Cross Country Adventure Day 2 - May 14, 2009

Depending on how you gage a day, really differs, but in my situation for the trip, I ended the day after the midnight mark and where the newest adventure began. The adventure with "the parents".


The drive back was rather uneventful. There were conversations, none noteworthy, as nothing included me. Mind you, I really don't feel like I'm self-centered or self-absorbed. It wasn't that if the conversation didn't revolve around me, that I wasn't interested. It wasn't really anything like that. What it was, was a group of people that have shared stories. Stories that they reminisced about and laughed about, which didn't include me as they didn't share the history of the story. Again, it was as if I wasn't there. A fly on the wall in a most awkward situation, that of course wanted nothing but to be at home snuggled in the comforts of my bed, or better yet with my family telling stories that I could include JC in. But the reality of the matter, I wasn't. I was in a mini van heading across Nevada into Arizona with a group of strangers, as an isolated outsider.

We arrived at the family home about two hours later. There wasn't anything memorable about the late night viewing out my window. The yard of their house was enclosed by fencing. We pulled into the yard, which housed an RV, a U-haul, a truck, several classic cars, a house, and a two car garage. The inside of the house wasn't completely packed up as it had been promised. The house appeared in disarray in attempts of packing, but a job surely left incomplete. Grandma and Aunt met us at the door when we arrived. JC and I had one of the bedrooms to sleep in which had boxes, and a full bedroom suite.

The last time I looked at the clock it was after 5:30a.m. Not that I settle in easily in the comforts of other's homes, but I had difficulty sleeping despite being overly exhausted and tired. The bed was extremely uncomfortable and the room was stuffy. I can't really say how long we or I actually slept, as I was awakened by the shower running in the adjacent bathroom. Shortly thereafter there were shouts and yelling and his mother screaming of cutting her finger.

Finally having enough, I got out of bed and stood wedged in between the bed and dresser searching for something to wear, standing in my night gown. There was a sudden quick bang on the door and without any hesitation, the door flung open. Fortunately, I had on my nightgown! In barged his mother who said that she cut her finger and needed a bandage which she grabbed from the nearby box on the dresser and off she went as loudly as she had come.

I went into the bathroom and got dressed. I put in my contacts and brushed my teeth. When I was done a few minutes later, I went back to the bedroom and closed the door. By now, JC was waking up. I decided to put in the movie to finish watching the ending, about five minutes which we had missed the night before. In searching for where we left off, there was another loud banging on the door instantly followed by his sister's (D) rude and loud entrance. Again, I'm glad that I was dressed. Mind you - in my family, we would knock and yell but never do you enter a closed door out of fear of what you may find behind that door!

D proceeded to yell at us, specifically JC; however, I was right next to him and his trusty companion in this three ring circus adventure. She began screaming and throwing in a few obscenities about how we needed to get out of bed as they had been up for over an hour and had packed half of the u-haul! JC said we would be out shortly and she stormed out of the room. JC didn't seemed phased by his older sister of three years, who at this point seemed neither none the smarter or wiser and definitely not nicer! We finished the movie and joined the other's outside. No one was working. No one was packing. It appeared to be break time, a good 30-45 minute break time and that U-haul that was half packed may have been 1/10th packed, if that! But shut my mouth I did.

You see, that day was a very long day. A day surmised by temperatures upwards to 107 degrees, which surprisingly I was the only one that didn't seem to be having an issue with! I suppose that meant that I wasn't working hard enough. We had a couple breaks, where we lounged in the pool behind the house and next to the mother-in-law house.

It quickly became apparent that the large U-haul was not going to fit everything. Decisions had to be made about what would come and what would go. The first part of the U-haul, boxes were stacked and packed. They were not opened, a concern wasn't made about what exactly went into that U-haul. Until the first of the boxes was opened. A box full of...only department store hangers. Upon this realization, we quickly decided that boxes needed to be opened and junk needed to be left behind. Junk and trash that was the livelihood and life of his parents and grandmother. Trash that they felt was worthy and necessary and who were we to judge what wasn't important to them?

