Three weeks ago, Peter and I left Gunnison, CO, the place we called home for only a year. Leaving Gunnison turned out to be harder than I thought it would. I guess the place grew on me, despite the frigid winter. There are a lot of good people in Gunnison who I will truly miss, mostly my coworkers at the Forest Service and Tomichi Pet Care Center. It was tough to say goodbye...but I didn't have much time to dwell on it then. We had movers coming, and there was a lot of work to do.
Because the
USA Pro Cycling Challenge was coming through Gunnison the very next day and the major road out of Gunnison was going to be closed, we had to get the movers in and out in one day. They told us they would be at our apartment before noon on Monday the 22nd, but they really didn't show up until about 2:00. We put Natasha in boarding for the day so that she wouldn't be underfoot, which was a good decision since she's nervous around strangers, and it was nice to not have to worry about her. I had to give the guys credit, though, it took them only five hours to pack up everything in our two-bedroom apartment. It was weird to just stand around and direct total strangers who were handling all of my stuff. I'd spent the day before packing up everything I didn't want them touching and that we planned on taking with us in the car. The biggest trick for the movers wasn't the packing, but getting the truck into the parking lot. I didn't know the movers were coming in a giant semi!
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| I really felt bad about blocking in my neighbors' cars. |
It was difficult for the driver to make the turn off the street and around the first apartment building. The movers had to go door to door and ask my neighbors if they could move their vehicles out of the way. It was a little embarrassing, but they managed to make it. Our stuff didn't even fill 1/4 of this truck. Apparently when you hire a moving company they make several stops. They'll go to one home, pack it up, then put up a divider in the truck, then go to the next home, pack it up, rinse and repeat. Then they either take your stuff to storage or deliver it directly to your new home depending on what your request. We still hadn't found a new place to live, so our stuff was going to storage. After the movers had packed up all of our earthly possessions, we had a farewell dinner to go to. The Gunnison timber department took us out to dinner at the Ol' Miner Steakhouse and gave us a beautiful framed photograph of
The Castles by a local photographer, Allan Ivy. It was strange to go home that night to any empty apartment. Natasha wasn't even there to greet us. It was kind of sad. We had a very busy day the next day, so we set up the air mattress since our bed was now in a semi heading towards Colorado Springs.
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| The now empty apartment. |
The next day I got Natasha out of hock and then the cleaning commenced. We were hoping to catch the cyclists coming through town since it was kind of a big deal, but we were so busy that we didn't have a chance. We spent the entire day cleaning and packing up the liquid items that the movers were not allowed to pack since our stuff was going into storage. By the time we were done you could hardly tell that anyone had lived there. It was like erasing any evidence of our short stay in Gunnison, but again we didn't have much time to dwell on it, because once we were done cleaning and packing we called it a day and crawled into bed...we had a long drive ahead of us the next day.
Stay tuned for Moving to South Dakota: Part 2
1 comment:
I so know how you feel. We took up an entire semi, except for the last 1/8 or so of the truck, which was used by another 'order'. What we found odd, was they used the same type of truck to transport our car, yet had it in a different shipment. There had been enough space in the first semi, that all of our belongings and car could have been in the same one. Guess someone wasn't thinking ahead; or maybe it made them more $$ to have two stops.
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