"House Camping"

Time seems to be accelerating as we rapidly approach our two-day moving sale. We need to thin down even more as we do our very best to stay below the 18,500 Lb relocation-plan-limit on our personal goods. We have a lot of stuff we're just not going to risk going over that limit for fear of how fast the cost will start to add up. Mark, the moving company representative, explained that going over the limit by just 1,000 Lbs will cost us approximately $1,500! If you live in the Louisville area, please come out Oaks Day or Derby Day (8am-Noon) and check out our moving sale. We've listed it in the Oldham Era and one Craig's List. Our address is 1007 Forest Lane, Goshen and you can find directions in the listing on Craigs by searching our address.

Rebecca and I have been spending a lot of mental energy calculating our steps. We have to - the moving company rolls-in just three days after our moving sale. The real trick is deciding what to set aside from what the movers will take. Since it takes 5 weeks for the container with all of our belongings to be transported to our new Alaskan home, we'll need to hold out certain items...namely, clothing!

It's a little tricky to articulate the timeline perfectly, but the following is an attempt to describe our current plan:

• Moving sale this coming Friday and Saturday (4/30 & 5/1)
• Moving company arrives and boxes up everything the our family owns next Tues & Wed (5/4 & 5/5)
• Moving company packs the 53' container with everything our family owns next Thurs & Fri (5/6 & 5/7)
• Moving company takes Rebecca's Ford Windstar and ships it to Alaska (5/24)
• Rent car for Rebecca (5/24 - 6/18)
• Last day of our home rental agreement...we officially move out of our rental home (6/6)
• Andy, Erin & Holly (the dog) start the 4,500-mile drive to Alaska (6/6 - 6/17)
• Rebecca, Katie & Jillian stay-over at a friend's home for one week and in a hotel for the following week.
• Rebecca, Katie & Jillian fly from Louisville, KY to Anchorage, AK (6/18)
• Late evening, June 18, Andy & Erin pick up Rebecca, Katie & Jillian from Anchorage Intl Airport. We might drive everyone home to Palmer, 45 minutes away, but there's a strong chance we'll spend the night in an Anchorage hotel since everything at home will be in boxes!

As you can see, there's a significantly long period of time (5 weeks)where our family is doing what I call "house-camping". Starting next Tuesday, we'll be left with a handful of suitcases, the clothes that will fit into them, whatever is set to go with Andy and Erin on the cross-country road trip and a LOT of borrowed furniture.

God truly has provided for our needs in the "borrowed furniture" category. Our 50-something next door neighbors are Gary & Jown. They have a garage-full of their parent's furniture stored-in-waiting for their children's eventual use, whenever they buy their first home. About three weeks ago, I mentioned in passing that we were just starting to consider what we were going to do once the movers took our stuff. Without hesitation, Gary started rattling off all he could lend us in the interim while we were waiting for the kid's school year to end. What a blessing! Not only was it just what we needed, but it was all just a short walk across the back yard to the neighbors garage!

So the adventure is about to enter the next phase: a borrowed card-table for a make-shift dining room table, borrowed dishes, lamps and beds. Really...not too shabby! The refrigerator and stove came with the rental, so that's covered. Oh, and our washer/dryer...we negotiated with our landlord's son (he's to be the next tenant at the home we're renting) and he said he would buy them from us. So we get the use of these until the last day we live in this home. I'd say, all-in-all, if this is "house camping", we're going to be all right.

How it ALL started!! - by Erin

I’m the one who asked my dad in the first place.

Hi! I’m Erin. When I first asked my dad if he and I could go on a drive to get to Alaska, he said that he didn’t think that he was man enough. That was pretty much me planting the mental seed in my dad’s mind.

Three, maybe four weeks later, my dad was on a trip and he sent me an e-mail asking if I would like to go across the county with him. I immediately responded “YES! YES! YES!”. My little sister, Jillian, wanted to go too (and still wants to), but my dad and I both didn’t think that she could stand the whole trip, due to the fact that the first time we started talking about it, we were on our 2-day trip back from our spring break in Florida and Jillian was complaining within the first 5 hours!

When we got back to Kentucky, my dad immediately started working on my passport because we have to pass thru Canada on our trip. My dad already has a passport because his job is to fly airplanes around the world. When he finished the main parts of my passport, he took my mom and me to the prospect post office because that was the closest post office that took it in. There, I had to swear that what was on the paper was correct. After that, my mom and dad both had to sign the same passport paper and I later found out that is because, if my parents were divorced, let’s say, and my dad wanted to sneak me out of the country, it would be… failure!

Never Saw It Coming

There are moments, whether it's while running errands, in the shower or maybe lying in bed, when I try to think about events associated with the move that are coming up. The exercise takes me into visualizing about all the details associated with the events and this usually leads me to a "punch list", similar to what many call a "to-do" list. The point is to reduce the blind spots and make it all very predictable. Less stress is good, right?

