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Thanks for the replies and support all!

I am happy to say that the first, and probably biggest, stage of our move is complete! As of yesterday we have left Germany and we are currently hanging out in London.

The transition of our apartment to the new tenants came with the arrogances and inhospitality that we have become accustomed to in North Germany, so we weren’t disappointed!


In the end we packed up 89 boxes, as well as various other pieces of furniture. In total it came to 1890Kg and 12 Cubic meters of space, which was a bit of a shock as we sold most of our big stuff.

So far of son is taking it like a champ, and as we are in London and the grandparents are here he is being spoiled rotten, so I don’t think the move is bothering him much at all at the moment. Our little girl is only 2.5 months old, so as long as she has a boob close by she is happy!

As for the wife and I we are enjoying being in a country where the people were actually born with personalities, and word like please, thank you, and excuse me are actually part of everyday conversation. We took in a night at Tony Roma’s, and all you can eat Monday, and we were in heaven! Ahh, the little things you miss!

So, technically we are homeless, unemployed, and parents of two! And we are loving it! We are letting our stress fade away, at least until the next big part of the move comes along.

Originally Posted by H46Bubba

Is uncle sam footing the bill for the move? Oh man I wish I could have movers move us every time we moved. Moving's such a pain in the azz!

No man, my DD214 hasn’t seen the light of day since 1999, so this move is all on us. Actually the financial aspect of the move is not much of a concern, it is the logistics that is killing us. Moving trans-continental is a real chore. Even if you have a wad of cash it is not so simple to find a service that will take you from door to door. Once our stuff hits the U.S., the move continues with a different firm, and that is where the logistical complications come into play.

I decided to ship our things to New York, rather then to PHX directly, as I still have things in New York with I would like to move as well, so we are going to combine the things in New York and send the off to PHX from there. I can’t wait to see how that is going to pan out!

Originally Posted by MQAAord

Yeah, the movers were a big chunk of change. Part of it was that we crossed state lines, so apparently there's taxes/whatever associated with out-of-state moves. Also we had the 4 days storage, which added to the bill. We had a 4 bedroom house, with a fair amount of furniture & books (which significantly added weight). It ended up being 10,000 pounds of stuff! We filled an entire tractor-trailer. We had several quotes from multiple companies, and they were all within the same ballpark. If it had been a local move, it would have SO much cheaper, but we wanted to stay with a brand-name company since it was a long distance move and we were leaving pretty much all our worldly possessions with them for 4 days!

But, it sure beat packing & driving a truck ourselves. We've been there done that, and we're far too old to go through that again. It was worth it. I'd have 'em pack my whole house next time.

I have to agree with you, our next move will be done by a company and not by us. I never even though we have so much stuff in our little apartment until the boxes started to fill up. On top of that we lived on the third floor, and our building has 5 meter high ceilings (Typical 19th century German building), so we had a bunch of steps to go up and down.

I’ll have to look into a good solution to getting our stuff from New York to PHX, but I’ll look into that once we get to the states.

Originally Posted by Kristie

not a problem! really.. we'll be in town and there are others here that can help as well!! if there's manual moving, all we require is pizza and beer! haha

did you find a place to live?

Thanks for the offer! It is really sweet, and we might take you up on it, but we’ll worry about that once we are over there, we are just looking forward to meeting people (Before putting them to work!). As for manual moving, god, I don’t we could ever ask for help like that in good conscious. We are a weird couple that way, we will bend over backwards to help others, but we are reluctant to accept help ourselves. Then again, that might change when we have a stack of boxes in front of us in a town where we don’t know anyone!

Oh, we would certainly do a lot better then pizza and beer for favors of that magnitude!

As for a place to live, well, we have decided that we are going to pick a place once we get there, and we have abandoned further research for the time being. We have gotten so much information about different areas, and eventually opinions tend to conflict and contradict each other, so we simply don’t know what to believe, so we are going to stay somewhere for a couple of weeks while we look around for a rental house. We are going to take the time to check out different areas, at different times of the day, to form our own opinion. We are pretty certain it will be somewhere in the north of Phoenix though.





More to come!