Car checkups

Right now I’m sitting in the Smart center (picture below) in Bloomfield Hills waiting for my car. It’s crazy that our Smart (aka Gunter) is almost at 50,000 miles. Marie took our Escape in earlier today as well. So our cars are now all checked out and ready for our trip across the country.

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We plan on picking up those few specialty boxes we need after I get back from Smart. The tv box is a bit costly but I figure its worth it to keep our tv safe. We’re also getting some boxes for our dishes to help increase their likelihood of surviving.

Not much else to report yet though. Just making steady progress on the packing and cleaning.

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Thunderstorm Update

Michigan’s certainly putting up a fight tonight with an impressive thunderstorm. Sorry, though, Michigan… it’s not going to be enough to keep us here. 😉

Nick and I did some more packing tonight and we disassembled the dining table. Our apartment’s starting to look bare and weird now, in spite of having our things strewn all about it.

We finalized moving arrangements tonight. My grandma is going to fly out and meet us in Chicago on Saturday, July 2, to help us with the drive (since we have to drive both cars now). In the 3 times Nick and I have done the Detroit-Seattle drive, we’ve made the trip in 3 days/2 nights. This time, I’m guessing we’ll do it in 4 days/3 nights. We’ll see, though.

It feels good to have the big aspects of this move figured out now. 🙂

What are our next steps? We’re going to pick up a few special moving boxes for the tv, dishes, glasses, etc. tomorrow or Thursday. Our cars are going to get check-ups at the car doctors on Friday to make sure they’re fit for the trip. Other than that, we pretty much only have packing left. We sure got a lot accomplished in the last week!

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The beginning of our new adventure

Since I accepted a job offer at the Information School at the University of Washington last week, Marie and I started on a new adventure. We’re moving from Detroit, Michigan to Seattle, Washington and we’re doing it all in 2 weeks. We’re planning on using this blog to document our move so family and friends can keep in touch and read about our new adventure, and also so we’ll have a documented history of it to read through later.

We unfortunately didn’t think to start this blog earlier, so here’s a quick bit of info to catch you up on what we’ve done so far.

Friday last week we put money down on a one bedroom loft style apartment at Radford Court in North East Seattle. We chose Radford Court because they’re affiliated with UW and month-to-month rent wasn’t too much more than signing a lease. It’s also located near UW making it an easy commute or bus ride for me.

Yesterday we secured our mover. After weighing out several options, from full service moving, to renting a truck and driving it out there ourselves, we chose to get a U-pack Relocube from ABF. Price-wise it’s the cheapest option and we feel it’s a safer option than the others as well, both for our stuff and for our sanity.

Since we own two vehicles, a Smart Fortwo and a Ford Escape, we thought we would be able to tow our Smart behind our Escape, but it turns out the trailers available for one-way rental weigh more than our Smart and would be too much for our Escape to handle safely. So we’re recruiting help from another driver to go cross country. Marie and I have experience with the Detroit-Seattle drive; we’ve made the trip three times by car now. The first time was when Marie moved out here to Michigan, and just last year we road tripped to Seattle and back in our Smart for fun. We’re actually looking forward to the drive.

That more or less sums up our current situation. We still have a ton of packing to do and a lot of stuff to get in order, but I think we’re doing pretty well so far. The big things are taken care of and my stress level has declined quite a bit.

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