A road story...

Here is a story from my move that pretty much sums up the entire experience in a nutshell.

So I left Kansas City on the sixth and it wasn’t as tearful a goodbye as one might have expected I was still decently choked up. I had a few sad goodbyes over the previous days and I am still missing many of my friends. But I knew that I had to move on to my next adventure so I went from Kansas City to Chicago on Saturday, Chicago to South Bend on Sunday and then the long haul from South Bend to Wilmington on Monday.

By long haul I mean that was roughly twelve hours in the car from when I left South Bend to when I made it to Wilmington. While Pennsylvania was pretty to drive through and had rolling hills and tunnels Ohio was quite possibly the least interesting state that I have ever driven through. Technically Iowa was worse but you would expect to come across something in Ohio. People actually live there.

On the way I listened to Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” on CD. I thought it would be a rather fitting listen: hearing someone talk about walking the Appalachian Trail while making my way to the East Coast. It was a very wise choice (much thanks is owed to my good friend who picked it out for me while we were at the bookstore) and it was funny and interesting and made the hours go by much quicker. However, I found out that there is one interesting side effect from listening to an entire book on tape in one sitting.

I basically spent six hours with this tape as my sole companion. So all I heard was Bill Bryson narrating his experience on the Trail. After six hours of this you discover that your internal monologue, which typically sounds like you or at least the way you wish your voice would sound, has suddenly taken on the voice of the narrator. It was as if Bill Bryson had suddenly stepped inside my head and decided to narrate my thoughts. Even more incredible, my thoughts began to take the form of his writing style so my internal monologue became this detached, almost third person, view of myself in someone else’s voice. Quite disturbing.

I finally make it to Wilmington and spend an hour unpacking my car. It wasn’t that my car was packed to the roof or anything. I intentionally kept what I brought to a minimum and let the movers take care of the rest. However, since I park in a high rise garage and live in a high rise building and the two aren’t directly connected it meant that I had to take two elevator trips, a walk outside and a walk to my apartment, which happened to be as far away from the elevator as possible, just to complete one trip. Luckily I learned from when I moved to KC and brought a folding chair with me so I had a place to sit down.

After twelve hours on the road and another hour lugging gear into my apartment all I wanted to do was take a shower. I had prepared for this eventuality as well. Not only did I bring towels but I brought my shower curtain from my spare bathroom. My old place (much like my new place) has two bathrooms. I don’t need two bathrooms. I have a two bedroom because I use the spare room partially as an office and partially as a place to store all the stuff I should really throw out. At least in KC my spare bathroom was next to the guest bedroom and living room. Here both bathrooms are next to each other making the design seem rather meaningless. Anyway, this is a long way for me to say that I had a shower curtain that had almost never been used in the past five years.

I thought it would be good for me to change things up and use what was my spare shower curtain in the master bathroom. After five years a change of color was needed. So I put up the curtain and finally get ready to take my shower. Turn on the water and discover that there is no hot water. In fact, if I turn it all the way to hot there is no water at all. After swearing a great deal I decided to suck it up and take a cold shower as painful as it may be.

Once I finished I tried the sink in the same bathroom. It had hot water. As did the kitchen. As well as the sink and the tub in the entire bathroom. In fact, the only thing in my apartment that did not have hot water was the shower that I was standing in. After all of that time on the road I came down to having a fifty-fifty chance at having a warm shower and I chose poorly. That is moving in a nutshell.

So the next day I moved the shower curtain to the spare bathroom. They’ve since fixed the hot water and everything is organized. But seriously, there is nothing quite as amazing as realizing that you flipped a coin and picked the wrong side.