13 Boxes & a Relocation Blunder

Personal Essay about Relocation Advice From Millennial YouTubers

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

I had never relocated across a country before.

And I needed to transport myself from Washington State to Brattleboro, Vermont without a plane. I didn’t have a car. Even if I had a car, 2,500 miles seemed like a long way to go alone in a car. I have a bad sense of direction.

So, I did what any modern person does by turning to YouTube tutorials. I watched relocation advice videos created by road warrior millennials. The only difference between them and me was that I wasn’t half of a couple nor did I own a Sprinter Van. They were also half my age and still full of life and vitality.

Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash

I quickly learned that I needed to protect myself from moving companies scammers. I watched videos with horror stories of people’s belongings being held for ransom. Although when I called moving companies I found on Google, I was nearly scammed until the scammers realized I had a small budget.

Eventually, I took advice from the retired nurse who lived across the street. She also thought I was crazy to move to Vermont. But this was during the pandemic and we were all crazy, having been confined in boxes seeing the world through screens.

I bought train tickets and I rented a relocation cube. Meanwhile, I had leads for rentals in Vermont that I found on Craigslist. So, I thought I was covered. I was already congratulating myself on a job well done.

But then one night I worried that my belongings which took up most of the living room couldn’t possibly fit in a relocation cube. The experts told me that people had moved entire bedrooms in one of those cubes, but I didn’t believe them. How was this even possible?

Millennial Advise Doesn’t Work for Older Folks

So, I took the advice of a millennial YouTubers and I sent boxes of books to General Delivery in Vermont—$350 worth of postage. I had thought I already rented an apartment and all I had to do was do the formalities of meeting the landlord in person.

What I didn’t know at the time was that apartments in Brattleboro were a rare find. Why would a landlord wait for someone arriving from Washington State when he had sixty applicants applying for his apartment?

I boarded the train and gleefully traveled to Brattleboro, not realizing the rabbit hole I was about to fall into. I had thirteen boxes of books waiting for me at the Brattleboro post office and nowhere to take them.

When I finally arrived in Brattleboro, the friendly postal worker asked,” When will you pick up your boxes because they are taking up space?” And then he pointed to my pile of boxes. While I was pleased that my boxes arrived safely in Vermont, I also experienced a knot in my gut. You’re in trouble…

I needed a plan. But the only people I knew were the friendly postal workers, the hotel staff and the Air BnB host. The hotel receptionist kept reminding me that I didn’t have friends or family in Vermont. She had warned me earlier to cancel my plans and stay in Washington.

She shook her head at me and nearly cried when I told her my plans of working as an animal communicator in Brattleboro—-Good lord! Has the girl from Washington State lost her mind?