More Move Madness

In retrospect, it seems like the milky coffee in the purse disaster from last week was just a warm-up for the stress and bullshit of this week.

First — some background. We are currently in a temp apartment that comes with a car. Because we got our orders so late on the Maryland side of this adventure we could only initially reserve the apartment through 31 May. When we checked in though, the manager assured us that they should be able to extend us past 31 May if we couldn’t find a permanent place by then.

Since the last couple weeks have been crazy between house hunting and trying to get our car, I lost track of the date and wasn’t really paying attention to the fact that 31 May was coming up fast. We also hadn’t heard from the property manager, so when we did think about it we assumed everything was okay.

On Tuesday (28 May) I got an email from the property manager saying they were very sorry, but they couldn’t extend us after all, and we needed to be out of the apartment by 11:00 on Friday (31 May) and could they please get the car a bit earlier so they could prep it for the next tenants.

***eeeeekkkkk**

(Okay, anyone who knows me well knows that “eek” is not the word I actually used. The other word I repeated many, many times did end in K though!)

In the meantime, the car we’ve been trying to buy was just about ready. The last step was to go to the car registration office on base and get temp tags, then we had to go to the town the car was in (1 hour drive, 2 hour train ride), finalize the paperwork with the dealership, and take the car to a German customs office. After all that we would have a few days to get an inspection and official registration on base to replace the temp registration.

We originally weren’t too stressed about the timeline on our car since we had a loaner car with the temp apartment. The plan was to take care of the initial paperwork on base, then take the train down, maybe the next day, so we could ride back up in the new car together. Tuesday morning I stopped by the registration office to see if we could get our temp tags, only to realize that we were missing some paperwork and probably needed an appointment. Since we had time, I got a checklist and made an appointment, which was conveniently the next morning at 0930. Perfect!

To keep the good news rolling, By Tuesday afternoon I had found another apartment style short-term rental we could move to on Friday by 1300. Out of one place by 11, a couple of hours to kill before we could move into the other, super annoying and stressful, but it was all under control — we had all day Wednesday and Thursday to deal with the car and get our stuff prepped to move.

Then I remembered that we had an appointment on Friday at 1300 to find out about the house we wanted to rent. Crap. There would be no way to keep that appointment without an apartment to keep the dogs in. Ratchet up the stress some… but we could reschedule that, just one more task on the list. Then we found out the German customs office — a necessary step before we could take possession of our car — was closed for a German holiday on Thursday. No problem… we had an appointment at the base registration office and we could get everything taken care of on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning we roll into the registration office for our appointment, at which point I realize our appointment wasn’t at 0930 on Wednesday, but 0930 the next week. Okay… not a huge deal… they take walk-ins too. So we put our name on the walk-in list and waited.

We were still there early and it was going to be okay because despite the wait list and appointments, they were getting through both groups. Finally our turn came around 11.

The registration worker went through our paperwork and started getting things filled out, but our insurance, which I had set up the week before, wasn’t in the system for some reason. She told us to call USAA and get them to resend it for us — USAA usually does those sends a few times a day, so as long as it was sent again by 1300, it should be in the system by 1400. She also told us to make sure that Chris’ name was the primary on the insurance paperwork, since he had the orders for the move and that’s how they needed the paperwork to look.

We took a few deep breaths, and went to the car to talk to USAA. We quickly figured out that we had mistakenly created a civilian registration with USAA, but we needed a military registration since the car was being registered with the local U.S. military base.

Once that mystery was solved we had to cancel the original policy and a set up a new one in Chris’ name so his name would come first, because that was the only way to change the order of the names. It felt like we would never get off the phone — seriously we talked to that woman for over an hour, but eventually we got the insurance woman to quit talking and let us move on to the next step. Once we were sitting back down with a new registration person, she told us it didn’t matter whose name was first as long as both names were there. Cool. That would have been useful 30 minutes ago. But whatever.

She cheerfully got the paperwork done for us and got us out of there within 20 minutes. By then it was about 1300 — too late for us to take the train down like we originally planned. The train would take at least 2.5 hours and the customers office would close by 1700, but we needed to be there by at least 1630 so they would still see us. The train would just be cutting it too close, so we drove down instead.

Luckily, the rest of the afternoon went smoothly. The drive down was uneventful. The dealership had all the paperwork ready to go and understood our urgency. We got to the customs office by 1530 and had our paperwork by 1630. And the drive back to the apartment was fine.

At some point during all of that I fielded a call for the house appointment, which we rescheduled for 0930 Friday. Now on Thursday we can pack all our stuff from the apartment and load what we can into our new car. Thursday afternoon we will settle up with the temp apartment manager and hand over the loaner car. Friday morning we will go to the house appointment and hopefully find out if our search is over, or if we need to keep looking. By 10:30 a coworker is going to stop by to help us load the remaining g stuff into his car, so we can bring it to the new temp apartment. The hope is that they will at least let us unload a few things on the patio while we hang out with the dogs for a couple of hours until the next place is ready.

Once we take a breath from all of this and find out about the house, we will need to figure out our next step for temp apartments since the place we’re moving to on Friday is only reserved through 15 June. Hopefully, they will be able to extend us as long as we need until we get into a permanent place, but I’m going to nail that down by early next week one way or another. If they aren’t sure they can extend us, then I will find another place and see how long we can stay there. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

I keep reminding myself that in a few months all of this chaos and stress will be in the rear view mirror. Plus, even amongst the chaos and stress we are still living in Germany, which is pretty damned amazing.