We made it!

We are now officially in Tucson, and, boy, are we glad to be here.

We left Fremont close to 10am Saturday morning (2/26/10), a bit later than planned. We had our two cars packed and stuffed to the max; the rear ends (of the cars, not ours) were sagging under the load a bit more than I was comfortable with, but nothing we could do about it.

The first few hours went well. Smooth drive, nice scenery, sunshine and blue sky. As we approached the Grapevine, things got ugly. The sky got dark, and it started raining. By the time we got to the other side, it was pouring rain. That part of the drive is never pleasant, but with the rain it was even worse. Then we hit 210 in L.A. and encountered a sea of traffic that never seemed to end.

From Tucson move

When we reached the outskirts of L.A. we thought we had left the rain behind, but as we stopped for dinner and looked out the window of the restaurant, it had obviously caught up with us again. We ended up driving through heavy rain the entire rest of the drive, with knuckles white, teeth grinding, and ass clenched.

As the evening went on, we started to feel the effects of the drive. Instead of a comfortable, albeit long and boring drive, we were tired and tense from having to concentrate so hard, drive defensively, navigate through the pouring rain. We made several stops just to loosen up, get some air, and shake off the fatigue.

We finally arrived in Tucson at 3:20am local time after over 16 hours on the road, over 10 of them in pouring rain. What a nightmare!

To top things off, we didn’t want to take the chance of leaving our cars fully loaded sitting in front of the house in plain sight. The duplex we’re renting does not have a garage. So I decided to get in a little CrossFit workout at 3:30 in the morning in the pouring rain: Unload two cars stuffed to the roofs, for time. It was awesome! Took me about half an hour, after which I was soaked because the roof over the front porch did not have gutters installed so I had to run through a water fall with every load.

It was about 4:30am before we finally crashed, completely exhausted.

Today (Sunday) we are unpacking, getting settled in our temporary home, and tomorrow I’m back to work and Sandy will meet our realtor to get serious about house hunting.

Outside it is still raining. Here is a photo from the front door taken a little while ago.

From Tucson move

According to the property manager it has been an unusually wet weekend. Looks like we could not have picked a worse day for the drive. Oh well - we made it, that’s what counts.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2010 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Tucson Move. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.