A Long Road Ahead

Not us, but sometimes it feels like it... image courtesy somedaynurse.wordpress.com

We’re now only about a week out from our last day in Minneapolis before moving to Virginia Beach.    We’ve been packing for about four days, trying to figure out what we’re taking with us and what we’re not.  Of the things that we aren’t, we sold 72 books at used book stores and are in the process of getting rid of about 50 items on Craigslist, only about 4 of which have been sold so far.  We considered a yard sale, but we don’t really have enough inventory to justify it, on top of the fact that we’re in an apartment building, which makes the whole thing logistically tricky.

Of the things that we are taking, we’ve got 7 small boxes, 7 medium boxes, and 3 large boxes now full of things from our living room, which includes two desktop computers.  I’ve also disassembled 5 bookcases (so far), as it’s less expensive to have movers take several planks of wood than an assembled bookcase.  Plus IKEA bookcases tend to disintegrate if you try to move them whole.

In further preparation, we took our cat, Neko, to the vet in order to get his teeth cleaned.  He has several chipped teeth, and more surprising to us, several missing teeth.  Evidently his pre-shelter life was a little worse than we thought.  We’ve also been trying to connect with a vet on the phone in order to talk about some anti-anxiety medication for him.

Oh yes.  You read that correctly.  We’re going to drug our cat.  You see, he’s a little anxious, probably due to that aforementioned pre-shelter life.  Any time he’s in the car, he curls up into a corner of his carrier, stops purring, and moans very loadly every couple of minutes.  So the thought of him in a 22-hour, 1361-mile drive to Virginia with him moaning for all 22 of those hours seemed a little more than we could take.

We’re splitting the drive over 3 days, which means we have to find cat-friendly hotels in three cities: Bloomington, IL, Charleston, WV, and Virginia Beach.  You may wonder why we have to find a hotel in Virginia Beach – well, there’s no power in our new house at the moment, and Dominion Power refuses to turn it on unless the circuit breaker inside the house is off.  Of course, we could have them send a tech out anyway.  But if the tech discovers that the breaker is on, then he won’t turn on the power anyway, and also won’t call or notify us in any way that he couldn’t do so.  Then, we’d show up, find the breaker was on, and have to reschedule the tech, which for some reason takes 2 days.  So instead of sending him out there anyway and risking an extra day without power, we’re taking the safer route, and scheduling him for the day after we should arrive in town.  And yes, I anticipate great customer service from this company.

Anyway, this will be quite a drive.  Here’s the route.  It’s technically about an hour faster through Chicago, but the thought of delays in Chicago traffic were quite unpleasant, we we’re swinging south instead.  Here’s the list of the moderate-sized and the interesting cities that we’ll pass through:

1. Minneapolis, MN (start)
2. St. Paul, MN
3. Eau Claire, WI (brief stop)
4. Madison, WI
5. Rockford, IL
6. Bloomington, IL (overnight)
7. Urbana-Champaign, IL
8. Indianapolis, IN
9. Dayton, OH
10. Chillicothe, OH
11. Charleston, WV (overnight, crossing the Smokys in the morning)
12. Charlottesville, VA
13. Richmond, VA
14. Williamsburg, VA
15. Virginia Beach, VA (arrival!)