DEC 2008-FEB 2009 "The Big Move"

We knew that our plate was full...we knew that we were planning too much...we knew that our 2-1/2 week short stint in DC (interrupted by a quick 1-1/2 day business trip to Indiana University to meet our new work partners, a surprise visit over inauguration weekend by Liz, John, Mich and Sam in town for the gala, and a quick 3 day trip to visit the family in NC) was not really enough to accomplish everything we needed to...but we were thoroughly unprepared for the reality of transitioning our US base to a Kenyan one.

The purpose of the madness, other than relocate to Kenyan for 3 years, was to simplify our life. Rather than renting our house furnished, dealing with utilities & cable TV issues (on $0.60/min phone calls from Kenya to automated touchtone systems), stressing about whether or not new tenants would move in, and managing car registrations & insurance for vehicles we kept garaged – we intended to SIMPLIFY life... What this translated to was finding a new management company, finding tenants long-term tenants, selling a car, selling as many of our possessions as we could part with, packing and moving what we couldn't part with (or sell) to storage, maybe refinancing our mortgage, and canceling extra credit cards WHILE ALSO sourcing those critical comforts we would need in Kenya, like a video projector, more beer ingredients and better brewing equipment, cordless power tools, fitted sheets, repairing computers, and on and on and on... All the while, Wendy was supposed to be working and transitioning to a new job. Although Wendy seemed to realize the scale of what we were trying to accomplish, I was blissfully confident that we had more than enough time to get everything done.

Let's paint the picture a bit first – we spent the few weeks before we left Kilifi, running around like crazy, me finishing my end of year trainings on the conservancy and culmination of the work of the year, and Wendy trying to get things set up for the next year as well as prepare for her presentation at the annual American Society for Tropical Medicine & Hygiene meeting in the US. We also were packing up our Kilifi life and shipping it to Eldoret, as well as selling our old station wagon. We made it out of Kilifi by the skin of our teeth, literally running around the house and throwing things in boxes...When we got to the US, we spent a week with my folks on the farm. We then drove up to NJ where we spent a week with Wendy's family over Christmas. (It was great because my parents actually came up and spent Christmas eve and day with us at her mom's house. There were a lot of people in a small house, but we had a great time.) We then flew to Colorado on New Year's Eve to start a 2-week roadtrip visiting friends out west. It started out badly - we missed our flight to CO due to annoying delays with the automated check in, followed by a long wait to check into the flight with a human, only to learn that had missed the flight check-in cut-off while waiting in line... We made the most of it, however, and managed to check some more things off the to-do list while waiting in the Philly airport for our standby flight, including sipping some microbrews. During the next 2 weeks we visited Nick & Veronica in Boulder, Caroline & Nathan & Dave (their Kilifi dog) in Santa Fe, Heather & Michael & Haileigh (their two week old daughter) in Orange County, Stacy & Amit & Abby & Kahlen in San Diego, and Jodie & Nishat in Palo Alto. It was great, even though we both got pretty sick one after the other and in the process managed to share our germs with our friends...sorry!

We then flew back to DC and jumped right back into the mayhem all over again. The next two weeks were a crescendo of activity. We had started some things even before we left Kilifi, like tracking down a new rental management company and giving notice to our old one. That worked out pretty well and we got to stay in our house from the day we got back to DC! I was convinced it would not be so hard to pack up the house, sell a few things, and move some things into storage. In fact, I even thought we could move it into my parents house and save $$ on storage. I could not have been more wrong about how much we had to do. Plus, everything in DC ground to a halt leading up to and during the inauguration, including our activities; Liz, Jon, Michelle and Sam came up from North Carolina for the inauguration and stayed with us for four days. We tried not to worry about the slow down and keep in mind what a treat it was to spend so much time with family we hadn't seen in ages. We also decided we had to see as much of the inauguration festivities as possible (see the next post...), during this landmark occasion...As soon as they left, the pause ended dramatically and the pressure resumed - time to get back to work!

Selling things on craigslist is great – that is, unless you have a lot to sell, don't want to give things away, and have other things to do with your time instead of waiting for people to actually show up when they promised. A woman showed up to test drive Wendy's car and unfortunately did not seem very comfortable driving a stick shift...I bit my lip for the first two stop - starts at 6500RPMs, joking about how difficult the clutch was. When we got into traffic and she took 10s to start after the light turned green. This was not a big deal until we got rear-ended by a woman on her cell phone at the 2nd green light...then the potential buyer had the guts to say she wanted to think about it some more! Somehow things worked out and a guy from Orange, VA, bought the car and even agreed to chase down the cell phone rear-ender to fix the mashed hatch door!

