Each year, some 300,000 service members and their families PCS from one duty station to another. We’ve all done it, some more than others. And after a few times of prepping all your stuff to be packed, dutifully watching the movers box it up and load the truck, and then watching that truck drive away with your precious belongings, you think you’ve got it down. You think you’ve seen it all.
Until you have the move from the hell. Or, the move that’s worse than the move from hell you had a few years ago.
Last year, while my husband was deployed to Afghanistan, I navigated a complicated move from Stuttgart, Germany, to Toronto, Canada. By the time he got home, the car and the household goods were gone, travel plans were finalized, out-processing was mostly completed and travel reservations had been made.
Who in the U.S. military moves from Germany to Canada, right? There is no standing contract with any moving companies like there is in the states, so one had to be put out to bid. There is no local U.S. base for support, so my husband had to personally go to customs in Toronto to clear our shipments before they could be delivered.
We had so many questions about schools and housing and all the things that come with a move, but we figured it out like we all eventually do.
Then, a year later, we did a U-turn - right back to Stuttgart. This was when things got really tricky. I mean, who in the U.S. military moves from Canada to Germany?
As excited as we were to return to Europe, we knew it would be logistically difficult. So as soon as we heard the news, we contacted the U.S. Air Force base in Massachusetts that would set up our move.
Of course nothing happens without orders, and when those finally arrived we were on a tight timeline.
Once again, contracts had to be put out to bid. We had to figure out where would be the best place to drop off our car for shipment and who would issue our plane tickets and who would do our overseas medical screening and HOW IN THE HELL WERE WE GOING TO GET THIS ALL DONE IN LESS THAN TWO MONTHS?
We are not newbies at this. I’ve been married to the military for almost 24 years, and this was our eleventh PCS (and seventh outside of the continental U.S.).
But I’m pretty sure the past four months have taken at least four years off the life of my liver, due to all the alcohol consumed late at night while stewing over dates and shipments and deadlines.
We had to drive to Ft. Drum, N.Y., four hours away, to get our overseas medical screening done. Then we drove nine hours to drop off our car in Baltimore.
We were notified of our pack-out date two days ahead of time. It took the movers three full days to pack what it took movers in Germany one day to pack. The moving company said they did not have a large enough shipping container to hold all of our stuff. It’s only 8,000 pounds, but somehow the shipping contract did not indicate that we actually had furniture.
The truck full of our stuff left our house in Toronto at about 4 p.m. on June 26, with no clear timeline as to how or when it would be put into a shipping crate, no specified delivery date and no contact information other than the guys who had packed us out.
We got our plane tickets a week before we were supposed to fly, via email from Ft. Drum. We made hotel reservations for our leave time in Florida two days before our vacation started.
Two and a half weeks later we flew out from Tampa to Atlanta, where we were supposed to catch our overnight flight to Stuttgart. We missed that flight thanks to bad weather and an unexpected refueling stop and had to stay overnight in Atlanta.
While I like to find the humor in everything, I have to admit that at this point it was pretty hard to laugh. Then again, what else could we do?
Finally, on June 18, almost exactly 54 weeks after we had left, we landed back in Germany. It was like we had gone on vacation but come back to the Twilight Zone. We no longer had a home, or any of our stuff, or our car and many of our friends had just moved.
We moved into base housing two weeks later, finished in-processing, enrolled the kids in school and other activities and my husband went to work. Things were finally getting back to normal.
Except that our car was still in Baltimore and our stuff was still in Toronto, sitting in the moving company’s warehouse.
Thank god for German beer!
The car was caught up in the IAL shipping debacle that many of you may have also experienced, although we lucked out in that it finally arrived only 24 days late. The unaccompanied baggage also arrived, a few days later than planned.
The household goods left Toronto 32 days after we did, and only after I spent hours on the phone tracking down their location and getting someone in a higher pay grade, as they say, to ensure they were being booked on a ship to Germany. Hopefully, they will arrive in the next few weeks. Or at least by Christmas.
In the end, though, does it really matter? It’s just stuff. My husband isn’t deployed, our family is together, and we are enjoying yet another tour of duty in Germany.
And I suspect this won’t be our last move from hell.
