Moving Day

Even though we had a month between Camilla's graduation and the day that we moved to Sweden, it wasn't enough time to get ready. We had to sell the car, TV, stereo, computer, futon, and tons of other crap that we had acquired over the previous 6 years of marriage. We had to ship a king-sized bed, clothes, toys, photo albums and other necessities. We had to pack our suit cases. We had to clean the apartment. We had to cash in over $200 dollars worth of loose change that had been sitting in various containers around the house.

Our last night in Sacramento was particularly horrendous. We spent so much time in the last week saying goodbye to friends and neighbors that we simply ran out of time to pack, get rid of the extra stuff in our apartment, and then clean up. I stayed up the entire night cleaning; Camilla slept for about an hour because she was on a different flight than me and had to watch Philip the entire next day.

Our shuttle van to the airport was scheduled to arrive at 5 o'clock a.m., and at 4 o'clock there was still tons of work to do. I dumped a whole bunch of extra stuff in our neighbor's front yard because she said that she would get rid of it for us. We had an old bed that had to be thrown out. When I was running through the grass to throw out the bed, the sprinklers kicked in and I was soaking wet from the knees down. That wasn't nice because I was wearing a business suit as one of the conditions for my free airline ticket. In the meantime, the fridge was still full of ketchup, mustard and other condiments. The bathroom was full of cleaning suppliers. I had to take a dump, but there just wasn't any time.

At 10 minutes after 5, the shuttle still hadn't arrived and I suddenly remembered that we had 2 batches of laundry in the laundry room left over from a 3 o'clock washing session. I went running to the laundry room and came running back just as the shuttle arrived. We started cramming all of the bags into the van, but the driver said that we had so many bags that we would have to pay extra. As we were haggling with the driver about whether or not we were going to pay the extra luggage fee, I noticed that there were 2 business men on the shuttle bus with nothing but brief cases and newspapers, impatiently waiting to get to the airport and catch their flights. You can imagine the types of looks that they were giving us.

We folded laundry all of the way to the airport, but we also had to do triage and decide what clothes to keep and what clothes to throw away. It wouldn't all fit in our overstuffed suitcases. We climbed off of the shuttle van and walked to the garbage with a basket full of clean laundry that we promptly tossed away. As we walked into the terminal, a security guard walked up, looked into the garbage as part of his routine bomb security procedures, and exclaimed: "Some idiot just threw out an entire batch of clean laundry, basket and all!" They nearby skycaps started laughing and pointed at us.

The airport wasn't any better. I had a free standby ticket from my brother Steve, who is a pilot, and I was supposed to be at the airport at least 1 hour ahead of time. It was 15 minutes until takeoff and they were already boarding. I hadn't put any tags on the bags yet either. When I walked up to the counter with 5 huge bags, the attendant asked me, "You are allowed 3 bags total, including carry on items. How many bags do you have?"

I answered "Three,' and we launched into a discussion of how many bags count as three. Fortunately, Camilla ran up and pleaded for mercy because we were traveling with a small baby and were supposed to be allowed to check in a stroller. There were now about 5 minutes before takeoff, and as I ran off to customs (no tags on the bags) the last thing that I saw was Camilla (with Philip hanging out of the baby backpack) stuffing laundry into her already bursting suitcases. Camilla had another free ticket, but it was on a different airline.

Ten hours later, after 3 flight changes and an unexpected 5 hour delay in Cincinnati, I arrived in Detroit, where we were scheduled to spend a few weeks with my family. Camilla, who left Sacramento an hour after me, had already been waiting at the Detroit airport for 2 hours with my sister Julie. After another 2 hour drive from the airport to Julie's house, the first leg of our nightmare move was at its conclusion.