Moving Day

One of the perks of joining the Foreign Service is that the State Department takes care of moving you and your belongings from place to place. This is a very good thing because the job requires a move about every two years and this relocation is generally international in scope. State contracts with big burly men in big gas-guzzling trucks to come out to your house, pack all of your belongings, carry all of those boxes and heavy pieces of furniture out to the truck (in our most recent case down four flights of stairs), and then do it all in reverse at the final destination.

It sounds like a good deal, and to be honest it is, but it isn’t at all a simple process. There’s scheduling movers, scheduling a time for the estimator to come and look through your things, there is sorting out all of the junk that accumulates over time and deciding what is trash and what is to be given to charity, there’s splitting all of our worldly goods into piles of “going in the car,” “going to long term storage,” and “going via air to our new apartment.” All of these steps take a lot of time and we haven’t even reached moving day.

Our moving company was Paul Arpin and we had a very good experience. I can’t really take any credit as the State Department contracted them, but if you’re looking for a mover, check them out. Three burly New England men showed up bright and early led by their fearless leader Roy who looked much like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s mean brother. They very quickly tissue wrapped and boxed everything that we own and in no time at all had loaded a semi-trailer with our goods. In theory we were there supervising and offering input, but in reality we just ate the donuts that we bought for them. The loveseat that took my dad and I about a half hour to drag up to our third story apartment with loads of swearing took these guys about 2 minutes and only minor swearing to remove. The only real gripe we had with things was that they didn’t bring a scale like they were supposed to so we think we probably went over our weight allowance for the air shipment. This means we’ll have to pay about $2.00 a pound for the excess if we ever want to see those items again. More than likely we’re going to need to fork over a few hundred dollars.

The plan after seeing our things drive away (possibly to never be seen again) was to stay in a hotel for the night and get an early morning start on the eight hour drive the next day. Well, we certainly managed the early morning start part of that. We had, let’s say, a bad hotel experience. Our best guess is that someone was filming a large skill porn epic in the room above ours so we finally gave up on trying to sleep at about 1am and decided to hit the road. We made it to DC by 10am.

Our new apartment is great and we had the unexpected bonus of finding a gas fireplace in our unit. We have rental furniture and are quite happy with it although they forgot the lamps so we’re living in darkness at the moment. We have endless restaurants to try out and the Metro is just a few blocks away. It’s going to be a fun time exploring the area.