After saying goodbye to the friends we had made in Florida with some delicious pizza from Lazy Moon and then hanging at my house with some Jackbox Party Pack, Cali and I packed up our condo that we fell in love with. It was fucking exhausting work. That’s a decent sized U-Haul in the above photo, and it’s nearly filled to the brim. Luckily, our very good friend on the left of me in the photo drove over half an hour to help us put in some of the heavier objects—this was a couple hours before his class started too! After spending a couple days of packing and moving stuff into the truck, we were done. With the cats and their litter boxes in the Prius and all our stuff in the truck, we were ready to set say goodbye to Orlando and hello to Big Bear.

We had planned out our route ahead of time, but we didn’t book any hotels because we wanted to stay flexible on when we could stop. We just knew we had to stay at La Quinta the whole time because they allow pets, which is something a lot of hotels don’t allow. We decided to take I-40, which would take us around northern Texas as we didn’t want to drive near Juarez. This route looked something like Florida to Alabama to Texas to New Mexico to California. We planned to take 3 days, which would’ve meant 12 hours of driving per day. I don’t know when we said screw that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we decided instantly on the first day. We decided to take 4 days, which meant we only had to drive 9 hours per day. This is much more reasonable as some days you feel like you’re going to crash into a car and ruin some poor kid’s life.

We might’ve been able to do 12 hours a day if it weren’t for us having to drive separately in order to get all of our stuff to California. It would’ve been incredible if we could’ve split the time. But no, I was stuck driving the big ass U-Haul. It wasn’t too bad at first. That was until we took a detour. This detour was brought upon us by there being an incredible traffic jam. We were stuck on this highway with thousands of cars because of a traffic accident up ahead. We waited for half an hour, then we realized we could bypass it and head to the next hotel. Luckily, we were pretty close to an exit, so we pulled off to the side of a road—this is scary in a big U-Haul that feels like it can tip at any moment— and drove up to the exit.

The detour was a bit weird. At first, it was a bunch of pitch black cornfields. Eventually, we started driving through a little town as we tried to get to the next little highway that would connect us to our hotel. It almost worked flawlessly until I was following a curve in the dark ass little town, and my U-Haul steered a bit off the road. Imagine me tipping over the damn U-Haul with all of our possessions in the back. It was a quick, scary moment that I managed to correct quickly, but it worried me. It shows that you shouldn’t push yourself too much because I was already tired around then, and if I had to have driven a couple more hours as it was, I could’ve seriously done some damage.

Packing up all of your stuff, shoving it all in a U-Haul, and then driving that U-Haul 37 hours across America was an exhausting experience. My body agreed. After a day or two of driving, my body felt really funny. I think I told Cali I was tired, so we stopped for the night. Once we stopped though, I immediately was hit with a fever. My body had just been barely keeping it together for the drive, but once I stopped, it stopped trying. I went to bed immediately once I got into the room. I was feeling hot as hell. Cali kept me cool with an ice pack, even though my body was also getting hot flashes. I woke up in the morning to Cali bringing me breakfast in bed, so that I could sleep in a bit more—can’t miss that continental breakfast. I felt so much better. The fever just disappeared. I was so exhausted from all of the moving that my body just needed a lot of rest.

I wasn’t the only one that was worrying though. Our cats scared us because they were barely eating any of their food, and we were even giving them wet food because we wanted them to stay hydrated. Them passing up on wet food was wack, but we researched, and it can be pretty normal for cats to not want to eat or even drink much water when they’re traveling. They’re so stressed from the experience that they don’t feel like doing much. They barely even used the litter boxes during this time. It was worrying, but eventually, when we did get to Big Bear Lake, they were back to shitting and eating normal.

And arrive at Big Bear we did. 5 days after leaving Orlando, we arrived in California. The drive had been beautiful at times although tedious as hell. The food had been a nightmare because we were freaking vegetarians in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately, it was a pretty shitty trip that I would never ever want to do again, but we made it to our destination all in one piece. We unpacked a bit, got some food in the village, and I rested a bit as I only had half of the weekend off before I had to show up at my job.