Moved Out, Rolled Out

Hi everyone! The last week or so has been a whirlwind but we wanted to share an update.

First, we are officially moved out as of Wednesday night!! Our move out was really the culmination of a ton of work and planning that started way back in January. Once we decided to move across the country, we realized that was a great time to downsize our lives a bit. Corinne worked tirelessly to list and sell our items on Facebook Marketplace and eBay. In the end, she sold 216 items - everything from a small salad spinner to an entire desk and bookshelf. It was an insane amount of work, and if you've ever used Facebook Marketplace you probably know what a...wild time that can be. We also donated or got rid of many other things, like books and old school work.

With a lot of help from some hired movers, we got all of our remaining belongings moved into a mobile storage unit. It felt very weird to load parts of our lives into a 16ft x 8ft x 8ft metal box, and know that we won't see them again until we dig them out in 5-6 months in Seattle. Even after all of our downsizing efforts, we filled up the unit pretty thoroughly. There are boxes stacked up almost to the top in the back, and every square foot of floor space in the unit was used up all the way to the door in the front. We had a scary moment when the storage unit people came to pick the thing up, tried to lift it from the back end with their machine, and reported that it was too heavy. I stood there in the rain in the dark (it was about 9:30pm), listened to the guy matter-of-factly tell me that we might have to get a second unit and move half the stuff over to it, and just kind of reeled in the thought that we might STILL have too much stuff for the unit even after all of our downsizing efforts.

Fortunately, the situation resolved itself as he then tried picking it up from the front/door end and was able to load it onto their truck. It probably means that our items are just unbalanced inside the unit. The stuff was arranged as best we could, but it's very possible that some of our items will be broken by the time the unit arrives in Seattle - and it's also possible that we'll want something in the coming months that got buried deep in there. Oh well! Our stuff is replaceable. We joked that it wouldn't be so bad if our unit got lost somewhere in transit - we'd get $10,000 which is probably a reasonable estimate of the value of everything in there, and we'd be forcibly parted from all that stuff. 😂 How much do you really need something if you don't need it for 5-6 months?

After a brief visit with Corinne's parents, yesterday - 5/2/25 - was the first day of our adventure! We are now in Cincinnati, Ohio for the weekend - about halfway from Michigan to our first longer term stop in the Smoky Mountains. I'm sure we'll share more about our travel logistics in future posts, but our first travel day was not without snags. When we planned out our route before leaving, Corinne's Tesla reported that she would be able to make it to a Tesla supercharger in Fort Wayne, Indiana with about 14% battery remaining. As she got closer, it became clear that the Tesla had underestimated her battery usage and changed its mind - she would now not make it there. She ended up needing to pull into a country club about 10 mins away and plug into their wall outlet for an hour in order to have enough power to limp on to the supercharger. We knew that we'd have to plan our travels around her EV range, but now we know that we need to account for a bigger buffer than her car reports out.

That said, overall it was a successful first travel day. The cats seemed to get acclimated to my Subaru quickly, and spent much of the drive resting together on my lap. They also seem to be adjusting to our hotel room just fine - both seem a bit more nervous than usual but have eaten, played, and used the litter box. We got into Cincinnati before sunset and enjoyed a comedy show with our friends Ian and Katie who live here. Excited to spend more time with them today and tomorrow before continuing on to the Smoky Mountains on Monday.

Closing with one FYI - We have received multiple reports of our blog email sign-up form not working. We have also had some related issues behind the scenes. If you'd like to be emailed each time we post, and you didn't get an email for this post, that probably means that the form didn't work correctly. Please try signing up again using our latest form (linked in the sidebar), or if you prefer you can just send one of us your email address and we'll add you manually. We'll only use your email address for the mailing list and won't share it with anyone else. Thank you for bearing with us on this!

We are exhausted from all of the loading, cleaning, and feeling from the last week - and really the last few months. Things should settle down a lot next week once we arrive in the Smoky Mountains. We're looking forward to some much-needed relaxation!

- Dan (& Corinne)

The full storage unit. 😅

Moved out!

Cats in the drivers seat! Elphie is the calico and Fiyero is the black one.