Moving Day (Stage 1) has arrived!
17 January 2013
By Guest Blogger - Jeff
Home sweet home is now mostly wrapped in brown paper and packing tape. Tomorrow, our furniture and a lot of other stuff will be loaded into a crate and begin its journey to South Africa.
...So most of us have moved at one time or another. If you're lucky, you open the door to the house and tell the moving company "Take it all, and careful with Grandma's china." Then, a day or so later, you hop in the car and drive across the country to where you're going. Shortly thereafter, your stuff shows up at your new place.
Turns out, moving across the globe has a few differences. After you decide what will fit in the space the company gives you, you have to plan the move in three stages -
First, what's going in your suitcases (limit 3 per) the day you fly from SLC to JHB - you probably can guess - it's mostly the clothes you will need to wear until the rest of your stuff arrives.
Second, what's going in the "air shipment" - we get an LDN container (which may sound big, but it's only the size of a pallet). This will contain the computer and other odds and ends the family will need to use immediately. The air shipment takes about 2 weeks to arrive in SA.
Third, you get a 40' shipping container for the cargo ship. This is a good 15 feet shorter than the normal moving company truck - which means we're not taking Grandma's china, Jeff's library or the family's food storage. The shipping container will take 3 months to arrive after sailing from Oakland to Shanghai and across the Indian Ocean to Durbin.
These steps happen in reverse order - They come pick up the boat items first, then the air shipment items, then your suitcases. And if it's big or heavy and it misses the first stage of loading, it gives new meaning to the phrase "You missed the boat." Literally.
So if you're doing the math, you probably have figured out that my family will be living in our Alpine home for the next 2 months with only folding chairs and lame kitchen utensils. Not a problem for me, as I'm headed out to Africa Monday, but my fellow bloggers might have a few words to say about that....
Seriously, a big vote of thanks for my wonderful Michele who orchestrated this move and has been totally amazing while I've been largely absent. And will hopefully continue to keep the home fires burning while I'm in Africa the next 2 months.
I'll return mid-March to pick up the family and we'll all head out to our new home in SA, hopefully JUST as the shipping container and air shipment show up in the driveway of our hoped-for rental home.
A big thanks to friends and Michele's parents for meals, childcare, probiotics, and help with driving as we've prepped for the movers the last few weeks!
