Moving

Did I ever mention that we fell in love with our sailboat on Easter Sunday? We made an offer that afternoon.

Three years later, on Easter Eve, a man would come look at our boat. He'd fall under her spell. He was her next owner. What is it with Easter? 

We sold the boat, which actually took quite a few months by the time the deal was actually made and we had a check in hand. There was the whole ordeal of the new owner scraping together the money. The whole survey thing. The whole thing of him having to research needed repairs that the survey turned up. He had poor communication skills and fell off the radar for a few weeks, to the point where our broker was going to forfeit the dude's deposit and put the boat back on the market. Took forever and was stressful beyond all belief.

The guy looked at the boat on Easter weekend but it would be months before he actually decided to buy it. The boat was still for sale and would need to be ready to be shown to other potential buyers. It's really hard to try to sell a boat while its occupied by a messy little kid and a disgusting, drooling, pee-leaking dog. I'd spend all day cleaning, while trying to keep the kid from creating epic messes, while hoping the dog wouldn't eek out a greyhound fart in the mere moments before the potential new owners stepped aboard. I'd have to get the kid and the dog off the boat and entertain them for the hour or two it took the people to go through all the crevices of our boat. I was a stressed out mess. I lean toward neurotic and this was too much. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.

So I did what any thirty+ year-old would do. I emailed my mother in Denver and asked her if we could move in with her until we could kick our tenants out on July 1st, when our tenants' lease expired. She said yes, even though my 30+ year-old brother was also living with her at the time. Such bums, we are. She took in me and a kid and a husband and Immortal Greyhound. She's nice to a fault, that woman. At that point we weren't even sure we were going to move back to Denver permanently. We were tossing around the ideas of selling the house once the renters were out and heading to Chicago or Seattle. But still, she took us in and was way too nice about it. 

Shortly after that Easter weekend, I packed up the dog and the kid and headed West. I love road trips, especially with my kid. Seriously. He loves being strapped into a seat for twelve hours a day with nothing to do but watch movies and eat crappy fast food with the reward of a swim in the hotel pool at the end of the day. He's also a marathon-pee-holder, which makes him the ultimate road trip companion. We'd have little contests, he and I. "Hey, Chicago is another 250 miles. Do you have to pee?"  "Yeah, a little."  "So do I. Should we stop?"  "Uh, no. I think I'm good." Right on, little kid. Right on.

We made a detour in New York to visit Niagara Falls. We stuffed our faces with Cracker Barrel. We jumped on hotel beds and celebrated every state line as we crossed over. We made the mistake of overnighting in Cleveland, and hightailed it out of there so quickly the next morning that I failed to realize the back hatch wasn't properly latched. Immortal Greyhound was back there! I pulled off to securely close the hatch and then got lost in a shitty neighborhood trying to find my way back to the freeway. We made it to Denver in three days, picking Jon up along the way* somewhere in Nebraska. Nebraska is the only thing that sucks about road tripping, unless hours upon hours of cows and corn happen to get you off. 

Kiddo and Immortal at Niagara Falls

We got to Denver and moved into my mom's basement. Jon planned on flying back periodically to check on the boat. We checked on our house and all seemed well (oh, the surprises to come. Fucking tenants.). We got the kiddo signed up at a great gym. Have I mentioned he's a gymnast? Kid is seven and more muscular than most teenagers. Turns out his gym was more than great. He was invited onto the boys pre-team and is currently hard at work preparing for team tryouts in the spring. We settled in (as much as we could, living in my mom's basement) and decided that Denver wasn't half bad. We decided to stay.

Rocking the gymnastics abs.  

Sometime in May, Jon and I flew back to the boat and packed all of our shit. We loaded up a Budget truck, hitched our car to the trailer, and took off once again. Jon's a pretty good road tripper too, but he tends to lose his temper when the Budget truck shakes like a sonofabitch and has a major gas leak, undetected until somewhere in the middle of Bumfuck, Nebraska. 

Acting like he isn't homicidal behind the wheel of the moving truck.

We made it to Denver and moved our crap into a storage unit. Nothing to do now but wait for July 1st.

*bonus points of being an airline pilot: when your wife and kid embark on a huge road trip while you're out earning a living flying, you can meet them somewhere along their route in the relative comfort of a regional jet and opt out of some road miles. The kid and I have picked up Jon in Chicago, Omaha**, and Vegas, all three times while on totally different road trips.

**or was it Lincoln? Either way, it was Nebraska. cowsandcornandcowsandcornandcowsandcorn