We’re on the Road
This past week was the last week of living simultaneously in our new trailer home and our Victoria apartment. We’ve driven hundreds of kilometers around Vancouver Island, spending some nights in Nanaimo to attend Emily’s driving lessons and rushing back to Victoria to pack our apartment, working towards bringing that chapter of our journey to a close.
At the start of our week we were taking our time and carefully deciding what items we’d like to keep in storage until our return and what items we could part with. It was a bit challenging to let certain things go but when we asked ourselves if we aren’t going to need it in the next few years while we’re on the road what is the likelihood that we’ll need it upon our return. This simple question often helped our decision making process. As the week went on we started to question our earlier decisions as the work in front of us and time remaining were not canceling each other out. We had thought that the packing process was going to be fairly straightforward as we’d already moved so much of our stuff into our RV. Typically with many of projects that Emily and I undertake we greatly underestimated the time it was going to take. This time was no different and the closer we got to our moving deadline we needed to make more drastic decisions. We quickly came to the conclusion that we just needed to purge. That night most of the furniture we had little attachment to went up on Facebook Marketplace to offload it and hopefully make a bit of cash on the side. It turns out it’s very difficult to sell furniture and we ended up just having to list it as free to draw any sort of attention. As soon as it was free, it was hard to keep up with the flurry of request asking if these items were still available. By 8am Friday morning (moving day) our last piece of free furniture was out the door and there was a chance that we were actually going to pull this off.
It was then time to go and pickup our U-Haul and in typical U-Haul fashion we’re in for an adventure. We had ordered another 15 foot truck as we figured everything should fit as we have way less stuff and it was the same size truck that we used to originally take us to the island in first place. We showed up to the place we had requested pickup but they didn’t have any trucks in that size. We then had to walk back home and drive to another location that luckily was nearby. When we got there they had plenty of trucks so our stress levels immediately dropped but that didn’t last long. When we go to the counter U-Haul informed us that when you request moving dollies with your rental ahead of time there’s only a chance you’ll actually get one depending on if they have supply. This forced us to have to buy one which was starting to ruffle our feathers. Then when this U-Haul dealer discovered that this was a One Way rental (meaning the truck won’t be coming back) they found us the grimiest, most beat up, questionably safe truck in their inventory and handed us the keys. I’m sure they were very happy to see this beauty of truck head out never to return. If we weren’t already behind we would have pushed harder to get a different truck.
Thankfully the rest of the day went relatively smooth after our building management showed up to set the elevator up for moving. We had originally scheduled the elevator for 10am but it took till after 11 to track someone down. Thankfully we had family friends drive down from Denman Island to help us pull this stunt off and stayed to the bitter end washing little scuff marks off the wall to ensure we got back our entire deposit. Friday night we caught the 7pm ferry to Vancouver arriving at Emily’s family, we fell into a deep sleep as we’d only been sleeping 4 or 5 hours the previous nights.
Saturday we spent the day unloading our stuff and driving around Vancouver to various family and friends places who had agreed to store some of our stuff while we are away. Although we were dropping things off we also seemed to be collecting various pieces of furniture along the way as they learned that we’d be doing a dump run on the way out of town and wanted to take advantage of the truck while we had it. By 7:30pm we had managed to return the scary U-Haul, free of garbage, made one last stop to drop off a plant and made it to the ferry terminal to head back to our 5th Wheel Trailer.
We are now safely in our new home (Yūkō), warm and dry listening to the rain pelting down. From here on out our road trip begins and wherever we desire to go will be our home.