Oak-town or Bust!
The move to Oakland is virtually finished, as we transported most of the contents of our apartment to our new apartment in Oakland last weekend. The experience was interesting, since we had a few mishaps with the moving vehicle. I say "vehicle" because we had a van at first, which would have been much too small to hold all of our things. Here's a picture of the original van:
Natalie had chosen to get a van when making the reservation with U-Haul through their website. I was a bit suprised when we were told the van was ours. The following day we returned to the U-Haul location to see if we could exchange the van for something - well, anything - bigger. After 2.5 hours of waiting among some interesting characters, we were given the keys to a larger truck which actually cost less money and was due back in 3 days rather than on the following day. Go figure. However, the truck was a total piece of junk. It had a problem with carburator or something because the engine would stutter really bad pretty much all the time. But we needed a truck, so we took it.
The loading of the truck was fairly easy. With the help of one of our friends, Glenn, it took only about 1.5 hours for the bulk of the furniture to be loaded. We then proceeded to a local British pub, The Crown & Anchor, where I got seriously drunk off two beers and a double-shot of tequila.
I paid the price for the shot of tequila the following day when we awoke at 5:30A to drive to Oakland in hopes of avoiding the Thanksgiving weekend traffic. Plus, the truck didn't instill a lot of confidence in us. It proved to be a good idea to leave early since the truck topped out at 55 mph on flat ground. Fortunately, it got us there safely and on-time.
I've got just one thing to say after all of this: U-Haul is America's Moving Adventure!