My U-Haul Stories

While talking to a young man who recently moved back to our area, I was reminded of the many experiences that I have had hauling my stuff from one place to another. Here are a few:

• The first time I rented a U-haul was when I moved from Mississippi to Texas to attend seminary. I paid for a hitch to be attached to my car and then went to pick up a trailer from U-haul. After loading my stuff, I started to back out of our driveway and the axle on the trailer broke. I did not have that much stuff since I was moving into a dorm room. U-haul wanted us unload the trailer and they would send someone to pick it up for repairs and then return it the next day. My dad convinced them to bring a replacement with them and that they were going to unload and load the stuff into the new trailer. By the time this had happened it was after dinner, but I wanted to go ahead and leave because I knew I needed to get to seminary early to start looking for a job. I made it about half way and slept in a rest area before continuing to Fort Worth. When I checked in they asked why I was there so early, so I explained that I needed to find a job. I went to my room and fell asleep. I was awaken by a dorm employee who said that they heard I needed a job and that they needed an employee. I knew I had to get there the next day. That was definitely a God thing.
• Our next U-haul experience was moving our stuff to Missouri before we left for Foreign Missions. I  borrowed my parents' conversion van and picked up the U-haul trailer. They connected it, we took it home and loaded it and left early the next morning. A tail light was out, so we stopped by a U-hail place to get it fixed. As we were leaving, the trailer came unhitched and ran into my parents' van. They re-hitched the trailer, but the repairs on the van had to wait. We had removed the vand seats and placed our sofa in the back of the van. Wendy and I took turns sleeping on the sofa as we traveled, but I kept worrying that the trailer would come unhitched again.
• Then we moved from Missouri to Texas again...with a one year old...who cried after being trapped in a carseat for 8 hours between us in the front of a U-haul truck. Even though we stopped often for breaks, we were forced to stop early and find a hotel.
• Then when we moved from Texas to Florida, the company that was supposed to move us failed. We were supposed to get a pod delivered that we would fill, then they would pick it up and deliver it to our new house. A week before the move, they called to inform us that they realized they do not deliver to Florida. So I frantically called every truck rental place. Nobody within a 10 hour drive of our place had anything available for the next two weeks, so I wound up driving to Albuquerque New Mexico, 13 hours away. A young adult from our church went with me and we slept in the car for a few hours while waiting for the place to open in the morning. After getting the only truck they had available, which looked like it was a WWII surplus transport truck, we started back only to discover that they truck could barely make it up over the hills. It would slow to about 45 going uphill on the Interstate and then we would speed up as fast as possible before the next hill. We arrived in Crane, Texas and a crew helped us load the truck. We left after dinner and stopped an hour later to find a hotel for the night. Then we spent three days driving to Florida.
• Our next move was much easier. Our current church paid for a moving company to pack us and move us. Although Wendy was tricked into boxing a lot of the stuff herself because one of the packers was sick and the other simply quit after 8 hours of work. Then Wendy had the joy of driving two kids and two bunnies from Florida to Maryland, getting a speeding ticket in Virginia along the way.