arch(e)ric

Goodbye Chicago. Hello St. Louis.The move to St. Louis, although exhausting and painful, has been completed. We’ve settled into our new abode on wheels in my in-laws driveway in which Mr. Stockmann has forbidden any #2s in the airline size lavatory.

We inaccurately calculated the time it would take to pack, load, and drive. We didn’t start packing until last Thursday. We started at about 8am and finished around 3am. A few helpers showed up and moved the process along but 7am Friday morning came very quickly. We finished up packing on Friday morning and I headed out around 11am to pickup the moving truck. That whole process took over two hours due traffic on the Dan Ryan. Arriving back at the condo at around 1pm, Jared had arrived to help us load the truck. Moving furniture and boxes down four flights can be added to my list of “personal hells.”

After about 3 hours of grappling couches, boxes, and mattresses down a tight stairwell of four flights the truck was neatly loaded thanks to Jared and Monica’s Tetris like packing abilities. We had a third person hitching a ride with us to St. Louis, Andrea, who was picking up a table and chairs and driving the truck back to Chicago. Monica, Andrea, and I squished into the cab of the moving truck and headed for St. Louis around 6pm.

With the truck loaded down and three people in the cab the truck was only able to hit about 60mph max. We might as well have been sitting on three bar stools because the seats in the truck were the most uncomfortable and oddly shaped seats I’ve ever sat in. Add in that we were operating on about three hours of sleep, had just spent three hours loading, and had a 6 hour drive ahead of us, this was bound to be one of the most miserable 24 hour periods in my life. 

After about 3 hours of driving, my eyes were so heavy that I felt like I had just polished off a bottle of bourbon. Monica reluctantly took over as a tried to down a obnoxiously huge Dr. Pepper from the Speedway. We switched drivers again a few hours later before we made our first stop in Columbia, Illinois.

What? Why we we stopping in Columbia, Illinois? Well, Monica’s office is in Columbia and we had packed the truck so that her office furniture and such was at the back of the truck. We pulled into Columbia at around 12:30am and began unloading.  With a moving truck backed up to a business with people moving stuff under the cover of darkness, I’m not sure we cold have been more suspicious and suspect. After about an hour of unloading, we were off to our next stop, Monica’s grandma’s garage.Grandma Stockmann had graciously allowed us to store our furniture and some other belongings in her vacant garage. Backing the truck into the driveway like a pro, my brother in law,   Matt, gladly let us know that we were 6 hours behind schedule. It was now about 2am and we were unloading. This whole operation felt like some clandestine mission to move from Chicago to St. Louis. 

Finally, we unloaded necessary stuff at the Stockmann’s and prepared ourselves for our first night in the RV. Now, since the moving truck needed to be back in Chicago by 11am, Andrea couldn’t waste any time, so she took the truck, picked up her dining table and headed back to Chicago at about 4am.  Seven shots of espresso later, Andrea had the truck back to the place before 11am on Saturday. 

I could have slept on a log in the yard I was so tired. I woke up at 11:30am on Saturday stiff and dehydrated. It felt like a hangover except I didn’t have any fund the night before. 

What an adventure. I would not wish this experience on anyone, but it all went relatively without incident. The RV is great so far and it deserves its own post including pictures.