Moving Nightmares

Cracked has a good round up on the horrors of moving yourself, and I have to say that I not only laughed at what they wrote, but also at the memories of every family move we made when I was growing up.

My step-dad worked for the Air Force as a civilian until he got fired for chronic stupidity.  After he and my mother got married when I was 13, we moved 7 times by my 17th  birthday.  Since there was money to be made in moving yourself at the .gov's expense, all of these except one were done by putting everything we owned into his RV, his Jeep CJ-5 on a hitch, and the back of my mother's station wagon, securing it all with strapping tape, then wedging the cats, dogs, and kids into the back of the RV and driving like a madman to get wherever we were headed.

Of course, the sentence in the article that really caught my eye in the Cracked article was this:

Buy a folding chair, a packet of no-doze and a gun. Camp out in front of your moving van; shoot everybody that looks like they need a shower.

You see, my introduction to handguns was my stepfather parking the family caravan behind the seedy hotel we were staying the night at, taking me to the construction area in the next lot over, letting me fire a few rounds from his .41 Magnum revolver, then putting me on guard duty next to the RV for the night.  What he expected to tell the cops if my 16 year old self had put a couple of rounds into the interesting characters who stopped by during the night is beyond me.  I did this for the 3 nights it took to drive from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Pittsburgh, California.  By the last night in Lake Tahoe, I was ready to do anything that got me arrested, because at least I could sleep in jail.


Needless to say, as an adult, I have been resistant to any idea that included me using a U-Haul.  Every move I've ever done was done with a moving service, and I've never regretted it or fussed about the expense.