Moving Days

The new location is on the way to the Dayton Hamvention, so that offered a great opportunity to combine moving with some fun. Mark KW1X agreed to make the trip with me and his help with loading, driving, and unloading was invaluable!

Monday May 12

We picked up a 26′ U-Haul truck at about 9 am. This thing was huge! I had followed the advice of my neighbor, who suggested it was always better to have too much room than not enough. This proved to be good advice!

We loaded as many boxes as possible into the attic area above the cab and then proceeded to the tower sections. Five sections fit perfectly across. And Rohn 25 sections fit neatly inside Rohn 45. One nice thing about the big truck is that it had a 20′ bed so the longest steel mast could sit directly on the floor.

From here on, it was just a matter of carrying things and finding a place for them to land.

Once all the towers, antennas, and feedlines were onboard, we filled the remainder with household items and furniture. It took from 9:30 am to around 4 pm to get everything in.

We still had some space, but I didn’t want to just run around the house throwing things in at the last minute. Plus, we had had enough of being movers…

Tuesday May 13

After a good night’s sleep, Mark was back at 6 am, and we headed out. It is 625 miles from Uxbridge, MA to Belmont, OH. We passed through 6 states and only had to stop at one weigh station. Mark volunteered to drive the truck, and I had the luxury of driving my car.

The weather was good most of the way, and it was just a matter of working around the number of large trucks that fill the major east-west Interstates. We stopped for lunch and gas breaks. We arrived in the late afternoon around 5:30 pm. Mark was glad to get out of the truck!

We were too tired to do any unloading and headed out to a local diner for dinner.

Wednesday March 14

No fun to open the truck door and see all the stuff we had to carry and find a place for. Fortunately, unloading is always faster than loading.

We also had a convenient building to unload all the radio stuff into.

When I first looked at this house, I remember wondering what I would ever do with all of this garage space! What a silly thought.

Around 11 am, just as Mark and I were getting tired and looking at a large pile of tower sections and aluminum that needed to be moved, we had some visitors. Martin AA1ON was driving from Boston to Dayton and had two passengers riding along with him – Fred K1VR and Zoli HA1AG. They arrived at the perfect time, and we put them to work.

In an hour, we had made great progress.

We all went back to the local diner for lunch, and our visiting workers continued their trip to Dayton.

We spent the afternoon cleaning out and returning the truck. And moving some furniture and unpacking things inside.

Thursday May 14

I spent the morning assembling the desks in the new radio room and unpacking some of the radio paraphernalia.

It was amazing how much the grass had grown in the 4 weeks since the concrete work was done. What used to be a clear field was now 3′ high grass that was hard to walk through and hid all the guy anchors from view.

We headed out on our 3-hour drive to Xenia around noon.

The Hamvention was its usual blur of conversations, meetings, forums, flea market walks, and late nights.

Sunday May 18

Mark needed to get home on Monday. We decided there was no reason to detour back by the house. So it was a straight 800+ mile drive back to MA. We both agreed we had had enough driving for one week. I slept most of the first 18 hours I was back home!

It was kind of hard to believe that I would be back in the car 5 days later, driving out to K3LR for the WPX CW contest.