Is that an Alpaca? Getting ready for the crossing

This post is being written several days later – but alas, I thought it was worthwhile to document our crazy pre-crossing day.

After 8 days staying at an AirBnB in Augusta Maine, we had confirmed the arrival of our car and our stuff. It was time to move onto the next phase of our journey. We packed up most of the van the night before (Monday night) and set our alarms. We needed to be out of the apartment and back on the road by 7:30am to make our various appointed start times.

Making matters a challenge, we awoke Tuesday morning to some light rain. This didn’t seem too bad, however, as we were preparing our last trip to load up the van the heavens unleashed. This is the first rain we had seen since back in early May – and it was more of a typical humid thunderstorm kind of rain, rather than the drizzly west coast rain we had become accustomed to. Fortunately, we don’t melt!

Our first stop of the day was to Bag End Suri Alpaca farm. Why an Alpaca farm you ask? One of our future neighbours from Treehouse Village has an Alpaca Farm that happened to be right off the highway about half way between Augusta and Bangor. She was willing to receive our car, as we were not sure we would be arriving in Maine before the car did. She was willing to receive it and park it for our until we were ready to pick it up. She also received some last minute mail for Becky. Thank you Jill for making this part of our trip go smoothly.

As an added bonus, Becky spend a few minutes visiting with Jill and the Alpacas.

I learned that Alpaca’s don’t like to be touched. They were rather shy and moved away when I entered into their space.

I also learned that Alpacas are naturally litter trained. If you put their litter were they like to go, they will continue to use that same place – which certainly makes it easier to clean up after them! One of the big challenges that Jill was current facing is a shortage of hay – and an ability to get the type of hay that the Alpacas need to maintain a healthy digestive system.

After visiting with the Alpacas it was time to move on to UHaul, where we needed to supervise the moving of all our stuff from the UBox containers into the UHaul truck. That is, Becky supervised while Scott and a couple of hired movers found a way to fit all our stuff into the truck. Fortunately, they had a coverage space for us to load the truck, so the on-and-off raining didn’t impact our plans. We had hoped it would take less than 3 hours, but in the end it was more like 5 hours without a break! Becky was exhausted from all that supervising!

Once the truck was loaded, we used the car to run some last errands – mostly getting groceries and printing out the documents we needed for the border. As we were headed to Staples to do the printing, we drove by Chipotle and decided that it would be a good idea to pick up one last Chipotle meal for dinner (turned out to be a wise decision).

After our errands, we went back to UHaul to load the car up. We had to wait a few minutes while they got the licence plates figured out for the trailer, which worked out perfectly as it meant we could eat before we had to drive to our overnight destination.

All loaded up, our next stop was the Walmart in Houlton Maine – just over a 2 hour drive. Scott drove the UHaul and Becky drove the our van. We found that the drive took longer than the Google maps estimate. This is in part because the truck plus trailer had a 55 m.p.h speed limit, and Google maps uses the 70 or 75 m.p.h official limit. Becky let Scott set the pace, as she tucked in behind the truck and followed along.

We arrived at Walmart after dark just before closing (just before 10pm). The parking lot was mostly empty. We found a corner in the back, and set ourselves up for the night – and promptly collapsed.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) would be the day we had been planning for – the day we cross back into Canada.