Onward to Arizona, Part 1

If you’re here, there’s a really good chance that you know I’ve moved to Arizona. What many of you probably don’t know is the “adventure” I had getting down here. The gist of my plan was the buy a truck and a trailer to get all of my stuff down to Arizona because it would cost roughly the same as renting a truck. The other bonus would be that I would have a truck while I was down there already and won’t have to buy something right away. I could also turn around and sell both for roughly what I paid for them, so in the end, the moving expenses would kind of be a wash.

So, I sold my car, and bought both a truck and a trailer, and on Friday, I put all my stuff in both. Actually, that’s a bit of a simplification. More correctly, my parents, my sister and the friend of mine was planning to drive down with, Money, helped me pack all of my possessions in both the truck and the trailer. This was about a 4 hour ordeal, because as much as I thought I had all of my things packed up, there was still a lot of stuff that wasn’t packed. On top of that, the more we packed up, the more it became apparent that I had a LOT more than I thought I did.

Another part of the plan was to ride my motorcycle through a good chunk of the trip down. Of course, the more of my things we packed in to the trailer, the clearer it because that that wasn’t going to happen. In the end, we got everything in (a feat we were all sure wasn’t going to happen) with only a handful of extra stuff left behind.

It felt good to finally have everything packed up, but we still weren’t ready to go. Because I spent so much of my time leading up to my departure spending time with friends and saying goodbye, I didn’t get a chance to hook up the brakes on the trailer. I was originally thinking about just winging it, but it was pretty clear that we had a significant amount of weight and I didn’t want to just take any chances since I was literally hauling everything I own.

My family left since it was pretty late and the packing wasn’t originally part of the plan anyway, so Money and I started hooking up the brake system. We got nearly everything wired up by about 2:00am and realized we didn’t have some connectors and other small things to finish the job. Of course, nothing around me was open 24 hours so we could grab the parts and be on our way, so we were forced to put the trip off until morning. The plan was to grab a few hours of sleep, hit Walmart when they open, wire it all up in the parking lot and hit the road. So, I locked up the trailer and we called it a night.

One part of the whole truck and trailer plan I left out up until now was that I had planned to keep the trailer in the lot of our place. Unfortunately, less than 24 hours after having it in our lot our asshole maintenance guy put a tow notice on the thing. In the end, I kept in storage for a couple months, which was pretty cheap but really annoying. I mention this because in the time we went to sleep, 2:00am, to the time we got up, 7:00am, I got another tow notice. Like I said, the guy is an asshole.

No problem though, we were ready to hitch up the trailer and roll. I back the truck up to it with Money’s help and proceeded to lower the trailer on to the hitch. Before I even started, I noticed that the truck was significantly lower already having been jam packed with my stuff, but I didn’t really think much of it. I lower the trailer all the way on the hitch and the crank stops…… but there was one, tiny little problem; the trailer wasn’t off the ground yet. You read that right. The suspension on the truck was completely bottomed out, the trailer was still not off the ground, and I was freaking out.

Our options, as we saw them, were 1) see about beefing up the suspension on the truck, 2) buying a truck that could actually haul the trailer, 3) renting a truck that could actually haul the trailer. I called my Dad to see if he had any ideas for how we could fix this, but he was as stumped as we were and offered the same ideas. So, we hit the phones. First, I had to make sure the trailer wasn’t going to get towed with all of my stuff in it. I called the Sheriff’s department, who informed me that I would have 24 hours before they would tow the thing. The only problem was that it wasn’t them that issued the notice, it was the condo association, and anything goes for them. Great…..

On the the bigger problem; moving my stuff. I thought briefly about just buying a half-ton truck and having that while I was in Arizona since my credit was good and I could probably sell it, but I dismissed that idea pretty quickly. The risk would be completely on my end and I really, REALLY didn’t want to have to deal with another car payment.

We called all the rental truck places around and found out that only a few places will allow you to tow a trailer with their trucks. Of those that would, some would only let you tow THEIR trailers, which didn’t help us. Even better, those that would let you town any trailer only offered a 2-inch receiver ball and had no idea what class of hitch they used. I knew I needed at least a class 3 hitch and a 2 and 5/8-inch receiver. This was looking more and more like a dead end the more we researched it.

So, we started looking at a truck and trailer rental combo. The truck would be enough for all my stuff and the trailer would handle the bike. U-Haul was really the only company that had a motorcycle trailer for rent, but they didn’t offer one-way rentals on them. Another dead-end. Two options left, rent a truck big enough to handle both my stuff and my bike, or pack up all my things in a smaller truck and ride the bike all the way down. But I guess that’s my cliffhanger for part 2!