Moving Still Fucking Sucks

In December, during his last trip to Morristown, Palumbo made a strong case for why I needed to get off my ass and move to Brooklyn. Jake and Buck were short a roommate, leaving a room available and I wouldn't be responsible for any deposits or whatnot, so it was the perfect opportunity. Just load up the necessities and go.
After combining my tax return with money I had put away over the preceding months I decided it was time to do it. I would rent a small cargo van and make the trip. I had planned to leave my car at my parents' house, since cars are a luxury and not a necessity in New York City. I also didn't know if my 1988 BMW 528e with going on three-hundred thousand miles would enjoy a 700 mile, 11 hour trip.

Problem is, I couldn't find anyone that rented a cargo van for a one-way trip from Morristown, Tennessee to Brooklyn, New York. You can rent full size trucks, but I didn't need and couldn't budget in an 18' U-Haul truck. At that point I concluded that my car was road-worthy enough to make it to Brooklyn because it has no major issues aside from a small oil leak. Change the oil and the air filter and it's ready to go.

The Weather Channel website has a useful feature for Interstate driving trips where you input various stops along your route and the time that you expect to be there and it gives you a forecast. At this point I'm about a week into March and planning on heading out on the 12th. As the 12th approaches, it begins to look like the 12th will be colder and rainier than previously announced, so I move the trip back three days to the 15th, which will be dryer and warmer. A key issue in not driving the BMW was initially that the heater core is busted and would cost around six-hundred American dollars to replace, mostly in labor costs as the heater core is behind the glove compartment in the dashboard.

I plan to head out around 3 AM on the 15th so that I arrive at mid-day. I'd stay up all night Friday the 13th until around 4 PM Saturday the 14th, just after the UNC-Florida State basketball game, sleep until 11 PM Saturday and head out around 3 AM. Unfortunately I had planned the time of the trip before the "spring forward" aspect of daylight savings time. I don't see particularly well when driving at night, and in order to minimize the amount of time driving in the dark, I decide to leave at 4 AM. I make this decision on Saturday at about 3 PM and decide to stay up for the rest of Saturday, get some sleep from 9 PM Saturday until 3 AM Sunday. It's also worth noting that I had only slept for about four hours on Thursday and had actually slept for about three hours Saturday morning. So when I left Morristown at 4:20 AM Sunday morning, I had only gotten about 11 hours sleep in the previous three days.

On Saturday I loaded up the BMW with as much as I could; clothes, some books, the PC, two guitars, various odds and ends. It was raining all day Saturday, but the forecast was still expecting the rain to clear out overnight. When Lewis Black says "meterologist" is Latin for "liar", he isn't joking. It was still raining when I woke up Sunday morning and the radar predicted that the storm system that had unexpectedly moved into eastern Tennessee from Louisiana would continue moving in a northeasterly direction along the I-81 corridor that I was planning to drive through. It rained, steady and hard, without stopping, from the time I left Morristown until I crossed into West Virginia some five hours later. In fact, I managed to travel a distance of nearly seven-hundred miles through seven states in approximately eight hours of daylight without actually seeing the sun. I didn't see the sun until a few hours after I arrived in Brooklyn.

Aside from spending five hours driving a heavily loaded car through a pouring rain, wishing badly that it would stop raining and warm up, the trip itself was uneventful. I made it to Brooklyn in one piece, loaded on coffee and energy drinks, and I'm still in the process of preparing myself for the adventure of living in Brooklyn. We'll see how this goes.