Goodbye Maryland - Hello Texas

Walking trail in Maryland

Goodbye lush, green Kent Island, Maryland, surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay, and hello huge, sprawling San Antonio. Steve and I arrived in Texas four days ago after driving our two car caravan 1,700 miles, passing through Washington, DC (in Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic and pouring rain!), Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas and then most of the length of Texas. I'd love to say that we quickly and comfortably settled in but thanks to multiple teething problems, we are still living with what we could fit in our cars. That means we are living incredibly lean. Since Steve made the drive with the two cats in his car, we couldn't pack as much as we wanted to bring with us.

Our apartment had become available a month before we were originally planning to move, so we had to put all our plans into fast motion. Both of us were traveling for work during the first week of June so we created and worked to detailed checklists to make sure that everything would be ready to go on our new scheduled date.

Two days before we set off I returned from two back-to-back conferences, first one in New York and the second one in Long Beach, CA. Because I was still living in Delaware during May, I spent the two weekends before leaving for my conferences driving back to Maryland to pack everything that I possibly could while still leaving our house livable for Steve.  He had the bigger job of packing everything else the week before the move.

Our overall big challenge is moving to a smaller apartment, but it has been a fantastic exercise in going through everything you own. Once you're forced to pack all your possessions into a much smaller space, it becomes very clear what's important to you and what you care about. It was pretty obvious that books were important to both of us because although we'd had a clear out a few months before, we had to be totally ruthless in getting ready for this move. Now that we both read almost everything on-line, it's not practical to keep books that we've already read so boxes and boxes of books went to a local charity shop. Other decisions included getting rid of our teak deck and patio furniture, our grill and all our plants. These went to one of our daughters, although we kept our small table and two chairs for our balcony in the hopes that we can use them before it gets too hot and humid.

Loading furniture in rain

Except for the torrential rain while Steve and the movers were moving the furniture out of the house and loading it into the pods, everything else went fairly smoothly.  We stretched our drive out over two full days, and two half days since that was all the cats were willing to tolerate. They did manage the trip a thousand times better than we anticipated, but then drugs applied every 8 to 12 hours helped.



Our challenges the past few days have consisted of pretty typical problems that occur when moving. We still don’t have our washer and dryer, although we ordered them a month ago, and I'm now getting desperate as I've been living out of a suitcase for almost a month. Steve had ordered the cable modem before we left Maryland, and it was supposed to be delivered to the complex office to await our arrival. It was delivered three days before we arrived, but no one could find it until mid-day on our second day here. Our missing cable box meant that the technician couldn't come out to hook up our Internet connection until the night of the second day. Once he was here, he found that the wiring had been previously mixed up, so it took him 4 hours to rewire and get us connected. Wanting to continue with the same satellite TV service that we had in Maryland, the technicians were scheduled for our third day. When they came to install our dish, they gave us the bad news that we were facing the wrong direction so we couldn't continue on with the same company. This was only the first part of the bad news because the company then held us to a hefty cancellation fee even though it wasn't our decision to cancel. Steve managed to get another company to come out quite quickly so we now have cable TV and Internet. What more could we want? Well – our furniture, dishes, pots and pans plus washer and dryer would be nice!

Anyone who's ever moved to a new area knows what it means to have to start fresh with a new home, connecting to new services and learning new roads and traffic patterns – almost everything is new and unfamiliar. Dealing with all of these strange unknowns can leave you feeling vulnerable, but then this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that you aren't playing it safe in your comfort zone anymore, and you have to open up to new situations, new people and new places. At least this move was more simple because we have a credit history. When we moved from the UK, it was as if we didn't exist.

The challenges that we've experienced so far are probably just the tip of the “moving experience” iceberg since we have things such as bank accounts, registering cars and getting new driving licenses coming up very soon. And these are only the ones that we know about.

Can we have our cat tree and all our toys back?

Stay tuned for my next blog to learn how we'll try to fit the furniture that we kept into a smaller space.