What a long, strange trip it was...

The whole awful story.

My view for the entire trip

Getting ready for our move to San Miguel de Allende was going quite well.  We were downsizing and had sold a lot of things, donated even more and trashed a lot too.  I was doing most of the packing and carefully numbered and labelled each box with its contents and the room where it would go.  I was also entering every item into an Excel spreadsheet so that the official documentation for Mexican Customs could be prepared.  The other thing I did was measure every single piece of furniture and every box we were planning to take.  I knew exactly how many cubic feet of stuff we had and I knew it would fit into the 26 foot Penske truck and 6x12 UHAUL trailer we were renting.  I even allowed extra room for moving pads and inefficiencies in loading the truck.  There should have been quite a bit of space left over for some “only if there is room” items.


Right before the move, I had to make a quick trip to Pennsylvania to see my 95-year-old mother who was not doing well.  My sister didn’t think she was going to last much longer and I needed to say “Good-bye”.  The trip took up three days that I really could have used to pack our art works and wrap some of the furniture in moving pads, but I’m glad I made the trip since it is probably the last time I will see Mom.

We hired some supposedly professional movers to load the truck and trailer for us, picking a team from the UHAUL website that had perfect ratings and rave reviews.  We thought we were in good hands.  My first clue something might not be right was when they told me they were going to load all the boxes first.  I had watched several videos and looked at diagrams of the proper way to load a truck, and this didn’t sound right.  They told me to “relax” and that they knew what they were doing.  It turns out they were totally incompetent and did everything wrong.  We found this out the hard way.

To my surprise, they filled the truck and the trailer and there was still stuff we wanted to take left over.  They assured me they had packed the truck as tightly as possible.  That was untrue.  We ended up having to leave some very nice furniture we really wanted to take as well as our bicycles.  I assumed I must have made some calculation error.

The next problem was that we had to get rid of all the left over stuff because our landlord was pushing us to get out of the way of the renovations they wanted to make.  We had Just Junk all set up to come take things away, and they had been told there would be a lot, but they sent one little truck, filled it and charged us $600.  When asked when they would be back for the rest, the said they didn’t have time.  Neither did any of the other services we called.  Finally, in desperation, Erich rented a pick-up truck and ended up making two runs to the dump.  He had to carry a lot of heavy furniture and really aggravated his shoulder and neck. Things would have been even worse had it not been for a young couple we had sort of befriended during the downsizing process.  We sold them a few things and they indicated they wanted some of our “only if there is room” items.  I contacted them and they came right over and took many items for themselves and then spent most of the day helping us clean up and dispose of other items.  We were now a day late in leaving, but it would have been even worse if they had not helped us.

Finally we started off with Erich driving the truck and me driving the SUV towing the trailer.  We made it to Fort Wayne, Indiana for the night but had an awful time getting into our motel.  The GPS kept telling us where to turn except that just put us back on the Interstate.  We could see the motel but we couldn’t get to it.  After three round trips of about 10 miles, we finally figured out we had to pull into a shopping center and snake our way through it to get to the motel.  It was very tiring.

We started off bright and early the next morning and, since I was following the truck, I noticed that it kept drifting to the right and Erich would have to pull it back onto the road.  He was tired and sore from the moving and couldn’t turn his head very well, so he was struggling with the truck.  Then just as we came to an extremely narrow construction zone where there was no space at all outside the lanes, the truck drifted a bit just as a huge semi raced by incredibly fast, and basically blew Erich and the truck right into the guard rail.  He crashed into the rail, bounced into the middle of the road where he was very lucky there was no vehicle, then crashed into the barrier again.  Somehow he managed to keep control, the barrier on the right ended and he was able to get the truck off the road.  We were near an exit where there was a truck stop so we hiked down an embankment to see if we could get some help.  As we went down, Erich slipped on a muddy spot, fell on some rocks and apparently cracked some ribs.  Hard to believe so much bad luck in so short a time.

This happened on a Saturday.  Penske was great and we were very glad we purchased all the insurance they offered.  They towed the broken truck to a nearby facility, delivered a new truck to us the same day, and made arrangements for some professional movers to transfer our stuff from one truck to the other on Monday.  By Monday it was apparent that Erich was not in any physical shape to drive the truck or the car.  He was in terrible pain from the ribs and probably had some whiplash as well.  We decided to ask the moving guys if they knew of a professional driver who could take the truck to Texas for us.  In a wonderful bit of serendipity, one of the movers, a lovely young man, said he could do it.  He turned out to be a real savior for us.

The two professional movers backed the trucks end to end because it was pouring rain and they had to transfer things directly from one truck to the other.  They discovered that the original movers had made awful mistakes with our belongings.  They had put light boxes on the bottom instead of on top, so a lot of boxes got crushed. They didn’t wrap some of the furniture properly. They didn’t use any of the rope we provided to tie off sections of goods. Even worse, by packing all the boxes first, they had nothing to fill in gaps between pieces of furniture.  As a result, there was a huge amount of wasted space.  MY CALCULATIONS HAD BEEN RIGHT!!!  There would have been plenty of room for all of our stuff.  Now we will have to spend money replacing things that we should not have been forced to give up.

We went to Indianapolis that night where the moving men lived and the next morning, Allen, our savior came back and drove the truck all the way to Laredo.  We became very fond of him on the trip and hated to say good-bye when we dropped him at the airport for his flight home.

I watched in Laredo as our belongings were transferred to a moving company specializing in taking things to Mexico.  It was heartbreaking to see how badly our things had been treated.  I dread opening some of the boxes and I’m especially concerned for our art works.  None of them were expensive - just things we treasure.  

Next, on the 3rd, we go for our Visas and then start the drive to San Miguel on the 4th.

Allen, Iraq veteran, amputee, our savior