“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Murphy’s Law

The concept is simple. You simply take your stuff from one place to another. But moving is never a simple task.

I arrived in Baldwin County last September. I pulled a Uhaul trailer behind an 18-year-old tuck through the tail end of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaac. Not the best way to start a life change, but at least it was sunny in Elsanor when I started unloading my belongings.

Meanwhile, back in northeast Mississippi, my wife had the arduous task of packing up the bulk of our belongings for the pending move. The housing market crash didn’t make the process any easier. After nearly six months apart, we decided to bite the bullet and get a house down here, even if the other one had not sold.

After a slight hitch in the purchase of a house, we settled on one in Daphne and set a date to move, planning it around the paper production schedule. I would haul my minimal amount of stuff from Elsanor Thursday afternoon, drive five hours and, with the help of family, start loading Friday morning.

The first problem actually came up Thursday. I had reserved two trucks in Tupelo, Miss. But the company called the day before and said they didn’t have one of the bigger ones there. I would have to pick it up an hour away. That would put a crimp in the plans.

Plan B came to light. A rival national truck rental company said they could have a 26-foot truck in Tupelo by noon Friday. It cost more but we went with it. At 11 a.m., that company called. There was a problem with the truck. It would be delayed a couple of hours but they would knock $100 off the price. OK. That would give us more time to pack the first truck I thought to myself.

The truck did show up, but it was three hours after the initial noon promise. But I rolled with the flow. The grandsons were going to help load once school let out. We might be late, but we’d have more help and make up time.

As the loading continued, it quickly and painfully became obvious that we were running out of room on the trucks. Trusting the company’s website assertion that the truck would hold the contents of a three-bedroom house, I underestimated the volume of stuff we had in our house. My wife was not happy.

As night fell, we got ready to move the smaller truck so we could park cars off the street and in the drive for the night. My father turned the key but there was no familiar vroom, vroom. Instead, just a weak click, click. A brief search uncovered a set of jumper cables and the reason for the suddenly dead battery. The light inside the back of the truck had been on all day. We got it cranked, let it run for 20 minutes and put a battery charger on it overnight, just to be sure.

Early the next morning, Kathy set off carrying Marcus, a 3-year-old and 100-pound Old English Sheepdog; and Hemingway, a year-old cat. I continued to stuff as much as possible into both trucks as well as my folks’ van before our caravan set off. The big truck was a diesel, so I left it running to warm up the engine as we hooked my car to the tow dolly. About the time we figured out how the ratcheting strap system worked, the truck suddenly died. Fearing the worse, I crawled up in the cab and it started right up. Apparently it is a safety feature to keep it from idling too long.

The actual drive down was fairly uneventful. Friends from work helped unload the bulk of both trucks in a few hours.

Of course there were a couple of more hitches. The refrigerator was delivered on time Sunday afternoon. The washer and dryer were lost in transit somewhere. At first I was told it would be a week later. They were actually delivered on Tuesday. The phone company hooked up the phone and Internet Tuesday. But it only after an hour on the phone with tech support that we figured out my modem wasn’t going to work with AT&T, delaying that process a couple of days.

Now, I just have to make the six-hour drive (it takes about an hour longer in a lumbering big truck than in my zooming Honda) twice this weekend as I get the remainder of our belongings to Baldwin County.

To paraphrase Lewis Grizzard, when I get back, I think I’m going to nail my feet to Baldwin County.

William Moore is the Senior Editor at Gulf Coast Newspapers. He can be reached at wmoore@gulfcoastnewspapers or 251-947-7712