Tetris champions- our first week as full timers

It's so funny how you plan, and you plan and you plan. Then the time comes for actually doing what you planned and it seems like a surreal experience. This is how the last week has felt for us.  We had multiple goodbye dinners and drinks with all our friends in San Diego, we worked feverishly to move out of our condo, shedding many years worth of belongings in the process, and then the move out day came.  Reality hits!!!

Well we had one last goodbye get together on Sunday night which scuppered the plans to get the final cleaning in the house done, which meant that at 5am on Monday morning I was taking out all of the refrigerator shelves and cleaning them like a demon. After days and weeks of Goodwill trips and moving our things into temporary storage, this was the final car loading day. We headed off to get the Airstream with a mixture of excitement and fear. Bye bye condo, hello Aluminium trailer.

At pick up we both were excellent students, concentrating hard on the right way to hitch. I don't know much about this towing business, but keeping the trailer attached to the truck when moving seems kind of important. After pulling off the lot we then had a fun hour practicing how to back the beautiful tin can up, in a college parking lot. Hmm I would give us a passing grade, needs improvement.

Our pull-through spot at Prado

We spent our first four nights at Prado Regional Park in Chino. We chose this for several reasons, it was close to the Airstream Dealer should anything go wrong, we could hop on the freeway to San Diego to get the rest of our stuff from storage, and MOST IMPORTANT it had pull through campsites. (See needs improvement comment above).  Our truck, now named Big Ben had the final touches made to make it ready for the road. At the dealer we had running boards and a spray in bed liner added and Iain fitted a retractable bed cover. The truck is ready for action. We took two 200 mile round trips to San Diego over the next few days which emptied our storage and finally on Thursday we had everything with us at our campsite.

Beverly Hillbillies

Final challenge: fit everything into the truck or trailer. Now over the last few weeks, while we have been staging our stuff in storage, we have become pretty competent at real life Tetris, developing a perfect eye for what could fit where. In this challenge we had to go up a level or two. The difficulty was increasing and our timer was running out. Someone else would be in our spot by Friday. So with the pressure on, we sorted, consolidated, made a few more Goodwill trips. At times it looked like chaos, and our fellow campers may have thought that the Beverley Hillbillies were staying in town but by Friday at noon, we were triumphant. Tetris high score!!!!!!!!

With everything packed up we pulled out, with a sense of achievement that we had done it, got everything we owned on the road with us. Now confession time, some of that stuff was just rammed into any available space, no rhyme or reason, no organization, Martha does not live in this Airstream. But over the next few weeks we have time to get organized, and with newly honed Tetris skills like ours we know it will fit in beautifully.