On the road again...

So we're in Omaha, poised to close on the new house tomorrow. Our little moving adventure has been a bit bumpy so far - when Mike went to pick up the biggest possible U-Haul truck plus trailer, the U-Haul guy discovered that someone had tried to steal it during the night, and the starter... wouldn't. This is never auspicious. So they swung over to the next-closest place, which had truck but no trailer. The movers (who drove up in a Mercedes that belonged to the substitute mover, whose friend was vacationing in Morroco and asked him to step in, whose usual job was owning a Middle Eastern restarant and being hot) worked their butts off, and we had the truck plus trailer (obtained from the first U-Haul place) loaded by noon.

Here it got tricky again. We had some more stuff. Maybe a lot of stuff, to be honest. First Mike thought he'd just fly to Chicago for his next business trip and load it in a truck and drive back to Nebraska, but then his dad (henceforth known as Al, the God of Moving) suggested that we could just get another truck, plus a trailer for the second car, and he'd drive that. So what do you call people who can't move without two U-Haul trucks? (We call them "Renata," at our house, but we're now equally guilty.) More than that, what do you call a caravan that includes one car, one huge U-Haul towing a trailer, and one small U-Haul towing a second car? I call it an embarassment of U-Hauls, but it did the trick, and I'm sure not complaining about being able to bring the outdoor furniture, various plants, and the playroom bookshelves.

Our driving had ups and downs - it was cool when a swarm of Corvettes drove by, at a surprisingly sedate speed. It was less cool that we were limited to speeds of about 60 mph, so it was a long drive. But we were well-fed with cookies and dried fruit and lemonade juice boxes and bottled shmancy coffee drinks, and we generally did pretty well. Our first night in a hotel, the kids posed at the cornfield next to the hotel - the corn was at least 8 feet tall and Peter really wanted to go investigate but we decided not to let him be a child of the corn.