Flash From the Past! The Trek

Leslie and I stopped to talk to a woman who was moving into our ward this morning on our walk. We noticed the moving van and cars were all from Utah and figured they were most likely members. After a short visit, we left and started reminiscing about our own experiences with moving. Here is my story, written shortly after we moved here on July 29th, 2004.

The Trek; From Happy Valley to Maple Valley

Leaving Springville was not as emotional as I thought it would be. I was so preoccupied with wrapping things up at the house, loading the car for the trip and getting the pets in the car and settled down, that I hardly thought to look back at the house as we drove away. Maybe it was better that way.

We set off about 7:30 a.m.. Kelly drove the moving truck with Riley riding along, and Brennan and I had the Explorer and all 4 animals. Valerie had gone up the week before to attend girl's camp with the new ward. My brother Brian drove our Nissan truck with no air conditioning.

Knowing that the cats would not travel well, we had obtained some sedatives for them from the vet. I gave them their dose 2½ hours before we left but they were so upset that they did not settle down much. I gave them a little more right before we left. It didn’t take long for Cali to settle in and go to sleep once we got on the road, but Katie cried constantly. Brennan and I said prayers that she would stop crying but it was not to be. The dogs were excited and anxious so I ended up giving them sedatives also and they went right to sleep.

We must have stopped 4-5 times before we even got to Boise. Katie was still crying. By now she was dozing for 10 minutes, then waking up and crying for 10 minutes. For the most part, we did not travel within sight of each other. The moving truck was slow so we would drive ahead and stop to let the dogs out while Kelly and Riley caught up. Brian was usually somewhere in between.

On one such stop Brennan and I got out and accidentally locked the keys inside the running car. We had not told Kelly that we were stopping because I thought we would be on the road again before he caught up to us. We had exited the freeway, pulled around a corner onto a dirt road behind a hill and the cell phone was locked in the car. Luckily we were just off a highway where I was able to wave down a man in a truck who called Kelly on his cell phone and explained how to find us. He waited with us until he received a call from Kelly informing him that he was stuck on the side of the road and could he come and help pull them out. Kelly had taken the right exit but made a wrong turn after that. In the process of trying to turn the 24-foot moving truck around he backed into a barbed-wire fence and became stuck on the shoulder of the road. While trying to pull back up onto the road, the owner of the fence drove by. Kelly helped her put the downed post back up and offered to pay for the very minimal damages but she refused any money. Our “Good Samaritan” was able to pull them back onto the road and Kelly found us and let us into the car, only to be pulled over by a policeman shortly afterward. Someone had seen him back into the fence and reported him. After hearing the story however, the policeman just checked Kelly’s license and let him on his way.

When we made the Oregon border around 7:00 we made plans to make it as far as Kennewick, WA and spend the night in a pet-friendly motel. We figured we should be there in about 4 hours. More than 4 hours passed. Katie was still crying. We were in the middle of nowhere in the dark with no cell phone service and I was very tired and frazzled. Twice I pulled over to sleep and cry on Brennan’s shoulder for a few minutes. He was so compassionate to both me and Katie. He would rub my neck and shoulders and make sure that I was doing OK. He would let Katie out of her cage and let her sit on his lap while he petted her. After a while she would get back in the cage on her own and sleep for a while before starting the whole routine again; cry a little, come out and get petted, go back in and sleep a little.

At 2:30 a.m. we finally pulled into the motel in Kennewick and checked into two rooms, cats in a room with Brennan, Riley and Brian, and dogs with Kelly and me. I would have liked to have fallen into bed and right to sleep but I continued to hear Katie’s crying in my brain and it took a while. The boys said she didn’t cry in their room, thank goodness.

We were back on the road by 10:00 the next morning and things went a lot better. I gave the cats a double dose of sedative to begin with and Katie would sleep for longer stretches at a time before waking up to yowl. The dogs were more settled so I didn’t need to sedate them. I was dead tired and had to make several stops to get out and walk around to wake myself up. Brennan was great about finding me music I liked on the radio and making conversation to keep me from getting too tired.

We got to our new home in Maple Valley around 3:30 Thursday afternoon. The closing had been taken care of by mail so we were able to get right into the house. We dropped the animals off, parked the moving truck and went to get something to eat. Shortly after we returned, some men and boys from the ward showed up to help us unload the truck. What had taken us two days to load into the truck took about an hour to unload and it was great to have so much help. It was very hot and humid. Washington has been having a hotter and drier summer than normal and it was not much cooler than Utah was when we left. Most houses, including ours, don’t have air conditioning and we were missing our swamp cooler, something I never thought would happen. We immediately put more fans on our shopping list.