Container is OUT OF HERE!!!

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR FRIENDS WHO HELPED US!!!!!
Without their help we wouldn't have made it.  No way could we have boxed, wrapped, numbered, carried and loaded it all.  Thank you all so much, we are both very grateful for Kay, Jim, Norm, Ed, Tammy, Chris, Ben and Grant.  The weather was tough but gratefully it didn't rain.  Snow and cold was bad enough but rain would have been worse by getting the cardboard boxes wet, weakening and damaging them.  So we are grateful we just had snow and cold; oh so cold!  But most of all grateful for our helpers!  THANK YOU!!

Whew!  Packing a container with your household goods for an ocean voyage  is much harder than moving to the next city.  Everything has to be packed to survive being tossed about by rough waters.  When we had our moving sale people were anxious to tell us about, "Our friends went overseas, and lost about half of their contents to breakage..." John heard the story of one guy who was really reckless and put a kitchen range up high on top of other stuff plus didn't secure his car well.  The car was "totaled" from the range falling into the back window and the car bouncing all over the container.  Every side of the car had damage.  Sorry, that is just stupidity!!!

These stories caused John to be extra extra careful about packing the container.  He went the extra mile securing things.  I imagine that they will never find another container so well secured. 
BUT this caused him so much extra work that he hasn't slept much for many days; often coming to bed 2 or 3am, tossing and turning with worry and getting back up at 5 or 6am.  So neither of us has had much sleep and looking forward to schedules more normal.  He was a real trouper, never complaining about the work or the cold or the snow. 

Moving Day brought the most snow we had all season. I was too busy inside packing and forgot to take picture during the snow storm and loading, this is the next day. 

If any of you decide to move overseas we can give you plenty of advice.  If we had to do it over again we would sell more stuff in moving sales.  And put important things on first to avoid the risk of being left behind towards the end.  But on the other hand, a motivating factor that moved us to pack as much as we could was trying to replace items with the quality we had already or even finding what we need.  Southern Costa Rica is not a shoppers paradise; more a tropical paradise.

I am already realizing some things that are on their way to Costa Rica should be here with us, such as important papers or numbers,etc.  John just came to me and realized our file cabinet didn't get assigned a number for the inventory list.  Everything has to be inventoried and a value attached to it so they can charge us import taxes.  I will get an email off to our Costa Rican 'friends' to fix the error.  We are also finding plenty of things we wish were in that container. 

A car hauler had to be hired to put the car into our container.  It was 11:00 pm before it was loaded as John wasn't ready until then.  Bitter cold that night.  John worked all night long securing the car, coming in only when he couldn't feel his feet anymore.

 

How appropriate...Look at all that snow and the container is heading off to a tropical location. 

As the truck left our driveway our container experienced its first jolt, dropping off the culvert and mowing down the "Rocky Gardens" sign.  This is just the beginning of the tossing it will experience, good thing John took time to secure things well.