Last weekend
we helped move Dave's belongings to his new home in Apple Valley,
California -- or the middle of nowhere as I like to think of it. First
the group showed up at Wizard's Attic to help unpack everything from
two storage crates and then we packed it all into a 17-foot moving van.
The first problem was that U-Haul didn't have a truck ready for us.
Apparently their policy is to give out one-way trucks later in the day.
That got Dave mad but all his huffing and puffing didn't get us a truck
until 18:00.
While we were waiting, the rest of us played a little half-court
basketball, three on three, which I haven't done before. Woo and I were
probably the best players there, and me because of getting humiliated
by Woo week after week in our one on one games. Shannon and Chris (Van
Horn) were game but they're both quite overweight and had to take it
easy. Christopher (my brother) and Rowe both were more energetic and
Rowe is not a bad shot.
Unfortunately, I got hurt in the game. Chris and I were going for a
rebound and I couldn't get my legs under me and fell. Scratched up my
right palm and hit my left cheek on the pavement -- luckly I didn't
break anything. After that I wasn't much use moving stuff into the van,
but we did have plenty of people so it didn't matter.
We finally left at about 21:00. Dave and Chris in the truck, Woo and
Fulton in Woo's car, and Christopher and I in my car. Woo had to drop
off Fulton, then he'd meet us at Santa Nella. Dave had to stop at home
and send an email to his mom... which took half an hour. But we did
eventually start.
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Early in the
trip we discovered that the U-Haul truck didn't drive very fast. Dave
said it kept overheating so his best speed was about 55 MPH on level
road. Uphill it got down to 40 and less, all the while belching black
smoke out the exhaust. The would plague us the rest of the journey,
making it both slow going and not entirely healthy if I wanted to keep
the windows open (eventually I resigned myself to the internal air
conditioner).
At Santa Nella we discovered another of the truck's problems: the
reverse didn't work. It would go into reverse but hitting the
accelerator just produced a lot of noise and smoke. We had to push it
back so it could get out of the dead end it was in. Dave called U-Haul
who basically said that they can give us another truck in the morning
but we'd have to transfer the contents by ourselves (actually, they
said we had to offload now and wait for the other truck). So we were
stuck with the truck.
We ate dinner (18 oz steak for $12 -- geez the Bay Area is expensive)
and left at 01:00. There were a couple more stops for gas (including
one were Chris jammed the side of the truck into a gas station crash
barrier; good thing the nice attendant had a truck and pulled us out).
We went over the Tehachapi pass which was slow going. But it's not a
steep pass so I could take it on the way back using minimal brakes.
And then we got to Apple Valley a bit before 08:00. I had two cups of
coffee at dinner so I was fairly awake. We unloaded the truck with the
help of Dave's dad. Then we ate lunch at the Waffle Iron. Since we were
running late I chanced driving home then and made it somehow. We left
at 12:00 and I dropped off my brother at 20:00 then staggered home by
21:30. A very long day...
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