Moving day. E and I had breakfast at the hotel and checked ourselves out around 9AM and drove over to the UHaul rental place. As we pulled in, noticed that they had a commercial van available for rent at the same $19.95 rate as the pickup, and since the day was a little bit wet (it had rained in the early morning) I made a snap decision to rent that instead of the pickup. Turned out to be the PERFECT vehicle for us. The rental desk made the change in just a couple of minutes and I drove the van over to Robert and Ashley’s apartment where we began to load it up. Only took about a ½ dozen trips up and down the stairs before we were ready to make the short trip over to the new place.
Managed to snag a parking meter spot on the street about 50’ from the door to the new place so we proceeded to start unloading and taking stuff up to the new apartment. Unlike Robert’s description and VERY unlike the drawing he’d made from memory, the apartment was NOT the tiny matchbox we had been dreading we’d find. Instead, it was a pretty expansive studio, with lot of space in the main room for bed, shelving, desk, and (eventually) chair or 2 seat sofa. The kitchen was small, but not oppressively so. We’d eventually select and have a counter-height table with two stools shipped up to Robert so he’s have both more work area as well as a place to eat his meals.
After unloading everything we returned the van (surprising the UHaul folks with how quickly we’d finished) and then all four of us went and grabbed food at a nearby Wendy’s before dropping Robert off and making our exit around 2PM to head to Seattle. After we’d gone about 10-12 miles, Robert called – turned out we’d accidentally left our backpack of electronics at his place! Fortunately, we had enough time to turn around and head back into Bellingham so Andrew could scurry up to the apartment and retrieve our stuff. That taken care of, we once again set out to the airport.
Traffic was very light until we got to about 11 miles north of Seattle, at which point the next 15 miles to the airport took us about an hour. We pulled off a couple of exits early, following guidance from E, who’d made this trip before, so we could approach the rental return garage by way of a gas station to refill the tank before we finally pulled back into the Budget return entrance of the airport. As usual, drop-off was painless and we were headed toward the shuttle buses to get to the terminal.
We arrived about 1.5 hours before boarding time, giving us ample time to clear security and purchase some food which we consumed waiting at the gate. The return flight was uneventful – the upgraded seats in Economy Plus on Delta was once again a nice thing. Back at the SJC airport, we called the parking folks for pickup and ended up waiting about 10-12 minutes for their arrival. There were also two large families who got picked up at the other terminal after we’d gotten on, so we had a full house by the time we were heading to the offsite location. Unfortunately, in the confusion of changing our dates I’d failed to update the parking dates. As a result, our pre-paid reservation included the day BEFORE we flew and did NOT include the day we came back, so I ended up having to pay for an additional day at non-discounted prices. Annoying, but not fatal. With that payment made we loaded up in our car and drove home.
Mission accomplished!
BTW: Eagle-eyed readers might have noted that today's entry is labeled as "Day 4"...but is time-stamped two days later than Day 3's entry. Apparently, somewhere along the way I failed to record any details about one of the day of our trip! I know there's a missing day as I still had emails from Delta with all our flight info, so I know our trip happened 8/13/21 to 8/17/21. I didn't get around to transcribing and posting this from Word to the blog until Aug 2026 (i.e. five years post-trip), so the memories are long since faded. The mystery day will remain a mystery.
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