6:30am – Get up, shower and pack or discard the remaining items I was living off of. The bedroom drapes, sheets and blankets, shower curtain, last set of dishes, my underwear… oh ya, and the TV and the XBox. I was living alone, and without Internet — I had to stay sane somehow.
10:30am – Movers arrive and begin loading up our possessions. As they finish each room, I go over it with a vacuum, then the steam cleaner.
1:00pm – Finish steam cleaning the last room, return apartment keys, get in line behind a little old lady at Price Chopper complaining about how she paid $3 more than she should have for her shrimp, finally return the steam cleaner, return the Fischer’s vacuum (thanks guys)
2:30pm – Hit the highway and drive furiously to catch up with the moving truck. As we were loading up, he invites me to cross the border with him and get my stuff cleared through customs all in the same day. This way we could get our stuff delivered this week, instead of some time in the next 1-3. I agree, and spend the next 4.5 hours chasing a transport truck through back roads and small towns across New York, on his “short cut” to an “easy border.”
7:00pm – Finally catch the truck at the “easy border” which is backed-up out my butt with Canadians returning from their long weekend trips… oh ya, forgot about the Canadian holiday. Got into customs to clear our stuff, where they told me I’d have to assign a dollar value to every single item we’d packed. This was a surprisingly depressing exercise, since as I went through the inventory, I realised the vast majority of our stuff was worth less than $25 (most of it less than $5)
8:30pm – On the 401 near Kingston, Ontario, suddenly realising why this was a short-cut for the truck driver. He lives in Whitby, which was barely 2 hours away. I, on the other hand, still had another 4 hours of driving, having crossed there. Not happy, but too exhausted to care much.
11:00pm – Changed into my pajamas at a Tim Horton’s rest stop. Got an Ice Cappacino. Drove the remaining hour and a half in my slippers.
1:00am – Climbed into bed in Ontario.
It was a long, long day, but our stuff, including our children, cat, furniture, and industrial class computers are across the border. Wednesday the driver will drop our stuff off in storage, and we’ll select a few items to go to our temporary apartment on Saturday. My home office is online, although barely. And we’re all alive, and no worse for wear.
This has to have been the smoothest International move… ever. Now if we can just get our kids some health care…