Getting Prepared for departure...

It sometimes just does not seem real.  Usually, if I am preparing for a trip, I can concentrate on the prep for that and not worry about the rest of the house.  This time, I have to check on this and that, is this ready and have I sorted that.  I have been doing moving prep for what seems to be forever, the fact that I am five or six days from leaving this house and area for a change in home base just does not seem real.  After all, I have been living in the Parkesburg area since 1976.  That is well over half of the total number of years I have been alive.  This is surreal!!

So, I started doing laundry so I have all of my clothes to choose from to pack for the lengthy journey across the U.S.A. and Canada.  And how do I pack??  I am sweating like a pig here with very humid days getting close to 80 degrees as I pack and sort.  But on the road, I will be heading north... way north as the final destination.  So I need a little bit of everything.  

But I did some prep work for Miss Gaddy.  I will be driving alone for the first 1,100+ miles to Minneapolis.  From there, Rob will be joining me, so I wanted to give us places for our phones, the Garmin GPS and whatever other devices we might want to have handy.  So I added a dash stand for the passenger to use as a phone mount.  I already had one for the Garmin.

This is the passenger side setup.

This is where the Garmin will live.  I have a very outdated GPS as part of the car.  I may try using it along side the Garmin, just for shits and giggles... but for this trip, maybe just the Garmin.  It has all of the latest maps.

In Miss Gaddy, I installed a barrier between the back seat and the open cargo area.  On my first trip, my Pekingese, Miles, kept hopping on top of the luggage and from time to time he would slip in an open space and get stuck.  So the barrier prevents that from happening as it was a pain in the butt to keep stopping to free him from his hole.  I have left it in the car as it is a tad difficult to get it secured.

In the new house, I am going to try to confine the dogs on the lower floor... which is bigger than my entire house here in Parkesburg.  I had a baby/animal gate between the living room and the kitchen here in Parkesburg so I could control the dogs when people arrive at the house.  I want to install that gate at the bottom of the stairs in the new house to control where they can freely go, as with dogs in a new home, they will probably be trying to mark their territory and I want to try to limit that as much as possible.  I have lashed the gate from home to the barrier in the cargo area which will have it not taking up much space but being quickly available once we arrive.

I have secured some important personal stuff in the storage wells beneath the floor and I will be filling the car up tomorrow so that when the movers arrive, everything I am taking will be in the car so they cannot pack it by mistake.  I will try to show the packing progression of the stuff I am going to be taking.