It has been quite some time since we have done much travel due to a long planned cross country move. We had been talking about moving to Colorado for years and finally everything lined up that would allow us to go remote for our jobs and take the plunge.
We are a few months in and it has been the best decision we could have made... we love it here! Albeit we are in the honeymoon stage of a new place, we really do love it and know we will more once the summer months roll around.
Our move from Atlanta to Denver felt overwhelming and huge to say the least. Little did we know how much effort it truly would take.
We'd started pairing down things around the house once we knew we would be moving and listing the house for sale. I spent months going through closets, the kitchen, the garage and just getting rid of things we didn't need or use. We donated items, gave things to friends and sold clothes and furniture on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. I had a decent amount of luck selling things and it is wild how some things will sit online for days or weeks and others get 15-20 messages almost instantly. People are wild and get very offended when you sell things to someone else, it was quite comical and kept us entertained while we scaled back considerably.
We had to sell and get rid of enough things so that our house still looked lived in and staged for when we listed the house to sell, but not too cluttered. It is a hard balance to strike. Even looking back on our realtor pics now the house still seems like we had too much 'stuff.'
We flew to Denver a few times, probably 5 or so, in the year leading up to our move. We wanted to look at neighborhoods we liked so we could keep an eye online for rentals. Renting something from two thousand miles away seemed challenging. We flew one last time in August for a house hunting trip and to just hang around the area for a few days. We even had a friend hook us up with a realtor to take us and show us a few properties and areas we may have overlooked. I was feeling so discouraged as the cost of living was quite substantially higher in Denver compared to Atlanta and the rental properties were slim pickings. If we found something we liked, they didn't allow pets. Us not bringing our pets was not an option and I was not prepared to lie and then live in constant stress that we would be caught with pets. So pet friendly was a must.
I have such fond memories of this trip, even though it didn't yield any living conditions for us. But Brandon and I had such a good time, even though I was a bit under the weather, I just couldn't wait for our move to happen. I was about ready to live in a box to just get out here. So we left Denver, with no lease in sight, hoping something may pop up online before we set sail.
Our move date was pushed repeatedly over 2019. Originally we thought Spring, then ok lets do it this summer... July, August, September....
It just took way longer than anticipated to get our house ready to sell. I think we over-prepared a bit thinking the house would fly off the market and we'd have nowhere to live. We had the house 'perfect' before we would click 'For Sale' on our listing. We ended up not listing until after July 4th having no idea that this time of year was a pretty dead time in Atlanta for home buyers. Most had already bought and moved in preparation for the school year and temps were high and rain was abundant... not really enticing for home buyers to come out and traipse through your house covered in mud or sweat.
We finally ended up moving the last week of September. We'd agreed to having a tenant while we moved as opposed to leaving the house empty for months on the market. It was almost as everything lined up the week of Brandon's birthday. We'd found a rental on Zillow we liked, it was only live for 12 hours before it was taken down due to too much volume. A friend of ours who lived in Denver, went and toured the property for us, sent us tons of videos and FaceTimed us to say it looked nice and the landlord was legit. We called him that night and I did my best job I could of selling 'us' to him so we would have somewhere to live as well as our pets. We signed the lease and the next day someone contacted us about renting our house. Normally we would have said no but it felt too weird to pass up. She signed her lease and that left us roughly 2 weeks to sell off anything else we didn't plan to take, tidy up the house and hit the road. I'd planned to take Brandon to the Atlanta Aquarium for his birthday to swim with whale sharks and then we had friends over one last time for Brandon's birthday on Saturday.... from there it was no more fun and games and into full packing mode!
One of my best friends' wedding was the last weekend in September and there was no way I was missing it. We set our target move date to the day after her wedding. Looking back, I can't believe how much stress and lack of sleep I handled that last week to get everything lined up but I was so excited that I guess adrenaline kept me going!
We'd opted to rent a Penske truck for our move. Pods were our original plan but with such a long move, they would have packed up our stuff and taken 10-14 days to make to us. This didn't seem practical as I was only taking 2 days off of work for the move... again... crazy! So we loaded up everything we owned in a huge Penske truck, towed my car behind it and I drove Brandon's Jeep with all 3 fluff-balls across the country.
