The Trip

The trip to Arizona was not as bad in some ways as I had anticipated and worse in other ways. Our flight out was at 8:30a and we arrived in AZ at 9:15a--thanks to a time change. They had moved our U-Haul rental from 2 miles from the airport to 30 miles from the airport. That was a nice $50 taxi ride. What a rip off, just to get out of the airport by taxi was a minimum of $15. The U-Haul guy was nice and deducted the taxi ride off the total bill bringing it down to a mere $926. No problem with airplane ride or getting taxi. We were then off to get the keys for the storage unit. They had me sign my life away and promise any unborn children just to get the keys. Then to the storage facility. The first very big frustration. My brother went to pick up my uncle. I looked around in the units to begin to formulate a plan.

I went to the office to ask about getting the truck in the gate. They would not let me get the gate security code without a letter and permission to get in the unit. (Keep in mind I have the keys) The unit was not in my aunt's name but in the trust name. The trust administrator was on vacation. After contacting the trust company and getting someone willing to help, he sent the letter but no that was not good enough. The manager came in and now they wanted the death certificate and trust papers. What!!! My blood started boiling in the 95 degree heat. After 30 minutes of arguing with the manager, we asked to contact her manager and then the VP. The VP said, "Oh, they have the keys...let them in". WTF are you kidding me. They then gave me anything I wanted, the security code, etc. It was crazy.

My uncle wanted to visit, take us to lunch, anything but focus on the task at hand. He looked horrible. Truly like a homeless man. It is such a sad situation. It doesn't help that I am so angry with him for manipulating my mother and aunt and now inheriting a lot of money. My brother and I successfully managed to get him focused and get him back home in a couple of hours. Bless my brothers heart, when he returned from taking my uncle home, he arrived with 2 whopper jr's and a huge glass of tea and water. It was about 2p AZ time and 4p our time.

We spend the next 2 1/2 hours loading the U-Haul in the very hot AZ heat. The pics above are what we looked like after were were done and changed out of our dripping wet clothes. We were able to get almost everything in the truck and what we couldn't, we moved to my uncle's storage unit. We were off. Only to encounter this. About 15 miles north of Phoenix we came to a complete stand still. We literally went 4 miles in 3 hours and spent the last hour just sitting on the interstate. Something about a semi jack knifing in the mountains for the second day in a row. That just added 3 hours to our 20 hours of driving. One small world experience- as we were sitting there, I started talking to a man from the car next to us. He said he was born in KS and when I asked where, he told us he was born in the town in which my brother currently lives. They knew some of the same people.
Here is our sunrise somewhere in New Mexico. The rest of the trip was uneventful. The U-Haul was not comfortable for sleeping so we only got about 4 hours of sleep each but were both glad we drove straight thur. My mother was very grateful for getting some of my aunt's thing back to KS. I personally very grateful it is over!