Last Days - Hellish Packing and Almost Locked into Public Storage

So my blogs are gonna be a little chronologically disjointed cause we've been so busy packing and moving stuff into storage (by we I mean I have been going to Riverside and dropping stuff off).

Packing the apartment was hellish. You know how you always think, "it's not going to be so much; I can just take it in my dad's 7 foot pickup" and then you end up having to rent a 16 foot moving truck at the last second to fit it all? Yeah, that's what happened.

Fortunately, we had a huge amount of help from Megan's dad, Ben, so we got it all in one go using the truck. He even hired a guy to help us with the painting, since we had made the ill-advised decision to paint it for a couple of months. Hey we can just paint it back in jiffy anyway right? We'd planned to move out completely by about 11am Saturday. We actually arrived at Jeff's place to spend the night before heading to San Jose at about 3am Sunday morning. If Ben hadn't helped us, we would have left SoCal Monday morning.

Thanks Ben! It's much appreciated. We really didn't realize we would need so much help, but you thought of us!

So on Saturday night I made the last drive to Riverside with the moving truck. My buddy Moon Bo helped me out with the last drive. We got to the Public Storage site at about 8:30pm. I thought we would unload everything within about 20 minutes. Turns out by the time the clock hit 8:57 we still had about half the truck left. At this PS site, the doors lock at 9pm for security purposes. If you are caught in the PS after 9pm, the gate locks and you have to call the police to come get you out.

Oh crap, we're gonna be locked in! And if we call the police and they are busy, they might not come help us until the next morning. So we started frantically throwing things in there. Moon Bo was stacking up boxes as best he could while I was literally sprinting to and leaping from the moving truck to bring him new stuff to stack. He did a great job packing real quick-like (for some reason he was deathly afraid the cops would show up) and soon I was locking up the door and checking my pockets to make sure I didn't leave any keys thrown around anywhere. I jumped back in the truck and Moon Bo helped me back it out of the site. We got to the front gates and I looked at the key pad. The time stamp said 9:10pm. OK... probabaly this has some kind of grace period... even so it's only either 10 or 15 minutes long. So if that number changes to 9:11pm, we are stuck in here. What's the goddamn pass code? Fortunately my memory was unusually sound just then and the gates began to open. We hopped into the truck and drove to safety. We were both soaked from running back and forth, but we congratulated each other on the mission accomplished.

Thanks Moon Bo! A true friend through thick and thin. Who knew packing could be so exciting?