There were a few reasons for the move, but in a nutshell, it was about money and the relief of boredom - reasons good enough for me at the time. I'd wanted out of Virginia for a while, having overstayed my welcome by a decade or so after moving there from NY in '83 with the intent of staying 5 years or so then heading west. In short, it was way past time to see the east coast in the mirror.

Planning the physical move itself was, in a word, something. My new employer offered to move me and my stuff as part of the deal, but after a couple of conversations with moving companies about the actual logistics of getting it done, I elected to do it myself. It seems most movers are set up for transporting funiture and boxes, and not much else. Throw a bill of lading at them that includes 10 bicycles, 2 big motorcycles, 6 sailboards, 2 surfboards, and a variety of other valuables that don't fit well into the average 10 cubic foot cardboard box, and their response is "crates". That's right, they wanted me to crate my cycles, bikes, boards, etc. I figured by the time I got my stuff ready for them to pick up and haul accross country, I could have driven there myself. So, I decided I would.

"It'll be an adventure", I reasoned... Uh, yeah.

In retrospect, the actual trip was less an adventure than merely long time in an uncomfortable place, kind of like racing the length of Chesapeake Bay on sailboat, but without the promise of a drunken blowout at the finish line. It was the kind of experience that had me asking myself "Just what the hell was I thinking?" by the time I hit Indiana. In all fairness, I've made worse decisions. Then again, my decsion-making bar is set so low I can get over it without tripping while knee-crawling drunk. It's all relative, I guess.

The only real adventure of the trip occured on the afternoon of the day I actually left Virginia, while the 26' U-Haul "Super Mover" was still sitting out front about half full. It was only half full because I was moving pretty slow, suffering from a severe case of sleep deprivation brought on by a trip to Richmond,VA the night before. I had a beer with my buddy Steve then changed venues and met all-time favorite ex-girlfriend Stella for several more after that. She drove down from DC and looked so damn good I found myself reconsidering the move more than once over the course of the evening. If you're lucky at some point in your life you meet a woman whose mere presence can rattle your brain so badly that the simple act of forming coherent thoughts becomes impossible. She's the one, and has been for over 15 years, on and off. Of course it's way too easy to forget that when we took a stab at a serious relationship we fought like a couple of crack house pit bulls. Hence the term "on and off". I've long held the idea that even the best things in life are often best enjoyed at arm's length, and there's no better example than Stella - magnificent and maddening at the same time.

Sorry, I digress. As I said, I get rattled.

Since I was waaaay behind schedule and my girlfriend Lisa was due later that afternoon to help me finish cleaning up the place, I dove into the packing process and basically just started tossing stuff into the truck, figuring I’d sort it out when I got to CA. This would prove to be yet another bad idea in a series of the same, but more on that later, film at eleven, etc… I made great progress for a couple of hours and was deeply engrossed in stuffing saltwater fishing tackle into a 35 gallon Rubbermaid ActionPacker when a pair of small, female-sized Nike cross-trainers came into my immediate field of vision. A quick scan upward revealed they were indeed standing on my kitchen floor and were attached to my favorite neighbor who came bearing cold Heineken and a desire to toast my journey to the Left Coast.

Now, bear with me for a moment... I knew I needed to keep packing & loading the truck. I was fully aware I needed to get on the road. I reminded myself my girlfriend of almost two years was due at the apartment in just about an hour and a half, and only a man of weak character and questionable integrity would consider a distraction like this worthy of the risk. Then again, only a complete idiot would ignore the beautiful woman in the white shorts & yellow bikini top, holding the cold beer, and offering up a toast & proper send-off. I mean, Mrs. Bastian didn't raise a complete idiot.

About an hour later a scene from any number of cheezy network sitcoms played out at 4505 Victoria Ave as Lisa pulled up in front of the apartment and my partner in crime bailed out the fire escape to the rear of the building. All I could say to myself was "I’m getting too old for this crap", while in fact I was pretty damn happy to have dodged yet another bullet with my name clearly stamped on it, weak character and questionable integrity be damned.

Unfortunately for my now jagged nerve endings, this lost episode of Three's Company wasn’t over just yet. Thirty minutes after the near-miss, Lisa and I were standing in the back of the truck with the overhead door up when another ex of mine from waaay back who’d threatened to stop by and say goodbye wheeled up in front of the apartment, started to park, then spotted the two of us in the U-Haul and wisely pulled away from the curb and split. I’m pretty certain that all she really had in mind was a simply saying goodbye (although I've learned over the years that underestimating her can be a BIG mistake), but I really wasn’t in the state of mind to be introducing current girlfriend to any ex-girfriend, especially considering the events of the last couple of days, much less the last couple of hours.

As I said… rattled.