Meanwhile, grandma was inside the house having a mental breakdown. She was crying and sobbing and fearing that her personal and valuable possessions weren't going to be packed. Grandma mind you is 86. If you have been reading my posts chronologically, you will recall my relationship with the elderly is not exactly warm and fuzzy. And grandma was the sheer epitome of the elderly that I loathe. The crotchety, haggard, self-absorbed, old-folk that have nothing nice to say to anyone. She yelled. She screamed. She cried. She bellowed. She sobbed. She barked. For many hours, she called a variety of U-haul dealers in attempts to rent another U-haul to be sure that her things made the trip home; however, grandma didn't care how exactly the U-haul was going to drive itself home. Because of the nine people - grandma at 86 who doesn't drive, nephew at 16 who just learned how to drive, mom who doesn't really drive, dad's health which is poor and the reality that there are already four vehicles, the options for drivers was pretty dismal. But mind you, grandma didn't care. Grandma's stuff was going to make it back to Michigan come hell or high water!

I did my best to pack the already packed boxes onto the truck or to hand them to JC. I consolidated when boxes seemed light. I filled drawers with junk boxes which included grandma's second husband's dentures, junk, old business cards, and other miscellaneous objects. The dresser consisted of three drawers of a variety of black elderly shoes - about 22 pairs of them! Mind you, grandma had even more of similar shoes yet to be packed on the U-haul! When we had loaded all of the packed up boxes with the exception of the Aunt's belongings, it was time to start packing up the remainder of the house and surroundings.

I headed into the grandma's room to see what I could complete. A $29.00 valued desk, which included one drawer was against the corner wall. The carpeting against the wall was covered in inches of animal hair and dust, as was the majority of the residence. It was more than disgusting! I opened up the single cupboard door of the desk and found an old edition of a Mesa Arizona Yellow Book, applications for US passports partially filled out and a couple other miscellaneous unimportant papers. I took the applications out to dad and gave them to him as they had vital personal information. The rest, I threw in the garbage. Grandma, managing the situation and barking out orders came into the room and scoured the garbage. She immediately pulled out the Yellow Book and apparently a single page calendar and started yelling about who would throw out her personal belongings and that they were hers and she had to have them! I'm pretty sure I made the woman cry. And, I didn't even feel remotely sad about it. I just wanted her to leave. Leave me alone. Leave the house. Shut up. Quit your bitching and leave us to get the job done. Because her being elderly did not give her permission to be a cantankerous old hag. In my book, she didn't earn that right. No one has.

Grandma left the room, finally on an angry mission to wreak havoc on others. I continued on my mission to finish up her room. On the other wall was a taped up armoire of sorts - the cheap $49 brand new concoction of opening doors which house a rack to hang clothes and then two drawers underneath. The back of armoire was the cardboard backing which you tack on. When we tried to move it, the tacks popped out and the cardboard backing became loose. Grandma was again in hysterics. The cabinet had to be packed! We asked what was in it, and she pulled back some of the tape revealing about a dozen hangered clothes. I offered that I could repack her personal belongings but that there wasn't room for the cabinet. JC and D told her this as well. She began to get really upset and finally agreed to let me repack. I sent the hangered clothes out of the room, which were packed into one of the vehicles. I opened the top drawer to find more shoes and blankets. The bottom drawer, (this is classic) was filled with pants hangers. Grandma began to shriek, "Those are my SPECIAL HANGERS! I have to have them!" Mind you, these hangers were your Class A generic department store pants hangers and there must have been at least 50-100 of them in this drawer alone. Grandma did get some of those damn hangers, about 25 of them, since I promised to pack them but JC made sure she didn't get anymore, and didn't feel she was entitled to even that many!

If I haven't mentioned, grandma also has a dog, as do JC's parents and a cat. Grandma's dog is just like grandma. It's mangy and snarly and sniveling. Nothing was remotely cute about grandma's dog. I suppose what they say is true, pet owners begin to look like their pet.

We stopped to eat lunch about two hours after we started, about 2p.m. our time although we never had breakfast. Mom had been professing about a dozen times about the feast of a meal she had prepared since we were picked up the night before - brats, potato salad, and pasta salad. You would have thought that she had chased down the pig with her bare two hands and sacrificed it with her own flesh and blood in order to feed us. I have to admit that it was good to eat, but I guess that I'm spoiled when it comes to the feeding of others when work is involved.

