Around the World in Eighty Days

Most of it, anyways. The movers (Broadway) came today and loaded all of our stuff into a "Lift Van". A Lift Van is a wooden crate that's 86" by 86" by 48" and is used when shipping household items via sea freight when you have less than a full 20-foot container of stuff. Part our of Master Plan in moving is to purge our unnecessary flotsam and jetsam and take with us only the bare minimum.

The packer was gobsmacked that we failed to fill a single lift van. He said that usually people are over. WAY over. He lamented that most pickups required standing around while people cracked their boxes back open and deliberated about what to take and what to leave.

I think we did pretty well. I think one of the reasons is that we taped off the dimensions of a lift van in the garage using blue masking tape and arranged things as we boxed them to get a sense of our total packed volume.



I also think we did pretty well because we boxed most things and all of the boxes fit together tetris-like to fill out our virtual lift van.

Now our stuff is in a crate that's nailed shut and on its way to The Port of Oakland---destined for a big freighter that's going to be on the high seas for eighty days or so, if you can believe it. Three months from now we'll be reunited with our gear. I wonder if we'll still want or need it by then.