2024, Automotive, Family

Taking Up Space

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When YA was four, my folks sold their house and moved into a condo, a small condo which necessitated some serious downsizing.  Quite a few items went into storage in my aunt’s basement but there were other items that my folks wanted my sister and me to take.  One was a lovely china hutch that had always been earmarked for me and a nice side table that my mom thought would look good with the hutch. 

Since I’ve always been a small-car person, driving down to get the furniture was out of the question.  Renting a truck to drive all the way down and back didn’t seem too appealing either.  We decided to take the train to St. Louis and drive the rental truck back.  It was a fun trip.  We took an atlas and a big batch of stickers which we affixed at every town we sailed through.  YA spent a good couple of hours playing with two other little girls and their large collection of Barbie dolls.

Driving the truck back wasn’t too bad although it wasn’t a good truck for sightseeing as it was not easy to park due to it’s size.  A couple of times we ended up parking in a lot that was quite a distance from where we wanted to go (especially in Hannibal).  Eventually we got home in one piece, unloaded the furniture and returned the truck with not too much fuss.

I hadn’t thought about this trip for a while until yesterday at the post office.  Now that my post office has re-installed the drive-through, I find myself there a couple of times a week.  Yesterday as I was coming down the street, I saw a HUGE RV kind of thing trying to make the tight turn into the little parking lot.  The woman driving had to scuutch it back and forth quite a bit, only getting 2 or 3 feet each time.  Eventually she got straight but had to get out of the vehicle to put her letters in the mail box because the door was too high for the slot.  It would have been much faster to double-park on the street and jump out quickly to mail her envelopes. It reminded me so much of The Intimida and I hoped she didn’t have too many more errands to run driving that beast.

Tell me about a time you drove a vehicle much larger than you were used to!

47 thoughts on “Taking Up Space”

  1. My older daughter went to college at the University of Wisconsin, part of her time at the University in Madison. There she shared a floor of a house with two other students.

    A peculiarity of student housing in Madison, and this extended to students housed in rental properties around campus, was that the lease term for all of that housing ended on the same day. For some perverse reason, the new leases for those units didn’t begin until the next day. The net effect was that on the same day any students who were changing housing in Madison had to move all their stuff out for a night and couldn’t move into new digs until a day later.

    Anticipating this, we had started looking for a U-Haul well in advance of the moving day. As you might expect, others had hit upon the same solution and no rental trucks were available anywhere near Madison. We finally found and reserved a modestly-sized truck in Reedsburg, 55 miles from Madison.

    On the day of the move, we drove down to Reedsburg from Minneapolis. When we asked about our reserved truck, the rental agent told us that they had rented it out to another party who had promised to return it by the day of our rental. Surprise, surprise, the truck hadn’t been returned.

    Our only alternative was a much larger truck, over twenty feet long, and a stick shift, which fortunately I could drive.
    I find Madison a hair-raising city to drive in under the best of conditions but navigating this behemoth first the 55 miles from Reedsburg and then into Madison and the student housing area was a nightmare.

    Once the truck had been maneuvered into a space near the apartment and loaded. We had to find someplace to park it overnight. As I recall, we drove around in some areas away from the campus and city center until we could find a suitable stretch of curb.

    The next day the truck had to be jockeyed once again into the student housing area to be unloaded and then returned to Reedsburg, which was, more or less at least on the way back home.

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        1. My earlier Madison trips were very stressful. These were when I was going to see my godchildren. All of them went to University of Madison. And then there were the graduations when you couldn’t find parking to save your life. Is it all the one way routes? Or that the streets in the city don’t seem to be in that great repair -ever? Or that it’s a college town so a lot of the people driving are not paying as close attention as they should? I’ve never figured it out.

          These days my buddy Sue lives in Sun Prairie. This means that I avoid the city of Madison getting to her house and then once I get there, she does all the driving!!

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  2. YA’s only schooling outside of Minneapolis was her freshman year. The couple of months leading, we laid out all of her items on the bed in the spare bedroom and ispent a long time f
    Thinking exactly how to get it all into my car, a small hatchback. When we actually packed the car, it took us about four hours. When I went to pick her up in the spring, I was thinking about that and thinking I did not want to spend four hours in Eau Claire packing the car with God only knows what else she had accumulated during the year. So I bit the bullet and rented a small van. To this day, I wish I had done that before we took her to school.

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  3. I seem to recall once renting a medium-sized U-haul truck for a move decades ago but don’t recall any trepidation about driving the beast.

    Sandra and I rented a Class-C motor home once and circumnavigated Lake Superior. A super-fun trip other than the vehicle was a rattletrap with very loose steering, so passing semi’s on US 2 across northern Wisconsin and the U.P of Michigan was a white-knuckle period of time. But class C’s are just campers put onto large pickup truck chassis, so not super large.

