In the afternoon Jonathan arrived to help us out with moving the first boxes to our new house in Xalapa. For the past days I had been packing things, mostly books, in carton archive boxes bought at OfficeMax, 31 liter and 42 liter Iris Clear Stack boxes bought at Office Depot, and carton boxes we got or bought at Chedraui. Regarding the latter, a few months ago Chedraui started to offer carton boxes for free as an alternative to the plastic bags they normally use. Very good move. If you need more boxes you can buy them at 3 pesos for small ones and 5 pesos for large ones.
I had already an plan of how to load stuff on the pick up. I wanted the 31 liter Clear Stack boxes (Iris 33Qt, CB-30) first, and cover the bottom of the pick up with them. Next I wanted to have large wooden shelves on top, providing a floor for the carton archive boxes, nine heavy ones with mostly computer related books -- the majority of which I received via my Perl help for books service -- and one with 3 empty scorpion terrariums. And then fill up the rest with 42 liter Clear Stack boxes (Iris 44Qt, CB-38) and various other carton boxes with toys belonging to Alice, kitchen stuff, etc.
So when Jonathan arrived I explained my plan to him. He's been to the USA for a while and does speak some English, which is a good thing since my Spanish is horrible. And so we put the 31 liter boxes first, and on top several wooden shelves. It turned out that my plan was a good one since the wooden shelves on top of the plastic boxes nearly had the same height as the top of both wheel casings of the hind wheels of the pick up, eliminating the problem of those casings sticking inward.
While we were stacking more boxes on top of the OfficeMax archive boxes drops started to fall. Since the sky was quite dark I was afraid that soon it would start to rain for real, so asked Esme if she could buy a tarpaulin at the nearby Truper shop. In the mean time I put a matress still packed in plastic on top of the carton boxes to provide some protection from the rain, since it now was raining.
Esme returned to ask if she should buy the 3m by 3m one, or the 5m by 4m one. The former dimension looked just right, so I decided to get the large one. When she returned, the Truper shop is a short walk at the end of our street, it had stopped raining. So we loaded more boxes on the car, and I decided to put on the tarpaulin anway, since it the rain might start again and/or the weather might be a bit different in Xalapa.
After we had fixed the tarpaulin very tight -- when we moved to Coatepec we had lost a lid of one 31 liter box and I wanted to avoid losing anything this time -- we got in the car. Esme held the baby on her lap, and I had Alice sitting on my lap, and off we went to Xalapa.
When we arrived at our new house, I opened the gate so Jonathan could drive the pick up close to the house, and he and I started to remove the tarpaulin. And just after we had the first 10 or so boxes inside the house it started to rain. So we put the tarpaulin back, and kept moving the boxes inside the house. And in a very short time the car was unloaded. On our way back to Coatepec we bought some refreshments because moving heavy boxes, some weighing over 20 kg, results in quite some loss of liquids. And a little later we arrived back in Coatepec. All in all a very smooth move. We estimate that two more trips with Jonanath are required, planned for next week. And we want to hire a moving company to help us out with the fridge and gas range.