Thursday, August 02, 2007

Of Moving


We are filing this report from beautiful Windsor, Colorado. It has been a superb week of travel by land from Guatemala through colorful, beautiful Mexico and less colorful, but still beautiful, Texas and New Mexico. Further reports and photos of the journey coming soon in this space.

But starting at the beginning, we had to first get ready to get out of Guatemala. It got off to a rocky start when the moving company "forgot" to show up at the appointed hour, but it was all uphill from there. The State Department generously allows employees to skip work while the moving company is packing up their belongings. While it might be more useful to have a couple days off for preparation before the movers showed up, your correspondent can't complain about his days spent alternately observing the moving company to make sure they didn't accidentally put any of our super-valuable household items in their pocket instead of the boxes (no problems observed) and reading a history of the Baltic Revolution against Soviet rule in preparation for future assignment in Latvia (problems definitely encountered in the somewhat dry text, but we soldiered on).

Having a moving company pack up all your stuff is, to use one of our favorite words, awesome. It doesn't mean that moving isn't a pain in the ass. It is still a massive pain in the ass. But it does transfer a lot of the physical labor to someone else. I don't know what we'll do when we have to actually move ourselves again someday, although with all the moving we've done over the last few years, we're considering becoming those shut-in types who don't move for fifty years once we land back in the U.S. for good.

Anyway, watching the moving guys work is also impressive. Everything - and we mean everything - is wrapped in paper before it goes in a box. So when unpacking you find things like paperback books carefully protected in a newsprint. This is not a complaint, because the thorough job the Guatemalan packers do should mean very little breakage. We hope. In any case, everything must be wrapped, which means even the odd-shaped pieces of furniture are mummified in paper-bag brown paper. It was almost like watching a master artisan at work seeing the old moving guy whip out a perfectly coffee-table-shaped package for our coffee table. It wound up being, truly, exactly the shape of the coffee table, tightly bundled in a half-inch of cardboard. For example, our couch, as seen from our balcony on the way to the truck:


In all, the army of guys needed just over one work day to completely pack up all our worldly belongings and put them on their truck. We were left with a few suitcases for the trusty Nissan Sentra's trunk as our only possessions for the next month, when we hope to be reunited with in our nation's capitol.

Coming next (and hopefully soon): Driving through Chiapas.

1 comment:

Cilicious said...

Yeah, we had a moving company pack up all our stuff and it *was* pretty cool. I just want to warn you, we still haven't found everything yet, though progress is slowly being made.
This is because of the way movers pack. Space is very carefully utilized. Thus, the electric mixer has no beaters, the Cuisinart has no motor, and so on. We had a cool old moving guy who did all our wine glasses, though, and he was a master at it, and nothing was broken.
Looking forward to the next installment of your adventure.