Monday, April 06, 2009
I have a Roommate
David, the Best Man in the wedding, finally got his transfer to move to Germantown from Atlanta. We picked the first weekend in April to do the move. I volunteered to help him out, since it is a very long drive from Atlanta to Frederick.
Whopper drove us both after school on Friday to Dullas, which was surprisingly empty. Although we were two men in crew cuts with no luggage and only one way tickets, we weren't searched. This was the start of the best flying experience I've ever had. Because there hadn't been any coach seats available, Dave's company had bought us first class seats. We weren't even boarded before the flight attendant was serving us complementary beverages. I was able to move and stretch the entire flight. Too bad I'll probably never fly first class again.
We landed at 9:30 and promptly began walking to the exit, since Dave doesn't care for the train. The walk is more than a mile, through something like six terminals. We passed time by criticizing the ridiculous art in between the people movers. Then it was time to pick up the rental car.
The rental car lady offered us a Mitsubishi. Dave was flexible, he said "Sure, we'll just take whatever the reservation was for." We ended up with a "Black Cherry" PT Cruiser, who Jillian named Wanda by phone. We drove to Walmart, picked up some exceptionally large Tupperware containers and some terrible food for dinner, and then went back to his apartment.
A few weeks ago, David had made another trip to Atlanta. At the time, he had no idea he was going to be moving to Maryland, so he didn't bother packing anything. However, he was stuck cleaning up some bees. It seems that bees had decided to occupy an entire wall of his apartment. There were still a lot of things in the apartment that had honey on them, which made packing things an incredibly unpleasant experience. If you look very closely at the picture of Dave's living room, you can just barely notice the yellow stain on the wall in the top right hand corner. That's from where the wall had honey leaking through it.
The bees were actually really terrible. It seems the exterminators hadn't quite finished cleaning everything. There were hundreds of bees left by windows and hiding in light features. Nothing alive, but it made for fun cleaning.
Dave spent a little bit of time packing up and I just went to bed. In order to get going quickly, we were up and picked up the U-Haul at 7am. For the next few hours Dave would pack things up and I'd load them into the truck. He only had a 10 foot truck, and I was convinced it was going to be a really tight fit.
By noon we were all packed up, which isn't so bad when you remember that he hadn't had an opportunity to pack at all ahead of time. It took us three tries to find the Comcast building, and when we did find it the line was wrapped up in a spiral shape in order to fit everyone. It ended up taking two hours for him to drop his cable subscription, most of it spent waiting in line. We returned to his place, got the U-Haul, and struck out to drop off the rental car and get on the road at last. We arrived at the Avis at 4:10pm to find that they closed at 4. David spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with Avis National trying to find another drop off location on the North side of Atlanta. I finally told him we'd suck it up and go all the way back to the Airport and drop off the car.
By the time we were done dropping off the car it was almost 6. Dave took the first driving shift. I fell asleep some time after we hit the North Carolina border, only to have Dave wake me back up after Charlotte to ask me to take over driving. I climbed behind the wheel at 11 and drove until about 2:30 when we switched again right after the Virginia border. I slept until the North side of Richmond. If you can count that as sleep, it meant I got about three hours in the truck. Dave got a similar amount. We finally rolled in to my high school, where we'd parked our cars, at 5am. Dave drove a truck and I drove my car onward to Frederick, where we both hit our beds at 6.
We were up again at 9. By noon we'd successfully moved his stuff either into the apartment or into storage. We used the truck to drop off an old couch at Goodwill, then returned it and found lunch. I packed some stuff for a trip to Charlottesville and then we were on the road again.
Unfortunately, right outside of my school I realized that I'd forgotten three or four different things I needed. So though I could drop Dave off to pick up his car, I was stuck driving back to Frederick. I finally got to Charlottesville last night at 8:30 to find a very sick Jillian.
I'd say it was a really terrible experience driving hundreds of miles over night on only three hours of sleep, but that first class place ticket made it all worth it. Plus now I have a roommate who will be staying in my apartment while Jillian and I are out riding across the country.
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| posted at: 15:23 |
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