We worked long into the day. The theme of the day remained about grandma's bitching about having to have the dining room table set and the bedroom suite. The aunt or the nephew could drive the second U-haul back to Michigan but she wasn't leaving her things behind! She continued to make phone call after phone call. Every time I walked through the house and grandma was seated in the front room in a recliner chair she would bellow out at me and ask me what I wanted or what I was looking for. She would order that I was doing something wrong or that I was lifting too much. But thank god she found that Yellow pages in the garbage to continue on her search for a cheap instant U-haul overnight! What grandma did workout between her mental breakdowns was she was trading in her 2004 Intrepid for a 1998 truck that had just had a rebuilt engine installed that would be ready by 10:00a.m. (1:00p.m. Michigan time) the following day.

At that point, I had had ENOUGH. Someone seriously had to put grandma in her place, and I surely wasn't going to be the one! If grandma had to have her stuff, she would be responsible for unpacking her jammed to the gills Intrepid, loading the truck on her own and driving it back to Michigan because I sure as hell wasn't going to sit around until some truck became available by mid-day on Friday when the plan was to be home Sunday night. Hell to the NO. And this, I did share with JC. Apparently, someone must have sedated grandma because that plan never came to fruition. She got everything with the exception of the kitchen table and bedroom suite - which were sold for a couple hundred dollars by the end of the day.

There was also a couple other issues with grandma. The first being that one large box was brought onto the U-haul and a pool of oil formed on the floor of the U-haul which I immediately lost my balance in! We opened the box and found a decorative oil lamp and four glass panels for a curio cabinet. The box had been labeled upright, but apparently it had been tipped. The box was packed with shredded paper, like all of the boxes, clearly not appropriate packing material. We opened the box and tried to determine what to repack the lamp in. I took the glass into the house at which point grandma again went ballistic. She became irate as to why the box had been opened in the first place and carried on. I tried to explain the spillage of oil, but grandma didn't care. Grandma had gone off the deep end and trying to engage in a rational discussion was beyond pointless. Then there was the issue of the mirrors. The mirrors that grandma (you guessed it!) had to have! There were four mirrors that were wall mirrors of various sizes, but all very large. They laid upon the side of the wall in the house. Grandma began to get irate as to what was happening with the mirrors. I informed grandma that the mirrors were going in the RV under the seat cushions for protection. Grandma's response?

What? What did you say? In the CAMPER? Yes, in the camper, under the cushions. Grandma then getting even more angrier, NO they can't go in the CAMPER! They can't go under the cushions! That's where the cat is going!

Yeah right dumb lady, the cat is going under the seat cushions where I will smother it along with you to an untimely death. Seriously, the cat is not going under the seat cushions. The cat does not require the ability and need to sit on cushions that are not on top of mirrors that are being secured for a trek across the country. But, apparently, grandma won as the mirrors ended up in the car we were towing, which was already too low to the ground without anything in it!

Oh and did I mention the other theme of the day? That whenever a tool was needed to fix something, undo something, etc. "it's already packed in the U-haul." The never ending comment. Nothing had been planned for. JC's motto is you have to have the right tool for the right job. This was obviously NOT the case and JC was getting more and more irritated as the day went on.

By early evening, the U-haul was completely packed. JC went to check the lighting on the trailers for the cars to find that none of them were working. The sun was quickly setting. The plan was for everyone but JC and I to stay at a nearby hotel, about 8 miles away. We had the only bed left in the house. Initially it was thought that the family would drive the RV to the hotel since everyone could ride in it, but apparently plans changed as the RV would have to be inspected to be parked in a hotel parking lot, even with permission. So the nephew drove back and forth to the hotel numerous times transporting one person at a time to the hotel.

JC and I had to make a trip to WalMart to purchase a wiring kit for one of the trailers. I was pretty excited as that allowed us to grab snacks and food for the ride as well. We also called and ordered pizza from WalMart that we went to pick up on the way back home. Unfortunately the pizza place we called was not the pizza place we went to! The guy was most fabulous and he called the other store and cancelled our order and made us our order. For the ten minutes we sat outside, watching the now setting sun and drank Bud Light Lime in the solitude of silence away from the cackling and bitching of his family. Alone at last. In peace and quiet. Not in any rush, we took our pizza across the street to an open field, sat on the tailgate of the truck and ate our pizza, shared stories and had a beer. It was by far one of the best parts of the day!