I finally got out of town about 7PM that evening. The drive was itself was, in a word, awful. Somehow the idea of driving cross-country seemed pretty cool when I first considered it. In reality, it pretty much just sucks. There is nothing, and I mean nothing worth a damn once you leave West Virginia until you hit Wyoming. There's a reason somebody coined the phrase "flyover country". The roads suck. The rest stops suck. Mixed in with all this nothingness were some long, steep, climbs. Naturally this Mother of All U-Hauls would barely climb the smallest hills (I took the VA-WV-KY-IN-MO-KS-NE-WY-UT-NV-CA route) and got blown all over the road with every crosswind. Believe me, the middle of the country is one constant crosswind. The route is due west. The wind is due south. This goes on for 2000 miles. Adding insult to injury, Interstate 70, (which I took all the way across Missouri), is without a doubt the worst piece of sh*t in the country's Interstate system. This poor excuse for a goat path had wheel eating potholes all over it, the kind you see and expect in deepest urban America, but not somewhere with a 70MPH speed limit. It was totally ridiculous. I cannot describe how bad the road is. Even the DOT is without answers. It's got billboards posted and a website that seeks out advice from passing motorists on just what to do with I70. My advice is to carpet bomb the f**ker and start over with fresh asphalt, but hey, that's probably too easy for those who make their living painting things orange and leaning on shovels.

I finally beat the crosswind when I hit the Wyoming border and ran into the blizzard (it's May, remember?) that dumped 2 feet of snow, created full-on whiteout conditions, and closed down a 50 mile section of I80. I lost most of the day waiting it out in a truckstop, drinking really bad coffee, and watching one really scary truckstop hooker named Mandy work the crowd of assembled 18-wheeled cowboys. I remember wondering out loud just how many days of being stranded in Laramie, WY it would take to turn the whole Mandy thing into a feasible scenario for U-Haul Boy. The closest figure I could come up with was about 180, but every time Mandy slithered by, I upped it by another 90.

Speaking of truckstops, one thing you learn rather quickly when driving a big truck towing an SUV on an auto transport trailer is that it's such a hassle getting off the interstate with something that's literally six feet shorter than the average 18 wheeler, you're pretty much limited to eating & sleeping where Bubba does. Most truck stops are famous for and heavily tout their "good old home cooking". Contrary to popular lore, there's nothing "good" about most "good old home cooking". Mostly, it's just old.

The overnight stop also takes on a look of it's own when you're playing a half-assed game of long-haul trucker. I stayed in cheap motels the first couple of nights, but got so paranoid about the unguarded, unalarmed van full of my enitre life parked outside that I switched to sleeping in the truck cab in rest/truck stops with Bubba and the boys, for the rest of the trip. You haven't lived until you get rocked to sleep by a couple dozen rattling Kenworths. One night in Reno put me into a combination truck stop & casino called Sierra Sid's that had the biggest back lot I'd ever seen. There were easily over 500 big rigs parked for the night, all in rows, most kept idling all night long. It was a city of rumbling trucks with long, dark tunnels snaking between the rows. It was just surreal. I half expected on of the futuristic machines from The Terminator to fly over and open fire on me.

On a more positive note, Utah and Nevada were actually pretty cool, and Bonneville, UT was worthy of a stop, as I've always wanted to see the site of the annual land speed trials. I had planned to sail my wind skate there, but got shut out for wind. It was just as well, as I was still way, way behind schedule.

I didn't get to Mountain View, CA until Sunday (the original plan was Friday) around 11:30AM and found my designated U-Haul location didn't have the 10'x20' storage unit I had been promised by the crack team of relocation experts at the Hampton, VA U-Haul branch. Team of crack heads is more like it. You can imagine the feeling of customer satisfaction that welled over me when the Mountain View U-Haul counter clerk and former dotcom business development executive looked at me over the counter and said with a straight face: "Sorry sir, we're all out of the 10'x20' units. All we have available at the moment is a 6'x6' unit. Will that work for you?"

The pause that ensued was just long enough for me to realize I didn't have the energy to choke the life out of him, but he was immediately added to my List of Those Who Will Go With Me Should I Decide to Exit Earth in Spectacular Fashion.

The only I could do was ask the location of any self-storage units in close proximity to the Land of U-Haul and head off on a mission to find storage for my world. I actually was able to secure a big cube fairly close by. Of course, by this time it's 1:00PM and U-Haul closes at 5:00PM. I managed to unload the entire van by myself in just over 3 hours, helped by the fact that about half the contents of the trucked spilled out when I opened the rear doors, courtesy of my "toss it and go" pack job a few days earlier. I still can't believe something that took two days to load got emptied that fast, especially considering my unit is inside a building, down 100' of hallway, through two doors.... well, you get the picture, and it ain't a pretty one. I got my first taste of Kalifornia real estate values when I got the contract for the EZ Stor. The 10'x20' space is a mere $310/month. Of course, it seemed like a bargain at the time...

I'm here. So far, so good.