The last week has been a blur! Leah and I have worked frantically to pack and clean the house in preparation for our departure and the arrival of our renters. We started when I got back from Florida last week. Slowly we started to prioritize the stuff that we wanted to take with us. What we weren’t taking was to be packed into the storage space under the stairs. Before anything could go under the stairs I needed to complete installation of a battery powered backup sump pump. We had one of these in our last house and it prevented a flood the morning of a showing which turned out to sell the acreage house.  Cost of pump $400 and 4 hours, value of second offer on house $15,000 pretty good ROI.

Final goodwill load

 The installation completed I cleaned up and then started loading everything into the basement.

Another load for storing at my parents house

I remembered when we moved last time Leah and I both went through times of being overwhelmed with the amount of work we had to get done in the time available, over confident that we had lots of time to complete the packing and lots of time where your brain is shutoff except to the task of packing. At one point I even remember thinking that we won’t need all of our ten box shipping allowance to get everything we needed into the plane. Fool!!

Leah and I packed, sold the Honda Pilot to Doug`s brother, cleaned, packed and stored boxes, threw things away, donated things and completed final appointments. The last appointment was the day before we had to leave, Leah has a bad knee that locked up earlier this year and we wanted to get it checked out before we left. She had a MRI booked for the week we would leave Hawaii and head out to Tampa to get the boat ready. She went to meet a surgeon who could advise on the path forward for her knee and perhaps fix it some day in the future.

Long and short her knee is fine for now and an MRI would not show the surgeon anything he can’t see when he opens up the knee to fix it. He also said with joints don’t fix it if it isn’t broke so now Leah can come with us to Florida instead of heading back to Alberta for the MRI while the boys and I chill in Tampa without her. Yahoo!!

Packed in tight. Cell phone cameras suck!

The final day of packing we had filled my Dad’s suburban so full that the boys had to climb over the stuff to get to their seats in the back of the truck. Ethan had stuff packed under his feet and all around him, to which he exclaimed ”I hate this truck” over and over and kicked the bags. What added to the leaving stress was our renters showed up at 11:45 with three trucks of stuff and waited for us to finish loading. Added to that we were supposed to have made it to lunch at Leah’s parents by noon and we didn’t actually leave until 12:30. We finally got out and left them the house cleaner then it has been since we have lived there – except for the entry which didn’t get cleaned at all.

In Lacombe, we shed a few items which brought our load to a reasonable amount – the boys could keep their shoes on while climbing into the truck. However this required more lifting as we had to unpack a bunch of stuff and repack it. At the airport we had rushed through getting out of the truck because it was -30C and a shuttle bus was waiting for us. We loaded 20 bags, 1 ukulele case and 1 stroller into the bus, took an extra coat (mine) and forgot Ethan’s car seat – $h!t. The car seat we will have to replace and the coat we will have to carry around with us for a year needlessly.

The airport was dead, we checked luggage, did security and customs and got on a plane! The adventure is really starting!