Seeing that the sister was going to be back at the house at 10:30p.m. we finished up and headed back to the house. Needless to say, she didn't come back. She didn't have a way to get back, so she stayed at the hotel - come to find out to gamble and get some much needed R&R. JC on the other hand, with some assistance from his dad, struggled with hooking up the trailer lights without proper tools. Needless to say, this went on for what seemed like hours. It was beyond dark and it was late. He finally got the lights to work enough. We had hooked up one of the vehicles. We were using the truck to pull out the old cars to line them up for quick hookup in the morning so that we could leave at a decent hour. JC and I wanted to leave by 8a.m. our time, 5:00a.m. Arizona time, but the reality of that situation was pretty grim.

The truck was packed with a variety of junk. It was packed with two electric amigos - grandma's and dad's. It had a variety of cement lawn ornaments, the truck tool box was also stocked full of cement yard art - mind you, not a screwdriver in sight! Also in the back of the truck was the cow mailbox and a very large cement light post with a cement man adjacent to the bottom. A wheel chair was also added. We had attempted to strap down the truck to avoid anything flying out of the truck in transit. When JC saw the wheelchair by mid-afternoon in the truck bed he had had it! The wheelchair had to go! He took the wheelchair out of the truck and with the aunt watching and aiding with where to discard it, he headed off behind the back of the garage.

When everyone had left for the hotel, JC decided that we needed to take a break before moving the last trailer and car. I told him we should just get it done and then take a break. By this time it was 1:00a.m. I had tried to line the truck up with the trailer hitch as best as I could by getting in and out of the truck several times. I was pretty impressed, but even an inch off is too far. JC stood at the front of the trailer to direct me, when I heard something remotely similar to, SON OF A BITCH! NO FUCKIN WAY, YOU GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

At that point, I put the truck in park and jumped out. I had no idea what had happened. I thought I hit the hitch or the trailer wasn't functional, or...I really had no idea!

And what did I see? There in the dark, at the front of the trailer wedged between the trailer and the classic car, but none other than....THE WHEELCHAIR. Somehow the damned wheelchair had been resurrected from it's previous resting place, burried under blankets and hidden behind the garage.

At that point, all I could think of was Chevy Chase's Vacation movie. I was going to put grandma and her stupid dog in that wheelchair, strap them in on top of a car and drive away. I had had enough. I admit that I was at my ultimate boiling point and pretty low. While I would never wish harm on grandma or anyone else, this seemed like the only viable option. And, I honestly didn't care if grandma was alive or not when I strapped her in, as long as she was QUIET! Amazing what 20 hours of constant bitching and nagging, chaos, heat exhaustion, fatigue and 107 degree weather will do to even the most sane of people!

We managed to hook the trailer up and pull the car in place for the next morning. With everything in place, we closed everything up and headed in the house for the evening. We went outside for a quick swim and a beer, but all I really craved was a good shower! I went inside for the shower and we enjoyed the peace and quiet.

It was after 4:30a.m. when we crawled into bed, ready for a night of decent sleep. We knew that we couldn't leave until everyone arrived back at the house, on their timeframe. As we laid in bed, with the ceiling fan on, what did we hear?

GRANDMA'S STUPID DOG.

Grandma's dog was lost without grandma. The damn mutt paced the pergo flooring with a continuous click, click, click. And if that wasn't bad enough, that nasty mutt had a bell, which continuously went tink, tink, tink. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, the dog whined like a bitch in heat, whine, whine, whine. So you put it all together and you have click, tink, whine, click, tink, whine, click, tink, whine... I was going to personally KILL the dog. I didn't care anymore. I NEEDED my sleep and nothing of grandma's belongings, with her out of my sight, was going to keep me from sleep! JC got out of bed and let both dogs outside, at which point they started barking up a storm. You would have thought that we were being robbed by the ruckous they made in the middle of the night! He brought them back in the house where the stupid dog, what was his name? "Changey" or something stupid, I think she named him Change but called him Changey for his nickname. Might as well call him quarter or penny for all I cared! We couldn't console the dog, so we did what we could, turned another fan on, shut the door and hoped to drown out all the noise to get a few hours of sleep for the night.

We could only be thankful that everyone was alive and well. We had survived an entire day of packing up the family. With the hard part out of the way, we were ready in a few short hours to connect all the vehicles to the RV and the truck and pull on out of his parent's residence for the past decade for our Cross Country Adventure. Afterall, the plan was to get home by Sunday evening: 2000 miles later, equivalent to 36 hours of continuous drive time averaging 55mph. We had no plans to get a hotel or stop for an evening. A true adventure this would be!