moving services
When I was a kid, like six years old, my family picked up and moved from California to Pittsburgh, PA. My mom grew up here, my dad’s from New Jersey; my dad lost his job as a teacher in Reading, CA, and they decided we needed to move closer to family. We did it, though, not in the way most normal families would do it. We drove.
There were no moving companies involved – well, minimally, my dad rented a U-Haul. But no serious comparing moving quotes, engaging moving services. There were no plane tickets. My dad was our moving company, driving the U-Haul containing the life of our family of five across the country in three days. (He killed the hamster along the way, accidentally. He forgot to give it water. Just another victim in my family’s long history of torturing and murdering rodents big and small.
My mom was our plane, our train, our Greyhound bus. She drove me and my two younger sisters from San Francisco to Pittsburgh over the course of two weeks. She was our travel agency too, booking stays with homeschoolers (we were all homeschooled at the time) in all the states we passed through, stopping with us to see the sights
Maybe I assume that’s not a normal way to move across the country because my family’s kind of odd, and does things the odd way, and I know that. But I think it must not be normal. Otherwise, moving companies would be out of business. It was probably part of the whole homeschooling thing: if we’re going to move across the country, then the kids are going to see the country, for Pete’s sake.
Did it work?
My most insistent memory from that trip is the time we stayed with a family (I don’t even know what state we were in at the time) that liked to go catch snakes at dusk. They let me hold one big non-poisonous sucker, and he bit me, of course. Another family had a nest of baby birds in a bush just outside the living room window. I remember being told not to touch the babies because their mother wouldn’t recognize their smell and would kick them out of the nest. And there are other little things.
In retrospect, I’d take my parents’ moving services over anyone’s, hands down.