update 1

Notice my absence from blogging? If so, thanks! If not, well I don't really blame you.

We have been busy, busy, busy. I will give some brief updates in a series of following of posts, but to start I will tell you about our little move from Eugene- and by little I mean BIG.

First, of all we were very busy leading up to the move, so we were way behind on packing. Two days before the move we slept three hours and the night before the move we slept zero hours- we literally packed continually until 9 am, then we hopped in our car and started our 18* hour drive.

*18 hours turned into 28 hours

We managed to fit all our belongings in the Uhaul trailer, but this little thing would later become the bane of my existence. About every two hours, the lights on the trailer would short out- so the brake lights, blinkers, etc. would stop working. Then, at 11:00 pm, on an empty stretch between Reno and Vegas, the lights went out completely and because the trailer is so wide, you couldn't see our car lights. DANGEROUS!

We called emergency Uhaul support; whom showed up 3 hours later only to tell us that the fuse on our car had blown out and he couldn't help us. So after much deliberation we decided to drive the remaining 8 hours sans trailer lights (we had to catch a flight the next day). To avoid getting rear-ended or side-swiped, we honked our horn any time a car approached and then slowed down so they could pass.

We eventually made it to Vegas, unloaded our things, and caught our flight to Boston, so no big deal. Buuuut, dealing with the Uhaul customer service ended up being more of a headache than the trailer.

I will spare you the week long drama, but basically when I called to complain about the faulty Uhaul, they eventually offered me a 25$ gift card to the local Eugene office as compensation. I told them that was NOT OK, so  after days of waiting to have my messages returned, they offered me a $50 gift card and a $30 refund. Still not satisfied! So I eventually got a hold of the guy who was offering all the gift cards and told him that I found his compensation ludicrous and that I had no use for it. His response was, "Well, you know you can use it on our online store, and you can get all sorts of things like locks, and trailer hitches."
"Sir, I am leaving the country, I have no use for any of this!"
"Well, they make great Christmas gifts"
"You are seriously telling me that the solution to my problem is to give my parents crappy christmas gifts?"
"Well, I don't see how you think monetary compensation is going to make up for your 'traumatic' experience"
"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, Sir, I am not trying to rip you off, I just refuse to pay full price on a product that was a faulty and could have caused a severe accident."
"Well, looks like we aren't seeing eye to eye"
"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
- So to make a really long, frustrating story short, I eventually convinced him to give me the gift card amount as cash, and we got back to our vacation.

Moral of the story, never use Uhaul!