We are in Lakefield, MN (pop. 1721!) and it is finally sunny! Our delight at seeing the sun after only two days of gray skies and rain makes me wonder how we’ll fare in Seattle…

For now, though, we appreciate the spectacular beauty of Minnesota.

Some aspects of the daily routine remain even when you are living out of your car and sleeping in a different place every night. I took Cooper for a walk in the sideways spitting rain this morning, through the quiet and frighteningly patriotic neighborhood behind our hotel in Rochester, MN. Time is sped up here, so there are already leaves on the ground, and temps feel like DC does in November.

We crossed the Mississippi River early yesterday afternoon. For some reason that feels significant, like now we are officially West. I wonder if we’ll become west-coast people or if we’ll just be relocated east-coast people?

Here’s a shot of me and Cooper on the west bank of the Mississippi River right after we crossed into Minnesota.

We’re on I-94 W about 45 miles east of Madison. This is the first visit to Wisconsin for any of us and the verdict is that it is beautiful but cold! It is also not raining here, which is awesome!

It’s still raining. We’re driving up I-94 for the next 156 miles.

We’re outside South Bend, IN and it’s pouring. Rain is forcast for our entire trip today.

We actually stuck to our itinerary today and had a fairly easy and uneventful drive. The one exception to that happened about an hour into our trip when we found a dog on the side of I-70 near Hagerstown, MD. It had spent at least one night out in the elements and was wet and and scared but very sweet. It had a collar but no tags so we took it to the local humane society, where it will hopefully be reunited with its owner.

We are now set up at our campsite at Pokogon State Park in Indiana, where it has been raining off and on all day. Tonight’s forecast calls for thunderstorms – yay! Once we finish our dinner (Applebee’s, eaten in their parking lot) we’ll head back to camp, read for a bit, and turn in early.

We made a rough itinerary for our drive from Gaithersburg, MD to Seattle, WA almost immediately when we decided to move, but the specifics are still up in the air. Our extensive road trip of the southwestern US three years ago taught us that no matter how well we plan our route things will change once we get on the road. This is of course complicated by the fact that we’ll have Cooper with us this time. We are not sure how he’ll do in the car for long stretches or for so many days in a row, so we’ll be playing it by ear and adjusting as necessary.

Highlights of our itinerary include two National Parks (Badlands and Yellowstone), Mount Rushmore, and the Wizard of Oz festival in Chesterton, IN (gracias to Jim for the tip on that one). Glacier National Park had been on the itinerary until about five minutes ago, when we found out that there are road closures in the park that would prevent us from driving through it (we aren’t really crazy about out-and-back drives in National Parks, they take forever). Also, the camp ground we were thinking of staying at in Glacier has been experiencing “mountain lion activity,” and we’re not so keen on taking Cooper anywhere near potentially aggressive wild animals.

So, now things are even less well-defined, with plans becoming especially murky once we get through Yellowstone National Park on Day 5. At that point we can either go north and pop into Glacier for a quick look-see at a glacier (and beautiful surrounding scenery), or we can go south and see more of Idaho and also a little bit of Oregon. I think either route (Montana or Idaho/Oregon) would be beautiful, it’s just a question of what we’re up for by the time we get out there. Please leave a comment if you have thoughts on which route would be prettier or more interesting! Although we really have no idea how things will go, here’s our itinerary as it stands right now:

Day 1
Saturday, September 13th
Gaithersburg, MD to Angola, IN
We’ll camp at Pokogon State Park, which has a nice lake.

Day 2
Sunday, September 14th
Angola, IN to Winona, MN
We’ll camp at Great River Bluffs State Park, which also seems to have a nice lake.

Day 3
Monday, September 15th
Winona, MN to Kadoka, SD
I’m sure this drive will be pretty, but we don’t have any plans for sightseeing/stops on this day.

Day 4
Tuesday, September 16th
Kadoka, DC to Cody, WY
Highlights of this day include driving through Badlands Nat’l Park and seeing Mt. Rushmore.

Day 5
Wednesday, September 17th
Cody, WY to Butte, MT
Alternate: Cody, WY to Idaho Falls, ID
Either route will allow us to drive through Yellowstone Nat’l Park, which is the main goal of this day.

Day 6
Thursday, September 18th
Butte, MT to Browning, MT
This would allow us to visit Glacier Nat’l Park, drive across the Continental Divide and see a glacier.
Alternate: Idaho Falls, ID to Baker City, OR
We’d get to see more of Idaho, including the supposedly-lovely city of Boise, if we choose this option.

Day 7
Friday, September 19th
Browning, MT to Seattle, WA (this would be a 12-hr drive, probably not doable)
Alternate: Baker City, OR to Seattle, WA
The big highlight of this day will be signing the lease and getting keys to our house!

We’ll be posting quick updates from the road at least a couple times a day, and hope to write longer posts when have access to electricity for the computer. And again, please leave a comment if you have an opinion on which route we should take after we leave Yellowstone!

Last night we saw Faraz, Jim, and Katy, who together make up the band Helsinki, play hardcore/thrash in a smelly basement in DC. It was awesome! They sounded great and we had a lot of fun hanging out before and after their set. Some photos from the show and the quick mart where snacks were purchased beforehand are below. Note the impressive Hostess display – they had stuff we’d never even seen before!

