Moving drama

This has been the strangest limbo move ever, full of adventures, mishaps, near-death drama, and barfing.

Last Sunday, as we were in the throes of packing the house, Isaac got the stomach flu. I followed soon thereafter, then Spence, then Joe. We were a pretty sorry sight Monday, but we'd generally returned to normal health by Tuesday, which turned into a majorly frantic packing day. Friends came to help us pack the truck and clean on Wednesday. We ate dinner on the floor Wednesday night, and Isaac surprised us, and mostly his Uncle Nate, who was on the receiving end of the explosion, by revealing that he wasn't quite done with the flu. This was worrisome, as we were due to board an airplane first thing the next morning. I brought a dish towel, blankets to spread on our laps, changes of clothing for all of us, and sanitizer on the plane in preparation for another Isaac barfing episode. It's a good thing I did. At least he waited until the plane was coming in for a landing in Sacramento to barf all over himself, me, and the airplane seat.

But my adventures are nothing compared to Joe's and Nate's. Evidently getting barfed on is a good way to catch the flu, because it wasn't long into their drive when Nate realized that Isaac had passed him the virus along with his vomit. So the poor fellow suffered through two days of a rocking, lolling, non-reclining moving truck with a plastic bag in one hand, while Joe did all the driving. And then they reached Parley's Canyon, a very steep descent into the Salt Lake Valley. And the brakes stopped working. On their way down. Luckily they hit a small stretch of flat ground and were able to apply the dying brakes hard enough to bring the truck to a shuddering halt on the edge of the highway. Joe was seriously shaken up. If they'd gone another hundred feet or so, they'd've been on their way down again with overheated, broken brakes. He was contemplating those big piles of sand that truckers use to make emergency stops. Yikes.

Fix-it guys arrived and decided the brakes were fine, just overheated. So they proceeded slowly on their way. The next day, they found themselves literally at the top of the Sierra Nevadas, at Look-out Point, with a broken transmission. I guess when your truck is going downhill, and you're flooring the gas, and the truck is shaking hard and going slower and slower, that's a bad thing. Fix-it guys were called in again. Luckily, Joe was towing our little Toyota truck, so he and Nate hopped in it and drove the rest of the way to Sacramento while Budget towed the moving junk-heap down the mountains.

Now it's sitting in some car garage in Rancho Cordova, full of our stuff, pining away. Budget told us there was nothing wrong with it, and we should just pick it up this morning and continue to Berkeley. But the mechanics called us this morning and said, yes, something is definitely wrong with it (um, duh). So they're working on locating a different truck to transfer our stuff into so that we can finally move into our new home. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, we're having a lovely pre-Christmas vacation with Joe's family here in limbo. Spencer celebrated his birthday on Sunday---four years old! I hope to be able to report tomorrow that we've actually seen and moved into our new apartment, a full week after we set out from Illinois. We shall see.