Almost everyone who had done a move like this with pets told me I should 'drug' my cats as this is a stressful thing for them. I felt weird about it so opted to not. I have a dog who loves the car, a cat who is just the sweetest thing on the planet and slept the entire time, and then a Siamese cat who wants you to know her every thought and emotion via meowing incessantly. She 'screamed' for all but rough 1 hour of the drive over 3 days. Turns out that she likes podcasts over music and she really hates the car. I am not sure who had it worse... Brandon driving a 26 foot truck or me going insane from hearing 'meow' every other minute for 3 days. Either way, we made it safe and sound!
Our last week leading up to the move was me working at my office every day roughly 9-5ish, coming home and packing up boxes. We were lucky that my mother in law was dreading us moving but wanted to help and spend time with us as much as possible, so we had another pair of hands. She did so much for us that last week, I am so grateful. From helping clean, to packing, to painting! We ate pizza or Indian food pretty much every night since the kitchen was packed up and we didn't have the luxury of time on our hands to cook.
Saturday morning finally rolled around, we had movers come and help us pack up our Penske truck. We took everything out of the house except the clothes we were wearing in the car and to the wedding. We packed the truck all day in 94 degree Georgia heat... think HUMID. We were exhausted!
Once we got to a decent stopping point, we showered and got ready for Katie's wedding. Our friends were picking us up and we drove down to Fayetteville, GA for the wedding celebration. It was so nice to have a kind of last hoorah with our friends. We really didn't want a going away party because I didn't want to get sad. I was really focusing on being happy about our move and felt like a 'goodbye' would really bum me out. I knew after having previously moved away, how the loneliness and sadness can set in after the initial vacation vibes wear off.
The wedding was beautiful and we had such a good time. Sadly we couldn't stay too late as we had an early morning ahead of us and we were frankly already exhausted that staying out too late would probably have been dangerous for us to be on the road the next day. We said our goodbyes and rode home with our friends. We returned to a very dark and empty house, we changed for bed and blew up our camping sleeping pads and crawled into our sleeping bags. We slept on the floor of an entirely empty house, basically camping in our place for the last night.
Morning came quick! I still remember our alarm going off and couldn't believe the day was finally here. I had a hard time visualizing it since it felt like it always got pushed off. We got up and got dressed, packed up the last of our things. My mother in law came over to help us do a final sweep of the house and get everything in order for our renter, setting out the keys and changing codes to the house. We put the final forgotten things in the car or trash and said our byes to Debi and we were off.
I followed Brandon in the Jeep for awhile to make sure he had gotten the hang of not only driving this big truck, but towing my car behind it. He was basically driving a Semi-truck for the first time and I was so nervous something would happen to him. He kept telling me to go ahead and I just didn't feel comfortable leaving him. So we shared our locations with each other and checked in as much as we could while not texting and driving. I would drive ahead and pick up food and then find a Pilot gas station he could fit in. I'd wait for him, let the pets eat and have a potty break. We'd eat dinner together and then I'd go ahead to find us a place to sleep for the night.
When I was a kid, we moved a lot! One of the things I remember was La Quinta Inn's being pet friendly. So I set my sites on us staying at one of them. I'd call a couple off of the road we were on and see if they had any last minute availability. Our first night we spent in St. Louis and they had a king size room that allowed pets for $99 for the night. Sold! I sent the location to Brandon and got there with plenty of time to park in as many parking spots as I could take up, unload the car, get the pets situated and then move the Jeep when Brandon arrived so he had somewhere to park his rig.
