Moving is a lot of work, even if you’re staying in the same town (ask me how I know…). From packing up, renting a U-Haul, getting help moving furniture, etc., its a lot to keep track of. A cross country move? Now that is a HUGE undertaking, especially when you know almost or absolutely no one wherever you’re moving to. This unfortunately was the case for both of our cross country moves. Take a normal move and add: selling anything you’re not taking with you, figuring out the road-trip route, and deciding where you’ll make pitstops or sleep for the night.
Disclaimer: I do NOT recommend doing this twice in less than a year and a half.
Cross Country Move #1
Trip: Lancaster County, PA to Oklahoma City, OK
Overnight Stop: St Louis, MO
Drive Time: About 20 hours
Total Trip Time: About 30 hours
After my husband Jasper graduated from college in 2013, he was offered his first engineering job in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I hate driving anywhere, even just the 5 min down the street to the grocery store, so this was a struggle for me. At this point I’d also never left the East Coast, so it was going to be a huge change!
Moving as a fresh out of college 22 year old was much easier than any of our later moves. You don’t realize how much stuff you accumulate over the years! We didn’t want to drive a U-Haul for that long, or worry about our stuff being stolen when we stopped overnight, so we used a storage company called U-Pack. They dropped a pod off in my parents driveway and gave us a week to pack it up before picking it back up. Just be prepared to not have any of your stuff for the week or so it takes to get to your destination.
If you’re planning to use a similar storage cube option, make sure to check with wherever you’re moving to first. We could park the cube in our OKC apartment lot, but not in Syracuse. They had to hold it at a facility for us to later load everything into a U-Haul.
The biggest thing I remember is hitting traffic at the West Virginia border because of a nasty accident, which resulted in us being rerouted off the highway through some sketchy WV back roads. Apparently I didn’t really document much of this trip, or if I did then the photos have gotten lost over the years. The only thing that seems to have survived is this blurry rainy picture of traffic just outside of Indianapolis.
Cross Country Move #2
Trip: Oklahoma City, OK to Syracuse, NY
Overnight Stops: St Louis, MO & Buffalo, NY
Drive Time: About 21 hours
Total Trip Time: About 42 hours
After less than a year in Oklahoma, we realized it wasn’t the place for us. While I can’t lie that the lack of snow was really nice, the tradeoff of having to deal with tornado season instead wasn’t worth it. Within the first two weeks of living in Oklahoma City, an F5 tornado hit 20 min south of us in Moore, OK. The wait, not knowing exactly where the tornado would touch down was honestly one of the scariest moments of my life. But without that tornado, our cats may not have been born at the local shelter where we adopted them, so silver linings I guess. On top of the tornados, we also just didn’t like having to fly any time we wanted to see our families.
After another (thankfully short) round of job searching, we landed on Syracuse, NY. This move was a little more complicated thanks to the cats. Their carrier with food/water/litter took up a LOT of room in my little hatchback. Once again we stopped overnight in St Louis, and Bryce decided to make things interesting by somehow managing to get out of his harness and INTO the box spring overnight. We had to stop a second night because we couldn’t get our keys until the following morning. Thankfully the bed in Buffalo didn’t have a space underneath for Bryce to make a second attempt.
We had help moving into our apartment this time around, thanks to my dad making the 4.5 hour drive from Lancaster to Syracuse. We thanked him with beer and dinner at the (unfortunately now closed) Empire Brewing Company.
Key Takeaways
Looking back, there are a few things I would have done differently:
- Taken a bit longer on the way there and spend the day in St Louis. We’ve stayed overnight there twice and have never actually seen the city. We had our cats with us on the move to Syracuse, so we weren’t going to leave them in an unfamiliar hotel room all day.
- In both instances, I didn’t see the apartment before we moved in. Honestly we got lucky with both places, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing it that way. Take at least a weekend trip to wherever you’re moving to scope things out beforehand.
Its safe to say I never want to do another cross country move again.
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