Spanglish, which is different. I can ask how to find the bathroom and find myself peppering my sentences with Spanish words, and I can tell you in Spanish how sorry I am that I don't speak Spanish. I suck at learning them. I grew up in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and went to a predominantly Polish school and I retained nothing. Sure, I could memorize words in French or German or Swahili to sing them in choir (all things that happened!), but memorizing isn't learning. And I really didn't want to be the ignorant American who shows up to another country and expects everyone to cater to me. Luckily, Tijuana is so tourist-based that there was only one instance where I ran into someone who didn't start by speaking English to me. We went for ice cream because it was hot like fire oh my god and needed a break, and the people there had no idea what I was asking for. So it meant trying to use my very rudimentary Spanish skills and a lot of gestures, and using that to make a successful transaction. If it's something you worry about, too, at least make an effort to learn the language. Not only will you help you, but people tend to be more willing to help you when they see you're trying.
So, with that out of the way, my friends Emily, Kelsey and I headed down one Sunday in May to help me expand my world beyond national borders.
Everyone is trying to get in and out of Mexico, basically. Traffic piles the hell up. (Also, do not watch Sicario before driving to Mexico.) Rather than get stuck in gridlock and border checks, we started in San Diego and took a trolley that got us right up to the border. There's a little area with a McDonald's and bathrooms where you need to pay to use them. And then you just walk across. There's a long walkway, covered with barbed wire and with armed guards walking around, but to get in they didn't check anything. We just walked under the sign that said "MEXICO" and there we were. Easy enough.
What do you do in Tijuana without a plan? Wander, mostly. There was a big gorgeous church we got to check out, but being Sunday it was definitely too busy to do any real exploring. We saw some traditional dancing on a stage. We went into shops. Things definitely are cheaper there, so it can be a good place to find goods at a discount, or yes, cheap prescription drugs that don't require a prescription. When you walk around down the lines of shops, most of them had people calling out to us promising a free tequila shot if we came in. There are also a lot of little restaurants who boldly advertise margaritas because they know why Americans are coming here.
There wasn't a ton of stuff to do, though. We planned on sightseeing and walking around, but the streets were not laid out like the maps we saw. And when we'd try to find a landmark on said maps, those landmarks seemed to have been left off. It was a giant hassle, and when we started walking figuring we'd come across something, we ended up walking around in residential neighborhoods and through construction sites until we managed to turn around and find our way back. I also managed to get severely dehydrated and sunburned over the course of this. It was so bad I ended up going home sick from work the next day. Did it stop me from getting drinks at a little restaurant right by the border? Nope, it did not! We'd been there all day and hadn't actually had Mexican food in Mexico, so we stopped in. The food was pretty good, and even though they accidentally brought four margaritas and two tequila shots that we shared at the table, I'm pretty sure the reason they were offering tequila at every store was because it was watered down.
The border into the US was hell, though. There are stalls for food, and people selling trinkets in the line, because you'll be there for I think two and a half hours. And here's a secret: if you have a passport card, you get to go in the middle line, which we saw most people just walking through. The giant line is for passport books. Unfortunately we didn't figure this out until we were about 80% through the line and one of us didn't have the card so we would have had to wait anyway. (And no, I'm not sure if this works the same if you're walking into Canada. I might have to test it.) And when I had to show my card and they asked where I was going, I was so caught off guard I answered, "The US?" Eh, they let me in anyway.
So that was Tijuana for me. Would I go back? I definitely want to go back to Mexico, but I've got my sights set on Mexico City at the moment. Tijuana's fine, but it was a lot like downtown Los Angeles to me, and the border was so much hassle when I could just pop on over to Olivera Street.
Also I didn't know how to end this because the only thing I was coming up with was "And having popped my international travel cherry, I'm free to slut it up by seeing the rest of the world" but my mom reads this blog. Hi, Mom.
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