Sooner or later everyone decides to gather together all of their worldly possessions and move to new living quarters. The last time I moved, it was only a fifteen-minute drive to my new home. I was anxious to move, and finding a place so close made moving sound almost simple. Moving to Tibet would have been easier, quicker, and less hassle. I think it was the idea that I was only moving a few miles that lured me into a world of idiocy. I reasoned that, since it is only a few miles, and I had no large furniture items, I’d be able to make the move myself and save lots of money.

For a move to Tibet I would have hired a moving company. Several strong men who presumably knew what they were doing would have arrived and packed up all my belongings for me. Then they would have loaded them into a big truck and taken them to my new house in Tibet. I could have retreated to the local watering hole and relaxed. In the name of saving money I decided to load all of my things in my car and make lots of trips. No need to bother packing everything since I would just have to unpack it almost immediately.

When you move the way I did (without packing) you can’t carry as much. It took me about 20 trips between my house and my car to get the car full of things for one trip to the new house. That meant another 20 trips at the new house to unload the car. It took me about 20 carloads to move all of my junk. No matter what type of math you use it works out to about 800 trips between my house and my car -- 400 of them with my arms full of things.

My new house was about 10 miles from my old house. With a little foresight I would have realized that 20 trips at 10 miles each way is 400 miles of city driving. I don’t even like to drive 400 miles in the country. Then there was the nice, neat, organized piles of things to be moved that, somewhere in the process of moving, became large, disorganized piles which took months to put away.

Of course the new place is never ready to set up house keeping. You cannot immediately put things away. There are floors, closets, walls, drawers, and shelves to be cleaned. If I had moved to Tibet I would have arrived before my possessions did, and I would have had the time to do all this cleaning. Doing it my way forced me to keep moving large piles of junk and furniture from one place to another while attempting to clean. I suppose I could have first made some trips with an empty car and done the cleaning, but that seemed a waste of time and money.

Did I save money? Well, that depends on how you look at it. If you are the kind of person who walks 10 miles to the airport in order to save cab fare, then you should make your next move the way I did. Still, the do-it-yourself part of me allowed me to stick my nose up at the moving companies and say: "Ha! I kept you from getting any of my money." However in retrospect, if you asked me to do for you what I did for me, I would charge you a lot more than Allied Van Lines

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