Moving Day
Our time is up at our 1-bedroom apartment in Tucan Country Club and it’s time to move on. Unfortunately, even though we bought a car — a big, gas-guzzling SUV with a 3rd row of seats that folds down to create a very large cargo area, we still have way too much stuff — and there’s no way it’s all going to fit in our car. (Everything you see in the picture above is not everything!)
I can’t begin to tell you how stressful this moving day was. Ultimately, we ended up in the common area with a ton of stuff hastily thrown into reusable shopping bags and faced with this conundrum: If we can’t transport ourselves, our dogs, and all our stuff in a single trip, how do we keep the stuff we’re leaving behind from disappearing before I can get back there to get it?!
What we needed was a luggage rack. (There were additional problems inherent in that solution but those were problems for another day.) So I left Krista with the dogs and all our stuff and off I went to buy a luggage rack.
But first we needed crossbars (which attach to the roof rails and give the luggage rack something to attach to).
At the first place I went, they looked at the car and told me that universal crossbars won’t work with the roof rails on a 2016 Acura MDX. It requires crossbars made specifically for our car and the only manufacturer$ that $ell them are Thule and Yakima. And they $ell for almo$t $500!!! I tried another shop and they gave me the same story. It didn’t sit right with me, though. I decided to go back and do a little more research.
I found YouTube videos that talked about OEM crossbars. One of them even gave a part number. A Google search on that part number turned up several listings — all in the U.S. — starting at $65 (with free shipping - but not to Panama).
Armed with a cost-effective solution that wasn’t going to help us today, it was back to the drawing board. Our next home wasn’t far away, so we decided that Krista would ride in the back seat with the dogs and I’d fill the passenger seat and footwell with all those reusable shopping bags full of food, kitchen stuff, laundry stuff, and misc/other stuff.
It wasn’t a lot of fun but it worked. Until next time.