My Worst Move Ever

In 1983, I was offered a great job opportunity, but it meant that I would need to relocate from one coast to the other. I decided to make the move. Judy, Ginger, Cindy and I were moving from Fremont, California to Rhode Island. Cindy was not going the whole way with us. She was traveling as far as Minnesota with us and then she would live with her dad and her step mother there.

I was told if I moved myself, the company I worked for would pay me $40 a day, tax free. I rented the biggest truck that I could find from Hertz Penske. I also got a discount from them through my company. My next problem was to figure out how to get 2 cars, a wife that didn’t drive and a baby to Rhode Island. Cindy had her own car, so that made three cars to move across country. One of our cars was a small Triumph GT6. I built a ramp and drove the Triumph into the Hertz Penske truck. I blocked the car in place and built a wall and platform over the car. After that, I loaded the truck with all our personal household goods. It was about 2 a.m. when I finished loading. The front of the truck stuck out into the road. When it had started getting dark, I had turned on the running lights so that no one would hit the truck. When everything was loaded, I tried to get the ramp into the truck but it wouldn’t go in. I pulled it out. I wanted to move the truck back into the driveway, but the truck wouldn’t start. Since the truck was a standard shift, I tried all the tricks I could think of. I put the clutch in different gears, emergency brakes on and off, etc. I had no luck. Then I started searching for the battery. I had the hood open and climbed up onto the bumper to look in the engine compartment. To my dismay, I heard a clunk and I was moving. I had left the truck in neutral and the emergency brake off. The clunk was the truck running over the sledge hammer that I had placed under the wheels to keep the truck from moving. I tried to play Super Man and stop the truck. I quickly gave up on that idea when I felt my legs up against a parked car across the street. I jumped out of the way just in time. The truck hit the car and dented it. Now the truck was blocking the whole road. I found the battery and was able to get the truck back into the driveway. I didn’t have time to talk to the owner of the damaged car across the street, so I left them a note with all the information on their car. I called the truck’s insurance company to report the accident. Luckily, I had bought full coverage insurance on it when I rented the truck. I rented a tow dolly and towed one of the cars on the back of the truck and Cindy drove the other one.

We left early in the morning on the trip and hit heavy fog about Sacramento. The running lights would go off and on. I pulled over and found a circuit breaker that was over heating. After calling the company, I disconnected the horn wire and the lights worked. We stopped in Nevada that night. Cindy was having trouble with the car she was driving, so I got to lie in the snow in the parking lot and change a starter.

The next day in the desert, the truck started to over heat. We pulled over. I left Judy, Cindy and Ginger with the truck and drove the car that Cindy was driving to the next exit, so that I could call service for the truck. There were no cell phones at the time. The company was sending someone from Salt Lake City, so we had a long wait in the desert. The pictures above were taken while we waited. After several hours of waiting, they got there. I sent the girls on to the Best Western motel and I stayed with two guys at the truck. The water pump was leaking. The men melted snow and filled the radiator up. We then drove to Salt Lake City. The men dropped me off at the motel and took the truck to the garage.

The next morning the truck was back. We were on the move again. We started on the road at rush hour. I was trying to get up enough speed to get onto the interstate, when I lost power. Cindy had gone ahead of us to block the traffic so that we could get onto the interstate. When the truck didn’t make it on, Cindy had no choice but to go on the interstate without us. We had no way to connect back with her and she didn’t know where she was or where to find us again. We did connect up with her again, but that is another story. Cindy said she would post her story on the blog to tell that part of the trip.
I was able to get the truck off the road and I walked back down the ramp to call service again. They sent someone out and he replaced the fuel filter.
We went on to Wyoming. It was snowing and we traveled several miles on slippery roads. When we got to Iowa, the truck was making a racket. Whoever put the water pump in, left a bunch of bolts loose and things were rattling. That meant another night in the shop for the truck.
The next time I bought gas, the truck only made it halfway up the ramp to the highway. I ran back to the station and bought a case of Heet (alcohol) to put in the gas tank. I started pouring the Heet into the tank, until the truck started running better. What was happening was that I was pumping so much gas to fill up the gas tank in the truck, that I was also getting a lot of water in the tank, which clogged up the fuel filter.

We did finally make it to Minnesota. We had a week’s layover there for some training I needed for my job. They took the truck in to service it. We stayed in a motel for the week. When we left and headed for Rhode Island, we had no more truck problems. On the way there, we stopped at LaDonna and Kenny’s. I smashed my finger at their house while backing out of their driveway. I discovered that you can’t turn and back up a car that is on a dolly. While driving in New Jersey, I got a ticket for being overweight at the weight station.

Amazingly, we made it to Rhode Island. It was the worse trip that I have every made in my life. Not only that, the job ended up being very boring. The house we had rented was full of mold. Because of the mold, I had an extremely bad asthma attack that put me into the hospital. We only lived in Rhode Island a little over a year, and then I decided to go back to my old job. On the trip back to California, I let the moving company move us. The trip back was much easier. Dad Truscott took the trip back with us.

Richard