    Other than that, we’ve hauled five camper-trailers around the country on various camping trips. Worst one happened to be our first, when we picked up our largest trailer, a 25-footer at max weight for our Highlander to haul, in Albuquerque, NM and drove it to a state park in southern NM. We hauled it empty to save time unloading our gear from our vehicle, and the cross wind of 25-30 mph that buffeted us as we drove down I-25 was hellishly nerve-wracking.

    We didn’t know about them at the time, but it would have been quite helpful to have an anti-sway trailer hitch for that trailer. They greatly help lessen the side-to-side in situations like that.

    Chris in Owatonna

    **BSP** Join me tomorrow (TH) for Downtown Thursday in Owatonna from 5-8 pm. My booth will be on the east side of the 100 block of N. Cedar. Come to buy a signed book, listen to some great music on one of two stages, get some delicious street food or dine in one of the restaurants in the area, meet friends browse the dozens of vendor stalls, and enjoy what promises to be a perfect summer evening! You can even imbibe in your favorite adult libation.

    This is turning into a must-do in Owatonna. Thousands come and hang out all evening. People watching is great, and everyone is in a good mood. How can you say NO to that?? 🙂 **END BSP**

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  4. When wasband #1 and I moved from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, we moved ourselves. So we had a big truck and we filled it up ourselves and drove it from Milwaukee to Minneapolis in time for the closing. We had hoped the owner would just let us take possession right then but he insisted that he needed until the next day to clean. Ha ha ha ha. We parked the truck in front of the new house and then took a bus to a friends house where we stayed overnight. And of course I didn’t drive for even a nanosecond. Wasband #1 liked to drive and I never have.

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  5. Rise and Shine,Baboons, from JacAnon,

    I must have avoided this particular situation in my life because I got nuttin’.

    Phoebe has another blood draw this afternoon to determine if the tick-borne infection is responding to treatment. She is still pretty lethargic and her back legs are stiff and painful to her, poor girl. Given the loss of appetite symptom, getting the meds into her is a problem that requires every kind of trick. This morning she took the whole meds in peanut butter. Sometimes I grind them up and put them in canned food, peanut butter, cheese, an egg, anything to disguise it.

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    1. Guinevere does ok w/ peanut butter when it comes to meds but if we REALLY need to fool her we use those push up kitty (delectables?) treats….

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  6. Love the drawings up top… esp. the Indimida.

    I got almost nuttin’. I remember driving a friend’s truck out in California at one point, which must have gone OK because I have no particular memory. When we rented the U-haul to move from here to The Cities in 1985, I must have driven part way, but apparently uneventful. Then for the move back here in 2016, I know I didn’t drive – Husband must have done the whole thing.

    I remember my dad trying to get all the brake lights connected and working right for those summer trips pulling the trailer… and learning to back that thing into our spot once we arrived.

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    3. When I first saw it this morning I thought maybe Clyde did a blog
      Then I realized vs used archived stuff from Clyde

      Great stuff Clyde
      Try monets big brag format for when he couldn’t work small anymore
      Want a bunch of 40×48 sheets of paper, card stock or heavy cardstock?

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  7. I’ve seen a couple of luxury RVs that were literally the size of a tour bus. One, parked at a gas station, spanned all three gas pumps and then some. I can’t begin to understand the sense or the attraction of such a vehicle. Aside from the initial cost, there’s the substantial cost to operate plus the undoubted awkwardness of fitting the thing in anywhere. You could travel in a normal vehicle and stay in the most luxurious accommodations everywhere you went far more economically. What’s the attraction?

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    1. YA is going to Iowa tomorrow for an “RV Camp”…. a large program where RV owners have been invited by the parent company. I’m sure she’ll see some of the tour bus types! The program is a week. She’s expecting the first couple of days to be the busiest as not too many people have downloaded the app yet – that means she’ll be showing lots of folks how to do it once they arrive!

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  9. I drove a large company truck filled with tile from Columbus, Ohio to Durham, North Carolina. Well, I was supposed to drive it all the way. Going down a long stretch of Interstate outside Charleston, West Virginia, the front right tire locked up. With that heavy load and a steep incline, it took a mile before I got the Beast stopped. The tire was gone and the rim was melted to the axle. Looking back up the valley, I could see where the tire had gone. Black smoke everywhere. Renting another truck and off loading and reloading all that tile ruined my day.

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  10. In the same trip, to help someone move in 2003, I managed to knock over a plastic post that was there to keep people in a lane (that cost me $20 cash) and to smash up an overhead carport shelter (which cost me $800). Because each mistake was my own, I paid up. I have not helped anyone move since then. I can plead “old age” to get me out of it.

