by Eric.

Packing up our apartment before the trip was sort of like escaping the embassy in Saigon. Probably more complicated though. Joan's mom, Elisa, would be moving in after we left. This allowed us to store some stuff in the apartment and the garage. Also our friend Andre offered some space in a spare room. The trouble was, for every item we packed, we had to decide the best storage place for it. Also some stuff had to be available for us to pick up later in the trip. The closet was the safest place to store stuff, but also the smallest so it had to be packed with precision.

We started packing a few things 3 weeks in advance. Katy was visiting and she helped pack many things, especially all of our framed pictures and art work (most of which she gave to me over the years). Even so, we had a long way to go. The shuttle bus to the airport would arrive at 6am wed. morning. At 6pm Tuesday night, we still had our furniture, bed, full kitchen cabinets, a computer, and innumerable other little thinks that you never notice lying around until it's time to go. Things like toy cars, a couple of walkmans, a box of papers, some of which might be important, but most are not, an apron hanging on the kitchen door, books Joan was still planning to read, etc.

Also, we still had to decide what would go with us on 6 week the east coast tour, which included 12 days in the Canadian wilderness and a wedding on Long Island. All of these things would have to be packed for flying while still leaving room for my 2 French horns. Katie and Roland (our friends and upstairs neighbors) stopped by and must have quickly decided that our situation was pretty desperate. They immediately started helping and helped us until about midnight. Dawn Baby (Joan's friend) had lent us her Miata for the last 2 weeks after we returned our leased Miata. She came over to pick up her car and ended up staying for a couple hours to help too. She packed with remarkable speed.

At about 8pm when we started taking apart the bed, it was clear we would not need it that night. Andre and another neighbor, David Cherry, helped us move it and some other furniture one block down the street to Andre's storage room. You would think it would be encouraging to have the furniture out but it just made the number of odds and ends laying around seem even worse. Every paper I picked up needed some attention - filed in the right place, put in the safe deposit box, taken with us to Pittsburgh. And you could never just say, "I'll deal with this later."

The computer was big thing to take care of. Before handing it over to Katie and Roland, I had to backup all of our important files and make sure everything still worked. Most important of the files were the Quicken data. Joan had spent 5 or 6 hours that morning planning our finances for the next 18 months. It was crucial we have this data with us for the trip. I cautiously took care of all this stuff then laid the computer out for Roland to pickup in the morning after we left.

We ending up bringing a suitcase, a day pack, 2 large backpacks, 2 French horns, and one enormous back pack (the one we call Homer). The darkest hour was just before dawn. At about 4:30, we could not find the backup disk of Joan's Quicken data. I was sure I had packed it but we could not find it. I wasn't worried because we still had the computer but when I turned it on, we couldn't find the latest data. It seemed to have vanished.

I knew I was not thinking clearly at that time of day. Joan said she would rather miss the flight than leave without those files. After about 30 minutes I figured out what happened but in the mean time I was going crazy with frustration. I guess you could call this the first computer nightmare of the trip.

At about 5am things were starting to look up. It was starting to get light. We had a few more heavy boxes to move to the garage. We heard someone walking around in the hallway out side. It was yet another neighbor, David in #8. (David and his wife Adrian also went on a group canoe trip for their honeymoon). His daughter woke him up and he couldn't go back to sleep. He helped us carry the last things into the garage. We brushed our teeth about 6am, packed the tooth brushes then realizes that all of the soap, mirrors, shampoo, hotel soap, hydrogen-peroxide, suntan lotion, etc. was still in the cabinet. As far as I know, it still is.

The shuttle came moments later. 

NEXT: Canoeing in Quetico.

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