We began the day with the knowledge that the day would be full. One more run to the landfill to get rid of the last vestiges of trash from our house. One quick visit to the post office to send a router back to Telus. A quick sit-down with Pierre to go through the paperwork that he needs to do when he gets back to BC in August.
But there is a rule to moving: everything takes a lot longer than you had planned. There is an occult force linked to everything to do with a move; that force conspires to scramble schedules in ways no reasonable person could anticipate. Worse, that occult force is intelligent; it accounts for the most meticulous contingency planning. It works like this: say a trip to the post office normally takes fifteen minutes. You, the mover, know about the occult force. So you build in a cushion, a soft, comfortable, thick cushion: you add 45 minutes to your original 15. You know this is absurd–but you do it because… well. You know.
That trip to the post office takes five minutes. Why? Because the occult force is just fucking with you. It knows that you have been conservative in your estimate for the trip to the landfill, but less so than you were with the post office. So… it unleashes its energy at the dump. And delays everything by an hour. And ainsi de suite. What this means is that your vague plan to leave by 10 am is replaced by the concrete reality of departing at 1 pm.
Yes if the occult force managed to slow us down, it didn’t manage to put a dent in our good cheer. That’s not because we’re immune to fits of choler. (We have witnesses to this effect.) No. It’s because we stayed with a wonderful friend. This friend not only provided us a comfortable place to stay and a wonderful dog to play with, but made a perfect breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast to start the day. So: occult forces be damned.
The good news: hauling a 5’x8′ trailer isn’t all that difficult.
The bad news: maximum speed is 55 mph / 88 kph. That’s not a big deal, but it does throw off the calculations that automated trip planners like Google Maps or Waze or AAA Triptik make when they help us plan our journey. So a six-and-a-half hour journey takes closer to ten. Again, we had inklings of this, so it didn’t come as a complete shock. But add a late departure, a slow vehicle, and frequent breaks, and we arrived in Revelstoke, our first stop, a little after 10:30 pm. The journey was long. And it was night.
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