Blog 16 Moving Day Finally Arrives

I am not sure that we would schedule a move again immediately after the Christmas Holidays, but it did work out. The problem is that so many places are closed between Christmas and New Year, and many service providers are operating at reduced levels.

Anyway the packer/movers were scheduled to arrive Friday, January 2^nd and have everything removed by the next day (which seemed highly unlikely). Little did we know that the West Point Movers would send ten workers, arriving the first day at 8am and staying to 10pm, and returning the next day early in the morning.

Luckily our next door neighbors (“the best ever”) had us over for Friday night and we crashed in one of their guest rooms and then even though they were out, gave us the keys to their place for Saturday night.

All we needed to do on Sunday was figure out how to get rid of all the stuff we decided not to move, and to have someone in to clean the carpets. Remember our house was still on the market during all this excitement.

The carpet cleaner (The Carpet Man, San Ramon, CA) was fantastic and arrived right on time. And luckily, during the garage sales we met a young musician who agreed to take anything that went unsold or that we didn’t want. He agreed to come pick up everything we were leaving. And our home cleaning service agreed to come in the following week and try to return things to near normal.

Off to the motel……..and on to our Big Island dream

Blog 15 Packing and Getting Ready for the Move

Matson Container Ship on Way to Big Island

At this point, your reminder lists will stretch to well over two pages, e.g., donate books to library, find somewhere for the old computer, plan going away party, fix back door, hold garage sales, etc., etc., etc.

This is probably about when I started to lose it, right after Thanksgiving.  After all we were moving January 5, and I was thinking, “how will we ever get everything done?”  Luckily, my wife was a stabilizing influence.  Remember that before now all I had known were corporate moves.  She had seen the “real deal” several times -- before we had met.

Last Corporate Move -- 2006

We picked a moving company after getting several estimates, and knew that we wanted help packing.  Hardier souls can obviously do this themselves and save considerable money.  Partially as an economy measure we did box some things ourselves and even shipped certain items that we would need until our furnishings arrived and many of our books.

The US Postal Service has a phenomenal price on shipping books.  So after about ten trips to the post office we probably shipped forty boxes of books for maybe $200.

Container Ship and Tug Entering Hilo Harbor

Part of our concern was that when we had our possessions eyeballed by the moving companies, they agreed it looked like a tight fit for a 45-foot container (their biggest).  And we did not want to have to ship two of them.  So moving the books our self was a big help.  Our container ended up 99.5% full (whew ...)!

Blog 14 Getting Vehicles to the Islands

We used a company named Pasha Hawaii (https://www.pashahawaii.com ) to ship both our cars and had a good experience for about $1,100 per car.  But there are plenty of other companies that also provide the same service if you want to shop around and get several prices.

Transport time was about three weeks, so we sent one car early in order that it would be in Hilo when we arrived there permanently.  The nearest drop-off point to us was Hayward, California near Oakland.  Pasha Hawaii has pick up points all along the western coast.  If you are inland you may need an auto transporter firm to get your car port side.

We kept our second car as long as possible, but since the shipping date was Tuesday and we were leaving the following Monday, we needed to rent a car for that one last six-day period.

We also needed to arrange a rental car at the Kona airport for the two hour drive to Hilo.  Kona had the only non-stop flights from the Bay Area, otherwise transferring in Honolulu to change planes for Hilo is seamless, but with two animals traveling in freight we wanted the trip to be as short as possible.