Worst. Move. Ever.

So here’s what happened:

My husband, my mother-in-law, and I all got up at 4:30 am Augusta time so that we could get the truck packed up with all of our baggage and be on our way to the airport. We got there by about 5:30, and we were very fortunate that there wasn’t a long line behind us, because we had SEVEN bags to check, which included an 85 pound tote with my husband’s computer and a much smaller tote with all of our kitchen stuff for living out of suitcases for the month prior. That part actually went surprisingly well: because we were moving under military orders, we were each allowed up to five bags weighing one hundred pounds a piece. So with that done, we got through security ourselves and sat down to wait.

Honestly, the flights weren’t that bad. I mean, we had three if them, and they were boring as h***, but they actually took surprisingly good care of us. I’m basing this off the fact that my carry-on was my violin, and as soon as they saw it, the crews always worked with me and made sure there was room in the overhead bins so that I could keep it with me. Also, my husband finally realized that my violin isn’t just sentimentally valuable: it’s worth about 6 times what he thought it was. I can’t tell you why, but that gave me a little twinge of pleasure.

So we get through our three flights and land in Honolulu. We pull all seven of our bags off of the baggage belt, and that’s when sh** hit the fan.

There’s a shuttle that runs back and forth from the airport to Schofield Barracks for anyone in the Infantry division to use. But we’re no longer assigned to infantry, so apparently we’re not allowed to use it. But my husband had already planned for this and contacted his sponsor to give us a ride. The sponsor, who has a truck, was planning to come get us, but ended up having a doctor’s appointment that he didn’t want to miss. So he sent someone else instead. And so my husband contacted our new ride, made sure he knew when our flight would be coming in, which baggage claim area we would be at, and how much and what kind of baggage we had.

He showed up in a Honda Civic.

When he saw all of our stuff and figured out that it might not all fit, he claimed that he wasn’t given any information about how much stuff we had. Except, that he had, because my husband sent him that information personally. This guy is a Master Sergeant. Blaming the captain for not giving him the right information to try to cover his own butt is a dumb Private move: you’d think he’d know better.

Long story short, he left us there with our pile of stuff.

Soooooo, my husband went with plan B. Or C, or D, or whatever it was. He traipsed his way down and found the taxi stand. Then he came back and we hauled our massive pile of crap down the sidewalk past all of the Asian tourists who were gawking at us like we were idiots (which we most definitely felt like), and we got to the stand, and they called us a cab.

The cabby helps us load everything up and we went on our merry way. He didn’t speak the greatest of English, which was just fine. What irritated me is that he would only talk to my husband, not to me, which… okay? Whatever? Bright side is that I had a chance to look at the scenery, which is definitely thistle-free. So he gets us to the base, which is basically in the middle of the island, and we pass him our IDs so that we can get in.

The gate guard tells us that unless the cabby has a pass, he can’t bring us on base. This is weird, because a lot of places, the base has an agreement with cab companies which allow at least some of the cab drivers to get on base so that they can take their passengers wherever they need to go. But either way, this guy doesn’t have a pass.

70 dollars later, we’re left on the sidewalk just inside the base while the cabby takes his van and leaves. And we’re still a mile away from the base hotel.

At this point I’m starting to lose patience. I’ve been awake for about 19 hours, and I don’t do well without sleep. I do my best to keep my cool though, because I know that this is really crappy for my husband too, and getting mad at him or flipping out at the gate guard who told us the cab couldn’t take us where we needed to go is just going to make things worse, not better. I know we can haul our stuff for the mile to the hotel, but I’d REALLY rather not: the few hundred yards at the airport was horrifying enough.

So my husband calls our sponsor again, and this time he’s able to come get us. He helps us load everything into the back of his truck and takes us the last stretch to the hotel. My husband goes in, gets our room and key cards, and our sponsor helps us pull everything back out of the truck. My husband goes upstairs to check the room for any issues and to prop open the door so it’s easier to carry things in.

There was someone already in there.

That’s the point when I started pounding my head against the brick wall. This was reaching disproportionate levels of stupid, and all I could think was “I sold my horse for this?”

Thank goodness the guy was really cool. If he had been mean, I think I would have cried. But it turned out he was coming from the same time zone as us, he was still jet lagged, and he was going to the same battalion as my husband, so he sympathized with us on a lot of levels. So he was really nice and once we got our own hotel room, he helped us load everything onto a baggage cart and shove it into the elevator and down the aisles to our room. Once we got there, and everything was piled in the room, I collapsed on the bed and fumed. And my husband went for a walk and he fumed. He brought back some dinner from the PX, and we just fell asleep.

The next morning we went to the PX, ate breakfast, and tried to figure out how we were going to get down to the pier where our car was waiting for us. We had shipped it early for precisely this reason: if we could have our own car, that would save us sooooooo much pain and money in the future. We had hoped that some family friends would be able to give us a ride, but they were working, so we were out of luck there. We ended up taking an Uber down. Our driver was pretty great: he was military as well, and he gave us more information about the base than our sponsor had. So we had a very pleasant drive down there, and we were fairly optimistic, thinking that today would be better.

The gates were closed.

My husband got out to talk to one of the guys behind the gate, and I stayed in the car with our driver. After about three minutes I went “If a conversation takes this long and no one is smiling, something bad is going down.” Low and behold, my husband came back and told us that because of the approach of Tropical Storm Olivia, the Coast Guard had shut the whole pier down. And the shipping company hadn’t bothered to tell anyone, because apparently my husband was the fourteenth person to come that morning looking for his car.

We made a quick pitstop to pick up our new insurance cards, because Hawaii plays by a different set of rules for insurance and registration, but then we took the Uber back to the base, griping most of the way there. Our driver was nice and dropped us off at the PX so that we could go get a rental car, because that moderately useless trip down to Waikiki had just cost us 100 dollars, and we just couldn’t keep racking up taxi fares like this.

So 200 dollars later, we have a rental car for the rest of the week until we can pick up our car from the pier.

The good news is that we were able to go to the housing office and get some addresses for available houses so we could drive around and creepily inspect them from a distance. We actually ended up really liking the one that already had our name on it, so we returned to the office and told them that we wanted it.

With any luck, we’ll sign for it this morning and actually have temporary furniture already in place. But with Tropical Storm Olivia coming closer and closer… well, we’re keeping the hotel room for another night, just in case.