Worst. Moving Day. Ever.
As I’ve said before (more than once), moving day is never much fun. The best we can hope for, really, is that Packing Day went really well and we wake up fully ready to just load the car and go.
That wasn’t the case this morning. Not even close — but at least we had something else going for us… we were really happy to be saying goodbye to this little AirBnB in Clayton.
We weren’t thrilled with it from the start — it was very dark inside (even on a bright day), the pool was dirty, all the furniture was uncomfortable and/or broken, and the ‘kitchen” had no sink! — but this morning, tree trimmers showed up early and took things to a whole new level of awful.
The sound of chainsaws would have sucked more than enough — but these guys were dropping huge tree limbs directly on our roof with a huge CRASH! that sounded like a bomb had gone off!!
Poor TinkerBelle, in her (not quite) 2 years on the planet, the closest experience she had ever had to this was really loud thunderclaps. But huge tree limbs falling on your roof, while not quite as loud, is way more percussive. She was so freaked out.
And that wasn’t even the worst part.
As I was trying to get all of our stuff taken out and loaded into the car, I kept coming out to find big tree limbs on the sidewalk. (Along with tools and rope and debris.) So I’d have to wait for them to clear the sidewalk. (Meanwhile the clock was ticking and checkout time was getting closer and closer.)
Eventually, I got everything loaded and away we went… until I realized that I didn’t know how to get to our new place and my phone wasn’t working. (No service/data.)
One of the first-world luxuries that we take for granted is “611” which connects us to our cellular service provider — even when our service has been mysteriously suspended — so we can get the problem taken care of. If Panama has such a number/service, I don’t know what it is. So it was off to the mall to talk to Mas Movíl and figure out why our service had been disconnected — again. (Turns out they had tried to charge my card — the one that was cancelled due to fraudulent charges.)
Happily, this sad story ends well. Our new place is wonderful! Five days will go by much too quickly in Casco Viejo. But more on that in another post — and YouTube video!