The next morning, we'd have the continental breakfast, fill up our water and coffee mugs and hit the road. We'd driven an 8-9 hour drive over about 11-12 hours due to how slow the truck was and stops and we knew the next day was going to be long too. Our day was a 12 hour drive that was going to take much much longer. We were off and I was again driving ahead, scouted some lunch at Chick-Fil-A and then met B at a Pilot for him to fill up on gas and have a quick snack. Unfortunately, we got held up a bit at this gas station as his credit card kept getting declined. Apparently filling up a huge truck tank sets off alarms to your credit card company and they shut him down. We spent awhile on the phone before I just put it on my card while crossing my fingers that I also wouldn't get declined. We hoped his card would be working again by our next stop and got back to the long drive.
At this point, we hadn't had any real snags in our plans at all and had been having good weather. I had been trying to stay hydrated and loaded up on vitamins as I knew getting sick on this trip was likely from the lack of sleep alone. Once we got to Kansas, the end was in sight but boy was that a tough drive. Kansas is flat, straight and wide open. There was not much to look at and I found myself making stops just to walk the dog or grab an unnecessary snack because I was so tired. We'd started that morning right after sunrise and I made it to Denver after sunset. It took me probably 13 or 14 hours of driving to get there and Brandon was always about an hour behind me.
We stayed at a La Quinta in about 40 minutes from where our rental was that night. We'd technically made it to Denver but our place was available until the next morning so another night in hotels it was. At this point the pets were so over being cooped up and the dog would not stop chasing the cats all over the room, I was worried they would ask us to leave. I'd grabbed some food at a grocery store and got back to the room in time for Brandon's arrival. We ate some snacks for dinner and passed out close to midnight. We had MADE it but we were far from being able to relax.
The next day was moving day! We'd 'hired' some movers off of the BellHop app and headed towards our rental. I met our landlord out front around 8am for our walk through. Remember, we had never seen this place in person and so I was both excited and nervous. I remember walking around and just being so pleasantly surprised. We were about 3 blocks from restaurants and shops and 3 blocks from a park but our street looked residential with old victorian era homes. To me, it is the best of both worlds as we get a neighborhood feel with city living perks.
Once we got the overview from our landlord, got our keys and our movers showed up. We were on our way to moving in! We moved in in about a third of the time it took us to move out of our Atlanta house. Once the movers left, I looked around and was completely surrounded by boxes. We had so much work ahead of us and decided we would both start on a room. Brandon took the master bedroom and I tackled the kitchen. Sleeping in our own bed and cooking in our own kitchen were the 2 things I was looking most forward to. We made a decent dent in the boxes and then called it a night.
We were here and I couldn't have been happier. Tired.... for sure! But so so happy!
Things I would have done differently:
Once I got the go ahead from work about moving, I slowly took my time getting rid of things. I wish I would have just blocked off a week or two of 'no plans' and just Marie Kondo'd the house. It ended up pushing everything out much farther this way. We still kept pretty normal and busy schedules leading up to the move, including trips with friends and family. I wouldn't trade those trips but could have better used some PTO days to just buckle down and get the house on the market sooner.
Get rid of it all!! It was hard to decide what to get rid of since we didn't know what our new 'space' would look like. However, we kept a lot of stuff that we ended up selling, donating or tossing once we got here. I think if you're on the fence about something, better to get rid of it than pay to have it moved across the country. Of course, I am not talking about things that would be expensive to replace. But we moved into a smaller space here and really didn't have room for a lot of things so it was a bit of a wasted effort.
Have a stricter driving plan. We really got lucky on our drive out of no big mishaps. We didn't want to book hotels ahead of time because we weren't certain how tired we would get although we had a vague idea of the cities we wanted to stop in. Looking back, me trying to call hotels and get us a room while driving wasn't very safe and having check in points with each other would have been useful should one of us have gotten a flat or worse. We got really lucky here and our system worked out good but if we do a big move again, I'd have the logistics planned a bit more carefully.
Having the option to medicate the pets. I should have just asked my vet for the medicine and used it if I needed it. It is safe and my cat was probably was more unhappy crying for 2 and a half days than if I had just given her something to sleep. She was pretty hoarse by the time we arrived in Denver but once I was already on the road... there wasn't anything I could do or give her. I was so annoyed but also felt very bad for her at the same time. I am sure she has long forgotten about the drive but I think just having the option to help relax your kitty would be preferred.