mountainsteading in rural appalachia

See, this is what I was envisioning when I said that we're transporting our chickens out to the holler Beverly Hillbilly style. Except here we're actually just taking them down the road to their new home at our friend Lori-the-other-crazy-chicken-lady's place. Because we decided that transporting two chickens across the country is an absurd idea. The Motel 6 locations along our travel route say they'll take in our mangy mutts and sassy cat, but I don't think chickens would go over very well, and frankly, I don't relish the idea of being denied a good night's sleep after driving twelve hours a day for four days straight because I'm a crazy hippie that decided to haul two hens from California to Tennessee. So now Lori has an awesome new coop (built by yours truly out of old IKEA flooring because I'm way thrifty like that), and we don't have to worry about another animal to transport. Score one for the wannabe farmers!

Speaking of transportation, I booked our moving truck. A truck that we don't have to drive ourselves. Full-service moving companies are totally out of our price range and I would have a very hard time forking over that kind of money anyway, even if we had it to spare (which we don't), so we went back and forth between a self-service moving company where you load and they drive and driving a moving truck ourselves. The former option is still expensive. The latter option is... well, you have to drive a shitty moving truck 2,500 miles, and let's just say that we were not looking forward to that AT ALL THANKS.

Way back in 2001, we moved from Bend, Oregon back to the SCM, which is about 500 miles. I came down about a week before Jaybird packed in my Prelude with our two 100 lb. American Bulldogs and whatever else I could fit in there (which wasn't much, let me tell you).

Poor dogs were stuck in the car with me in 90 degree heat on I5 listening to reggae
for hours on end while I bombed through the armpit of California. At least my A/C still worked.

Jay drove the U-Haul (aka, U-Have-No-Brakes) with our two cats and everything else, while also towing the Old Toy on a car carrier (which was also packed to the brim).

The Old Toy on a mountain somewhere in Orygun.

I was so happy to see Jay when he finally rolled down our street on Monday, July 30, 2001 with the U-Haul barely making it up our street. We dropped that piece of garbage off that weekend and flipped U-Haul the bird for that rolling death trap they rented to us.

Jay later revealed to me that the cats almost didn't make it. First off, Trouble decided to take off on moving day. So Jay got to wait around the house with everything packed and ready to go ALL DAY LONG. I'm told that Trouble finally moseyed up the sidewalk around 5:00pm, at which point he was promptly thrown with probably some excess force in the cat carrier along with his brother Turbo (always the angel), and Bend was waved goodbye (or maybe also given the finger, not sure which). Cats do not usually make good travel companions, and they let Jay know they were not happy with with the moving experience during the entire 12-hour ride. This almost resulted in them being dropped off on the side of the road in the fine locale of Weed, CA. To this day, I am eternally grateful to the hub for making a very smart (and compassionate) if not terribly irritating decision for their benefit.

So yes, we really did not want to repeat the u-drive moving truck experience. I decided to list our "shipment", that being all our worldly belongings, on uship.com. I ended up conversing with a very pleasant gentleman that offered to move all our crap for us using his 1-ton truck and 24' of enclosed trailer space for about the same price as driving a rental truck of equal capacity after taking fuel into account. Essentially a self-service moving service, but it's just a dude and his wife who apparently like to drive a lot so a bit easier on the wallet, and I feel good about supporting a little fish in the big sea of moving companies. uship.com's terms of service make it pretty hard for either party to get screwed over, and he's got rave reviews from other people that actually used his services. This allows me to drive my Pathy and Jay drive the Taco in blissful comfort. And not drive a moving truck.

Sadly, we don't think that Mean Green (first picture above) will be able to finally realize her true calling as a farm truck at the holler. At $1,200 to ship her out there, we have a hard time justifying that expense. Since I already have a tow package on the Pathy, we might reinvest whatever money we get for her into a small utility trailer that can hold more of our stuff. Because, good grief, we have a lot of it.

Did I mention that we don't have to drive a moving truck?