Fuel stop along Interstate 20

I went from a three bedroom home packed full of 25 years worth of “stuff” down to a 6′ x 9′ pallete of goods in less than 30 days.  I got by with a little help from my friends — Craig’s List, ebay, a garage sale, Good Will, and Atlanta Step-up, a local charity that helps homeless families get back on their feet again.

I sold every last bit of my furniture except for four things — an antique desk and china cabinet that belonged to my grandmother, and a glass coffee and a sofa table that I gave to my good friend Nita.  My last night in the house, Sunday, was the hardest when I had to get everything into boxes and into the U – Haul, get the house completely cleaned out, and get myself cleaned up to make it to the closing at the Real Estate attorney’s office by 11:00am. I stayed up until 5:00am that night working as hard as I could go, then had to get up at 6:00am to start again. I got maybe 30 minutes sleep that night.

A can of Red Bull got me through the hour-long closing with the cash buyer, an 80 year old woman with a bright red wig, red lipstick, and red fingernails to match.  She never shut up during the entire closing while I sat there stabbing myself in the leg with a fountain pen trying to stay awake.  As soon  as the paperwork was signed with check in hand, I headed straight to the U-Haul location to hook up the auto-transport with my car in tow to get out of downtown Atlanta and onto I-20 before the traffic started to pick up. I drove for about 2 hours, then had to pull into a grocery store parking lot and just sleep for an hour, as I could physically go no further.

I made it as far as Tuscaloosa, Alabama the first night with a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel through pouring rain and single-lane construction.  Thank goodness for the Motel 6 with pull-through parking, where I fell asleep at 7:00pm and slept like a dead person until 4:00am the next morning.  I was on the road by 5:00am the next morning, driving the additional 12 hours straight through. I was exhausted, but towing the car was not as bad as I thought it would be once I got used to it. Nine hundred miles, and I only hit one curb!

Now what’s left of my worldly possessions are sitting in my parent’s garage awaiting delivery of my new storage shed, with the hope that the value of the storage shed did not exceed the value of the “stuff!”