Selling the household odds & ends on craigslist, however, was tougher and took way more of my time than it should have. I finally gave in to Wendy's idea and agreed to a yard sale, the first of which we advertised on craigslist (and no one came) (WENDY HERE- this Craigslist sale was a complete and total success from my point of view because we sold THAT PAINTING. You know the one – Marylin, Elvis, Bogart and James Dean...) and the second of which we posted fliers for around town (and got one person to come to - on Superbowl Sunday). We finally threw in the towel and decided it was time for a trip to goodwill. By this time, we were so crunched we didn't even think we were going to make it there. Luckily, Lowell Dodge pulled through for us and called a family living in the projects around the corner that he had worked with before and gotten to know personally. They were super excited to take our sofa bed, as well as all of the other goodwill items we had. There were bags & bags of good stuff and they were excited to be able to play santa & divvy the loot out amongst the building! Two of the guys even helped me to move our big leather couches (which I really did try to sell and could not get a decent offer for...) into storage! Everybody was happy!

Somewhere in there, I managed to find someone selling an almost new video projector that I drove 1-1/2 hours to Leesburg, VA, to pick up. Luckily I remembered my computer to test it, but somehow I managed to give the guy my driver's license when I handed him the envelope of cash I had just gotten out of the bank! Why would they put my driver's license in that stupid envelope?! Of course we did not notice until the next day when he called me about it... I also managed to get an updated Yellow Fever vaccine and in a super 'oh shit' moment I realized I had three pages left in my passport... this meant some serious rushing around because apparently some countries (thanks Wendy!) will not let you in without enough extra pages! Between trips to the storage unit, I also managed to coordinate with a friend's cousin that works for Black & Decker/DeWalt. She talked to her marketing team and scored me a whole set of DeWalt cordless tools for my project in Eldoret. Of course, this also meant a drive up to MD the next night to pick them up... By now we had sold Wendy's old car and I had to borrow a friend's truck to run errands so Wendy could use our car. Oh yeah, this was night before we were to fly back to Kenya. Of course, we still had to pack our suitcases for Kenya, fix a moldy drywall section in the bathroom, replace all the locks in the house to meet DC standards, and remove the glue from the floor where the tenants had put out mouse glue traps – upside down. So, starting when I got back from MD at 11PM, between coats of drywall spackle, and eventually coats of primer & paint, I was changing outside door locks in 15deg temperatures at 3AM! So much for my blissful confidence...

After a whopping 1-1/2 hours of sleep we shook ourselves out of bed for the final push. The final push for me involved last trips to the storage unit with the mattress we barely slept on and a few other final odds & ends. The final push for Wendy was a run to the post office to ship some boxes to ourselves in Kenya... (We only just realized this was necessary when we discovered that the 2nd leg of our trip we would be charged 16 Euro for every kg we carried over our 20kg each limit. This $10/lb was going to be rough when we had already packed 4 pieces of luggage @ 50lbs each! Needless to say, some things became less critical fast!) So, as I literally sprinted through the storage facility, Wendy struggled with heavy boxes at the post office. Then we were to magically meet at my friends house where I would drop the borrowed truck & we would dash to pick up my drivers license on the way (not really) to the airport. I got lost and stuck in nasty traffic, realizing I had no maps of DC in my buddy's car and did not know that part of the city at all. Luckily my Kenyan driving skills kicked in and some vaguely legal (but very safe, I promise mom) maneuvers got me where I needed to be. Wendy had been waiting for 20 minutes and since we only had one US cell phone, she was approaching frantic, not knowing where I had been! Now the mad dash out of DC to Dulles, somehow beating the Friday exodus of traffic, but then driving straight past Dulles by another 45-60 minutes, into the boondocks to pick up my driver's license from under the door mat of the projector guys house. (I would have left it behind, but our international driver's licenses have expired and getting pulled over without a license was not an opportunity for diplomacy I wanted in Kenya...) Realizing Suki was about to be caged for almost three days of transport and was at least as stressed as we were, we gave up getting our international driver's licenses on the way (yes, back) to the airport, and instead let her out to run around a random field. Just before she threatened to chase off after some deer we corralled her back into the car and took off for the airport.

I dumped Wendy and the 200+ lbs of luggage off at the curb and then parked the car in the short term lot, strategically hiding a key where my dad would hopefully find it to recover the car in a few hours (he had promised to arrange his flight home for the weekend so that we could magically overlap in the departure terminal – him landing at 9:05 and our plane flying out at 9:50...yeah right we said!). I finally met Wendy at the baggage check where she was supervising a guy coring holes in the back of Suki's crate with scissors. Even though Suki had travelled back and forth across the Atlantic once, apparently no one before mentioned the fact to us that her crate needed breathing holes on all 4 sides to meet international standards! Another near disaster averted with a $10 tip, we worked our way through Suki's paperwork with the overly careful supervisor (who had never checked-in an animal before).

While we were finally looking for a spot to pause and grab our last good microbrew for a while, we get a call from my dad – he just landed and where can he meet us! Lo and behold, we get sent back to Kenya with big hugs from my dad in the airport terminal and some not so good airport food... looking back on it today, neither one of us have any idea how we really did it.