The March of the Totes Continues

A picture of the totes that went out at the end of last week.  Today was a mostly down-time day as we took the kids for a promised visit to the water park at Muskogee as a final part of the girls' birthday presents. 

And despite doing fairly decent on our yard sale over the weekend, we still have a ton of stuff to deal with.  I think we'll be squeezing in another yard sale this weekend and we have another half dozen totes going out tomorrow with more to follow on Wednesday and Thursday.  This week will be the last week we can ship stuff out with any hope of it beating us to Nulato.  Or that's the theory anyway.  Of the dozen plus packages we shipped out three weeks ago, we have had no update on their tracking since 12 days ago when they left Seattle.  The estimated delivery time is supposed to be this Wednesday.  We'll see.  

Inception: T +19 days

21 days ago my wife Ellie interviewed with the Yukon-Koyukuk School District in Alaska for a teaching position at the Andrew K. Demoski School in Nulato, Alaska. She interviewed, but we really didn't expect anything to come of it, so imagine our surprise, two days later when we returned from a field trip with our eldest daughter to discover an email and phone message offering her the position. With the level of relief that only comes with deliverance from a truly desperate situation, she accepted. I probably should have created this blog at that point rather than 19 days later, but there was a bit of a rub...

For those who've never tried to MapQuest or Google Maps to figure out how to get to Nulato, let me save you a step.  To borrow one of my dad's favorite sayings, "you can't get there from here." Or more correctly, you can't drive to there from here, well unless you're willing to both wait for the Yukon to freeze solid and then cast yourself as an Ice Road trucker for the ~400 miles between Fairbanks and Nulato. Unfortunately, the Yukon doesn't freeze solid till late September or early October and school starts in August. So obviously U-Haul was out. If it gets in to Nulato, it arrives via river barge or airplane. You can charter the barge or plane yourself, or you can simply mail stuff via the Post Office; however, the transit time is 3-4 weeks and the packages must weigh no more than 70 pounds and have combined height and length dimensions of no more than 108 inches.

Thus what was supposed to be 5 weeks to take our time packing up and getting things squared away, instead turned into a 2 week frenzy of separating our material possessions into two categories. Category A was things from our house that we knew we would need to be waiting for us in Nulato when we arrived and would fit within the shipping constraints. Category B was everything else. 

Category B was split into four sub groups: stuff that could arrive after us, stuff to be sold, stuff to be given away or discarded and finally, sentimental stuff that would go to long term storage. 

Now, 19 days later, we've got (almost) all of Category A on the way and are moving on to Category B. As our pace goes from frenzied to hurried, I wanted to take the time to set up this blog so that friends and family could follow along vicariously.  

Looking forward, we have just over two weeks till departure. Tomorrow, we'll be mailing out half a dozen large Rubbermaid totes containing several hundred pounds of stuff we'll not need until we've had a few days to get settled into the new place. The old hands in the AK teaching profession tell you to bring what makes you happy to help deal with the long winters. The totes going up tomorrow are full of various happy things for the whole family. After that, all we'll have left to mail is a few items that have to be broken down a bit to comply with the Post Office's size/weight restrictions.

Ellie's District is hubbed out of Fairbanks, so at least one of us will be back into there every 6 weeks or so. Renting a car in Fairbanks isn't cheap, so we've decided to make the 3700 mile drive up there. It's an approximately week long drive and we don't want to subject our kids to that, so my wife and I will make it and use the time as an ad-hoc couple's retreat. Before we do that though we have to get the car ready. I've ordered engine block, battery and oil pan heaters and am waiting for them to arrive before a day trip to the mechanic.  

We also need to get a spare tire. For some idiotic reason Hyundai decided that 1 free use per year of Road Side Assistance is equivalent to a spare tire and jack. Obviously, the brilliant strategist who came up with this idea has never lived in rural OK, much less the wilds of Canada or Alaska. So, some time this week, I've got to hit a salvage yard and then a tire shop to correct their stupidity.  

Last but not least, we need to finish sorting through both our house and mini-storage. We've got a garage sale for Friday and Saturday, but I suspect we'll need another one the following week to finish it all off.


It's all coming together, but man it's going to be close.