Also note that this post and all the photos in it were created on my iPhone! I am seriously impressed, and so happy that we’ll be able to easily blog our cross-country trip from the road. Speaking of that, we leave on Saturday the 13th! I’ll be posting our itinerary sometime before then.

We finished packing the POD late yesterday afternoon, an accomplishment made possible by a final burst of help from my dad and Linnie. Hurricane Hanna barely disrupted the overall POD-packing process, as most of Saturday needed to be spent inside packing boxes anyway. Yesterday we loaded the remaining boxes into the POD along with four bicycles and two bicycle frames. The unofficial Step One for how to successfully pack your POD should be “reduce the number of bicycles you own.” In the end, everything fit just fine (with room to spare even) and we learned a few things!

Here’s our step-by-step process for successful POD packing:

1. Pack everything that needs to go into the POD. In boxes. Sealed and labeled boxes. Pack like you’re going to tumble the boxes down your street after they are sealed and labeled. Be sure to note fragile (oooh, it must be Italian!) boxes and boxes that have a specific end that needs to remain up.
2. Buy a lot of rope. We used about 150 ft of nylon-poly rope for a POD that measured 8 x 8 x 16 ft.
3. Make sure you know how to tie good knots. We used half-hitches, square knots, and modified figure eight knots. Our large POD was divided into four sections by 4×4 wooden beams that ran floor to ceiling and across the ceiling. Each beam had two eyehooks to use as tie-off points. You will need to use these tie-off points.
4. Set all your stuff outside the POD so you can see it and get a good sense of what you have in terms of relative size and weight of various items.
5. Visualize. Imagine your belongings packed all safe and snug inside the POD. Then imagine the PODS truck driver making a really hard turn at high speed, complete with squealing tires and major g-forces. Keep this image in mind as you pack your POD.
6. Get busy packing that thing! If you’re feeling fancy, try to distribute weight evenly throughout the POD so that it is not heavier at one end than the other. We did not do this. Our POD was a lot heavier towards the back. The kind people at PODS assured me that it was fine, though.

   Depending on the size of your POD and the amount of stuff you have, you may or may not need to pack floor-to-ceiling. We packed floor-to-ceiling in the back section only, and then created a mega spiderweb of rope to hold everything in that section. The next section was packed within a few feet of the ceiling and tied-off appropriately before we moved on. Something to note about NOT packing floor-to-ceiling is that this enables you to access the eyehooks that are on the ceiling beams further back in the POD. We did this to help stabilize heavy items that could shift towards the front, less-full sections of the POD.

   Pack all sections except the last one and tie them all off securely, keeping in mind that contents could shift both front-to-back and side-to-side. Use light, fluffy, friendly items like pillows and comforters to fill in empty spaces (bag them first). Make use of the rods for your hanging clothing (we bagged ours in heavy-duty garbage bags for protection and ease of transport when loading/unloading the POD).

7. Check inside your house to make sure you didn’t forget anything. Pack the items you forgot (hey, it happens) in whatever boxes are handy.
8. Before you pack the final section, tie a longish length of rope to each of the eyehooks on the forward-most floor-to-ceiling beam on the left. Run the ropes out the opening of the POD. Pack the final section, leaving space on the right side so that you can access the eyehooks on the beam on the right side of the POD. Now use the ropes to secure the items in the final section and tie them off to the eyehooks on the right. Since our final section consisted of just a few boxes and a lot of bikes, we put the boxes one layer deep on the floor, creating a nook of sorts for the bikes. We loaded the bikes upright (alternating the direction they faced) and placed the extra frames and wheels in the very front. The rope was then wrapped around the bikes to hold them in their places before it was tied off.
9. Do another final check inside your house to make sure you didn’t forget anything. Take the one last thing you forgot (it’s okay, don’t beat yourself up about it) and pack it into whatever box is closest to the opening of the POD.
10. Get back in touch with your visual of your POD trucking across the country at high speeds, encountering potholes, reckless lane changes, hard turns, and quick stops. Is your packing job going to hold up to all that? If you have any doubts, do what you need to do to erase them now. Seriously, having to redo some of your work at this point will be more than worth the peace of mind you’ll have once you send your POD off to meet its uncertain fate. Not to mention the great relief you’ll feel when all your stuff arrives at its destination intact.
11. Make sure that nothing that shouldn’t be inside the POD isn’t inside it (children, pets, your wallet). The sign on the inside of the POD recommends this, and though I think it’s a bit over the top (are you so disorganized that you don’t know where your children and pets are? Get it together!), taking a second to be sure of this can’t hurt.
12. Set off a bug bomb inside your POD and close and lock the door. Really. We saw a roach wiggling around between one of the ceiling beams and the ceiling when we first started loading our POD. Having to deal with a seriously nasty roach infestation when we bought our apartment in DC made us more than willing to risk any toxic side effects from setting off the bug bomb inside the POD. If you have time, collect the bug bomb (and the newspaper you set down to protect all your belongings) before your POD is picked up for shipping. This is advisable so that the supposedly-empty bug bomb canister doesn’t roll around and leak any toxic goo during shipping.

That’s it! We won’t see our stuff again for 11 days, but I feel pretty certain that when we do it will look pretty much the way it did when we closed the door to the POD this morning. Of course, if it doesn’t, I’ll have to retitle this post “What not to do when packing your POD” and publish a list of lessons learned, won’t I?