The month of May is done and boy it has been a busy one. We returned to U.S. on the 27^th of April and started with a visit at my mother’s place in Florida. I was lucky enough to bring a cold that turned into bronchitis with me. We arrived while my mother was in Boston, but she returned after a couple of days and as always it was good to see her.

Our plan was to ship the trusty(?) 18-year-old Saab from Florida, where it spent the winter, to Chicago where we are spending the summer. Once the car was dispatched, we were heading to Baltimore to see our most perfect granddaughter – and her parents – for her birthday, then to New York for a flying visit to my company’s office, followed by a flight to North Carolina to see our niece graduate college (yay Jillian!)and then finally to Chicago for the summer (or at least the when we would hope that weather would be reasonably close to summerish).

As always, things didn’t go as planned. Shipping a car in the U.S. is a study in nervousness. You contract with a broker who then “finds” a carrier to take your car. The normal pickup window is five days, and as a general rule the carrier does not agree to take the car until 24-48 hours before the pickup. In our case, the broker could not find a carrier and so at the end of five days, they said they would continue to look and would find someone – soon. A quick side note, the car carriers cannot enter the street that my mother lives on, so when they are close, they call/text and I meet them on a larger street, they load the car up and it is gone. Because of this, I cannot leave the car to be picked up on its own.  We were leaving the next day to go to Baltimore, so I couldn’t wait for them to find a carrier in the near(?) future.

Time for a new plan. One possibility was to drive to Baltimore (16 hours), then either ship it or drive it to Chicago.  However, that would require us to lose a day to driving on a very boring drive up the East Coast. A second possibility was to contract with another shipping company who for about double the price would guarantee pickup on a given day, but they couldn’t do it for at least three days, which meant that we would have to return to Florida for at least a day to be there for them to pick up the car. Neither were great solutions.

After talking about it, Sue and I decided to go the second route because we just didn’t feel up to a 16-hour drive.  We hit the internet, cancelled our trip to New York, booked new flight from Baltimore to Florida, and changed our flight from New York to North Carolina to be from Florida to North Carolina. Many changes, but we were able to use a bunch of airline points and flight credits from some other changed flights so the cost wasn’t too bad. One complicating factor is that my mother was going to be in Boston again, as one of my nephews was graduating college.

As planned, we left Florida for Baltimore and spent a weekend looking after our granddaughter while her parents attended a friend’s wedding out of town. When we tried to pick up our reserved and prepaid car from Dollar rent a car, they didn’t have it.  We spent the next hour waiting for them to find us a vehicle – very frustrating (how can you sell something to someone and then just not have it available when the people arrive to get it??? Excellent customer service) – but in the end we got our car and a made the 10-minute drive to my son’s house.

We spent 36 hours looking after a three – turning four – year old. Luckily, we are grandparents, so we knew we could feed her pancakes, candy and ice cream and take her to parks, playgrounds, and let her watch TV to keep her occupied. We all had a great time, but to say we were tired would be a major understatement. I don’t remember being that tired when my kids were young!

By this time, I was feeling better, but because I am such a kind and generous person, I gave my cold to Sue. During the next week in Baltimore we arranged for all our belongings to moved from one storage facility to another, which Sue covered in our last post. Then we headed back to Florida for take 2 of shipping the car. This time the broker delivered on their promises and the carrier picked up the car on time and took it to Chicago. We made one small mistake, which was that we didn’t remove the automated toll transponder from the car, which caused us to incur about $75 in tolls for the car while it was on the truck. On my list of things to do is to contact the transponder people to try and get a refund.

After our three-day stop in Florida, it was back on a plane to go to North Carolina for the graduation. This time, we rented a car through the Turo app, and it was great. The car was parked where it was supposed to be, we and simply opened the lock box and drove off. I will definitely use them again. Luckily for us, our sister-in-law is one of those people who organizes EVERYTHING, so all we had to do was show up and smile. Our niece went to a fairly small school, so the graduation was reasonably short, unlike her brother’s which I believe lasted just under 1,000 hours. Due to seating constraints, I was exiled along with our nephew’s girlfriend to another building to watch the ceremony on screen, which was great, because we were (or at least I was) able to spend the entire time making snarky comments about the ceremony. All in, it was a great few days, and thanks as always to Stacey for organizing everything.

We headed back to the airport, dropped the car off (again, super easy) and hopped our flight to Chicago. (In case you weren’t counting, that was our fifth flight withig a month.) The car was delivered to our friend’s house so we Ubered over, picked it up and drove over to our AirBnB.

After a couple of weeks of sounding like she was going to cough up a lung, Sue is feeling better. Hopefully June will be a bit quieter.