    By the way, I strongly commend you for taking the train to St Louis. On Friday night, I depart for Atlanta, also be train. Going there and back for a 4-day conference will entail 4 nights of sleeping in the coach, but every moment will be worth it, and there will be NO airports!

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  11. My father had a very small U Haul franchise along with his coffee shop and car wash business. When we moved from Winnipeg to Indiana in 1986 for Husband’s psychology internship, Dad used what I thought was one of his rental trucks to move us. Well, it was a U Haul truck, but it had been abandoned at Dad’s parking lot, had been stolen from another dealership, and Dad didn’t report he had it until he had driven twice over the US Canada border, taken us and all our earthly possessions to Indiana, and then returned to Minnesota. He was so proud of saving money and moving us for free!

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  12. Well, I’m not having any luck playing the audio of the LGMS Intimida episodes. The transcripts are there and some download links but nothing else works. Still funny. The Sherpa Caballero!

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  13. My last Chicago move I told Debbie to use anyone but you haul they are terrible in Chicago
    She used Penske. We discovered they make U-Haul look fantastic
    Our truck was not where it was supposed to be and we had to drive 2 plus hours to get a truck that turned out to be 1 foot taller than Chicago underpasses. I found this out the hard way.

    In Alaska 20+ years ago we rented a big ev and got to stay in trailer parks and wal mart parking lots or simply streetside when we decided to pull over. In some towns we’d park early and get a great spot in others we’d go till sleep time hit ( it never got dark so you had to use your physical clock not your sensory clock
    My only trip to Alaska I loved it and would recommend it as both rent a cars and hotels are expensive
    Rv is big but no problem if there’s only 2 or 3 of you no problem at all

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  14. In the Dale Connelly era I wrote a blog about being out on the road and in parking lots with my small vehicles. I have always driven smaller cars and pickups. I drew three cartoons to go with it. I was astounded a couple hours ago to see the header image from that blog on today’s. Not offended or anything, VS, just surprised and pleased. I woke up from a nap and my eyes do not want to focus, which happens now and then. My eye doctor tells me why. I don’t remember the term. Those people seem to have the worst polysyllabics in medicine, including her name. So excuse fuzzy typing. That blog, BTW, got picked up by some onile magazine as well.
    Sandra has taken a turn and not for the best. I am exhausted physically and emotionally. She sleeps close to 20 hours a day now, and is sometimes hard on me, which happened yesterday. I came home with a severe migraine and hid in my dark room for four hours. It is still there in ghost form. My point is that I was not avoiding commenting yesterday. I am as offended by such evangelism as all of you, in some ways moreso.
    The church to which I belong is in a poorer area of town. We provide free Wednesday night suppers to anyone, without any religious message involved. We do Halloween and other holiday parking lot programs in the same vein. The Salvation Army requires people who come to the shelter to be straight and sober. They require those who come to attend a religious program and they separate by sexes at bedtime. As a result most of the people off the street will not attend. The downtown churches banned together about four years ago to welcome people in for the night for a meal and a bed without any stipulation. They have now developed a permanent shelter. That is an evangelism too.
    I just want you to understand that most churches today are not knocking on doors, leaving leaflets, and the like.

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    1. Yesterday was not even a condemnation of evangelism – sorry if I didn’t make that clear. The biggest issue for me was the waste of the marketing attempt – just dumping all those books on folks’ front sidewalks!

      Clyde – I was going to give you a heads’ up on using that artwork but I just ran out of steam last night….. that piece ran in December 2012!!!!

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    2. From JacAnon,
      I am for service to the community and outreach such as meals. That is different than the tactics VS came upon or the approach I rant about.

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  15. When we moved down here from upthere I drove a big Uhaul truck with an automatic clutch. But its top speed at best was 55 mph. I avoided I35 except about 30 mies. I took a long route on state highways. I was not going to drive that speed through the Cities. It all went fine.

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  17. This is a day late.

    I moved myself from Waterville to Northfield. I used a 20+ foot U-haul truck. I picked the truck up in Northfield and drove it back to Waterville. The drive went pretty well. I approached my driveway feeling pretty good about it. I pulled forward to back into the driveway for easy loading. I forgot that the driveway was only about 15 feet long though, and the truck was 20… I was looking at the right front of the truck to avoid hitting anything and as I backed up… WHAM! I hit the gutter, soffit, and facia on my garage. Then, being upset and crazed, I opened the door and FELL out of the truck onto the concrete driveway. I wasn’t hurt but I was devastated. My closing day was the next day and I had to have the house empty and clean and now I had done damage to the garage. Fortunately, I have a very handy friend who was willing to fix the damage quickly. He fixed it so well that you couldn’t even tell it had been damaged.

    I’ll never drive one of those things again.

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