Without fail, the more people involved in any production, the more variables one can expect. With relocation to Alaska there are a LOT of people in our production and, consequently, stuff can get uncomfortably unpredictable.

For instance, on Tuesday we were told the amount we have to ship is below our relocation plan limit of 18,500 lbs, but just barely below. We originally wanted to take as much stuff up with us because everything in Alaska costs so much more for the cost of transportation. (Next time you're watching TV or reading a magazine ad and a business offers "FREE SHIPPING", look at the bottom of the screen or in the fine print in the corner and notice the "excludes Alaska and Hawaii".) Anything and everything in Alaska costs more for the expense to get it there. So, now we're looking at the list of items we were going to buy and have shipped up for free and are forced to choose what we could do without. Ugh! Sounds a little trivial, but these little rubs with go/no-go decisions are the first significant ones coming from the move, at least for me.

We've already been told that all our stuff is getting loaded into a 53' container that's getting hauled across America to Tacoma, Washington. Once there, our container will go onto a sea-going vessel and float its way up to Anchorage. What complicates the thought of a 53' container sitting in front of my rented home during the move is that the moving company advised me that it would be a four-day (yes, 4!) process to pack us up. I was perplexed about whether or not to contact my landlord about this revelation from the moving company. The saying "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" ringing in my ears, I decided to do the stand-up thing and called my landlords. The time I placed the call was somewhere in the late afternoon.

Ring...Ring...Ring...
Whew!...no answer...good...I'll just leave a message!
And that's what I did…I left a message.

Later that evening, at around 9:30pm, I got a call back from Mr. Landlord and this is the way it started (in a deep, gruff Boston accent):

"Now Andy, we've had a great experience with you (as a renter) and now I'm growing concerned that we're going to have some serious problems (with you) at the eleventh hour..."

I handily cut the blue wire and diffused the would-be-bomb that this call represented, and we hung up with the understanding that I would get back to the movers with some guidelines from the property owners. Their expectations were not very "reasonable" and included things like no heavy objects on the asphalt driveway, no parking/setting the container anywhere on the property and no excessive walking on the grass. So, basically, our landlords left us with levitation as our only option for completing our move out of our rental home. Fortunately, the moving company made everything all better the next day when Mark, the moving company rep, told me that they wouldn't be dropping the container off but pulling in front of the home, on the street, and only for one day. Mark explained the packing would take the two days prior to the hauling out of stuff (day 3) and apparently day 4 is for clean up items, presumably whatever didn't get hauled out of the house on day 3.

Thinning down for the trip

Today is Monday and, not unlike many who will read this, my wife Rebecca and I discuss what to accomplish around the house this week. Perhaps the biggest difference for us is what looms in the background. On May 5, "Cinco de Mayo", we have a different sort of party planned at our home. This is the day when a team of commercial movers is set to arrive with a large sea-going container and intentions of packing into it everything we own and expect to take to Alaska.

So just how does one plan one's week of house work? What's the point of getting overconcerned with straightening, cleaning, or preparing for much more than the move itself? And that's more or less where our focus is drawn...preparing to move out of our world any and all things that aren't going with us to our new home in Palmer.

So this week is going to be comprised of selling off the remainder of our inventory of handmade stationery from my all-but-closed business, getting everything that's banned-for-transport by the moving company identified and ultimately begin preparations for a KY Derby Day (May 1) moving sale.

Direction is good - knowing this is the next step in our preparation for the relocation somehow brings the anxiety down just one more notch. At a minimum, not having to think about all that lies ahead for having the daily to-do list formed is worth it. There really is an amazing mountain of items to get done before we pull out with the pickup and head west. But that's just part of the adventure...at least that's what I'm going to keep saying to myself.

The blog begins...

On Sunday, June 6, 2010, my Daughter, Erin, our family dog, Holly and I will begin our road trip to Alaska. Starting from our present home in Goshen, Kentucky, we will travel over four thousand four hundred miles in less than two weeks to our new home in Palmer, Alaska. We're going all this way in my 2001 Ford F250 pickup truck which I expect will average a whopping 13.5 miles per gallon. Mapquest estimates this 4,470-mile trip as taking 77 hours and 15 minutes of actual road time with a fuel cost totalling around $1,035.

Click on the map below and take a look for yourself:

We will be journaling everything along the way including all the planning and, of course, the trip itself. When I say "we will be journaling", I'm referring to both me and my 11-year-old daughter, Erin - she's a very talented writer.

We sincerely hope you'll follow us on this blog where we'll record our travels from Goshen, Kentucky westbound across America to well-known stops like Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone, we'll turn north and run a few thousand miles along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains. We'll describe our border crossing into Canada as we set our sights on joining the Alaskan-Canadian (ALCAN) Highway at Dawson Creek in British Columbia.

The ALCAN will be our route through British Columbia and Yukon, Canada all the way into Alaska. Once there, Interstate A1 will take us rest of the way until we reach our destination in Palmer.

We'll do our best to keep the writing lively and interesting and hope you'll give us your feedback.

-Andy