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It took us around major cities and promised slightly nicer scenery. The internet told us that it would take around 11-and-a-half hours, which was relatively equal to estimates of other routes.
The movers came on Tuesday and took away all our things. Normally I try to be a relatively confident person, but the idea of having a bunch of people come into my house and poke around in my stuff makes me incredibly anxious, so I spent most of the time sitting on my sheetless bed or, when the bed went away, in the corner.
Being unable to pack was also nerve-wracking. There's the weeding process you go through when you move--"Do we really want this?" "No." then you throw it away--which we didn't really get to do with anything other than the stuff that got left behind. I am not looking forward to going through this process when we unpack, especially because I'm not sure I'll have unlimited access to a dumpster in the city.
If we'd been leaving the day the movers came, we would have had a lot more space in the car, but we also had to keep the things we'd need for the few days we'd spend in an empty apartment; things like the comforter and pillows take up a lot of space in a car, even if they are squished.
A large portion of the car was packed up with our bar, honestly. We weren't allowed to ship any kind of alcohol into the country with the movers, so we had to take it across the border ourselves. It was completely legal--I provided a list of everything we brought to Customs--but an enormous pain in the butt. As we've gotten older, we drink significantly less amounts of significantly better booze, so there was probably several hundred dollars of liquor there, accumulated over five years or so. I gave some of it away but it still made up three large boxes.
We tried to leave as much space as possible for the dog in the car, but things were more cramped than I would have liked. It took her a while to actually figure out that there was space for her to lie down, and even then she ended up in some funny places, like sleeping on the arm rest.The drive up to Montreal was relatively uneventful for the first day. We didn't end up leaving DC until almost 6pm on Friday. Ben's last day of work was that Wednesday, so we spent most of Thursday and more of Friday than I'd like throwing things away and cramming everything possible into the car.
We spent the night in Scranton. While the scenery in a lot of the places we went through was lovely, the area of Pennsylvania that we passed through had that special flavor of Appalachian despair that seems to encompass everything--the people, the houses they live in, the kinds of businesses that exist. It's the same kind of situation in major cities, but it just doesn't feel the same.As we went into New York state, the scenery got nicer. There's a kind of haze in the pictures that I took which is a combination of poor photography on my part (no surprise there) but also the constant flurries of snow that were in the air.
After a few hours on route 87, we ran into two nasty white-outs. I actually called Will, Ben's dad, to see if this was an enormous storm that we should pull over to motel for. He didn't see anything at all on the radar; I think it was a small storm that we hit at just the right moment to be difficult for us. And so we turned our lights down and drove very slowly, navigating by the rumble strips on the side of the road, which were the most visible indicators left since the road was suddenly covered in snow. After a while, we came out of the storm and things were back to normal; the experience still feels surreal in retrospect.We passed through customs with no issues and got our work permits. Traffic in Montreal was basically nonexistent (I can scoff about traffic the way people up here can snoot about snow). We were tired, but we were able to find our keys and apartment with only a small amount of fuss. We got the dog upstairs and the minimum amount of stuff we needed out of the car, and crawled into bed.
This is when the fire alarm went off.
Driving in white-out conditions doesn't sound too fun. Coming back from PAX last year Sara and I had to drive through a bunch of thick fog, which was pretty nerve wracking. You'd like to just drive slowly, but then you also worry about getting rear-ended. A white out would probably be even worse, because the road would be so hard to see.
ReplyDeleteI assume it was snowy along the whole trip up? I couldn't decide whether it was more fitting that it should be like that or perhaps better that it should be a typical winter day in DC (which is to say no snow and not too cold) and you'd get to see the gradual change in landscape and conditions.
I have to say, a fire alarm in Montreal in winter must be quite annoying. Hopefully it was an isolated incident. What floor are you on? One year my dorm in college had constant middle-of-the-night fire drills, and the two worst things were a) standing out the cold and b) climbing up and down the many flights of stairs on sleepy legs.