Well yesterday was extremely fun. Rented our storage room (for a year, got a discount) and unloaded both trucks. Packing storage rooms is almost as much fun as packing the U-Haul, but with slightly different objectives. You want to U-Haul weight-distributed and packed tight so nothing shifts, but you want the storage room packed so that the stuff you'll need sooner/more frequently is at the front (and it's a good idea to at least be able to get to some of the stuff in the back without unloading the whole room!).
We managed to complete the task with many less bumps, bruises and lacerations than moving out of the house... guess we remembered which boxes and pieces of furniture bite LOL! I did nearly break my neck doing my monkey thing to get light stuff up and to the back... stood on a box that shifted while the suitcase I was kneeling on with the other leg started to slide, had to jettison the whole attempt and jump down 5 feet because I couldn't find the step stool. Yeah, that could have been a very nasty outcome!
But it's great to be all sorted out and not driving that brick anymore. Even the Dodge is much more spritely without several flat-packed bookcases, the bed, etc loading her down. You know when the suspension bounces up on a jacked-up off-road pickup you had her loaded almost to capacity ;) I love those IKEA bookshelves, but man are they heavy!
U-Haul reimburse us for the tire we replaced in Dawson without any issues. They also gave us some extra free miles on the trip because we were over by 27 (probably from being lost trying to find Jim & Kathleen's LOL). I don't know who sets those long-distance mileages, but even if we'd stayed on the straight and narrow we would only have come in by the skin of your teeth. I guess they don't want you to ever get loast, have to take a detour, or just take a scenic loop! A well, at least it's done and over with now :)
We'll go pick up the firearms from FFL dealership today. Hopefully that won't be an issue at all... pretty much everyone has guns up here (and needs them!) so no one gets all freaky with the transactions like they can in the Lower 48 (and Canada - OMG!!). We really can't go down to our property without at least the shotguns, and it'll be a load off our minds to have all our weapons back under our control again. I'm sure we'll have to do a little show and tell with Kari and the girls when we bring them home... really, almost everyone is into guns! I think that Mark and Eric (Kari's DH) will probably end up going hunting once he comes back from Iraq. Supposedly, we're in a really great hunting district, so that's a bonus for our friends ROFL! (Plus, there are certain things we can't hunt without a guide or a previously licensed hunter until we've been here longer).
If everything goes well, we'll have a PO Box and a temporary place to stay (while we break trail on our property) down in the village on Monday and can get all the legal/financial crap that needs an address all sorted out quickly. Luckily, no one even bats an eye in AK when you say you don't have a street address or a phone... it's refreshing! Once all that nonsense is taken care of and we're all legal and loaded, we can start the real work :D
3 comments:
Hallelujah! to your safe arrival! Now the real adventure begins!
Viva -- Sager
So, did you send firearms that you owned in the lower 48 to the FFL in Fairbanks? Or did you purchase new weapons?
Hi Parris, we had all our firearms sent from an FFL in Seattle to an FFL in Fairbanks. Technically, we could have mailed all the long guns to ourselves from Seattle to Alaska, and only used the FFL for the handguns, it was simpler to handle the entire transaction through the FFLs. Note that this was NOT a transfer since we were sending them to ourselves "care of" the Fairbanks FFL, so we didn't have to pay that transaction fee or file additional paperwork, we just paid the shipping charges and small fee for the service and storage.
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