Escrow was supposed to close on Sunday the 25th. I woke up to texts from our realtor on the 26th saying that it hadn’t closed yet, but she was positive it would soon. John and I shrugged and continued trying to pack up all the little odds and ends that were left.

By that afternoon, escrow still hadn’t closed. I asked our realtor what the hold up was, and she explained that the escrow company had requested a final total of what we owed the park for utilities the week before. Apparently the park had not responded yet despite multiple emails and phones calls. But we shouldn’t worry – she was sure it would be handled by tomorrow! If not we could always have the escrow check wired to our accounts.

John and I agreed that we could, but we would prefer not to since the escrow company charged a fee for wiring checks. We felt that we had already lost enough money in the escrow process. Sure the fee wasn’t that much, but when you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for so long… it kinda is.

Unfortunately the park office was closed so we couldn’t do much about what was going on aside from waiting. And we had a friend to pick up from the airport and more packing to do. We loaded the Boyo up into the car and headed up to Los Angeles to deal with the chaos that is arrivals at LAX.

I will not miss that airport. I really really won’t.

As of Tuesday morning, Escrow was still waiting on the park management. John and I were getting fed up with the delays. We were leaving the next day for crying out loud. We needed to have these funds available in order to pay for rent on our new apartment!

But we bit our tongues, did more packing, and ran some last minute errands.

When four o’clock rolled around and escrow STILL hadn’t closed, we finally said enough was enough. John marched down to the park office to find out what was taking so long – and promptly discovered that no one had been in the office since Monday due to illness.

We were furious.

Now, I understand no one has any control over when you get sick. And there are some illnesses that you can’t just muddle through. But given our history with the park manager… well… the timing was a bit suspicious.

Even if there was no malicious intent behind the delay, she had known for three weeks that this was coming. That we were leaving on this day. Why not handle the request as soon as it came through? Why put it off until the last possible moment? And last but not least why didn’t she contact her manager to tell him that she couldn’t do it because she was ill?

What a mess.

We told our realtor and she was just as furious as we were. Apparently, the park manager had pulled this same nonsense on the owners of the last house she had sold on this park. Except their escrow was dragged out even longer due to the park’s refusal to cooperate. We let her know we couldn’t afford that. We needed escrow to close immediately. She said she would see what she could do, and within an hour she had good news – escrow had closed and the check would be ready by noon the next day.

Oh, but the park was claiming we owed them $600 for utilities for the month of March. Because, of course, the manager had to get one less jab in before we left.

We resolved to deal with that later. We had friends coming for pizza, and there was still some last minute packing to do. So we resolved to not let it bother us too much and enjoyed the evening.

Wednesday started way too early. The moving pod was supposed to be delivered some time between 8 am and noon, and we wanted to be ready to go the second it arrived.

It got there a little bit before the Boyo woke up. After directing the driver to park it around the corner (the hill our home was on was too steep to park it in front of the house), we realized there was going to be a problem; there was no way all our stuff would fit inside it. We were going to have to leave some things behind.

So much for the pod company’s claims that their pods were big enough to fit a four bedroom house in.

We quickly came to an agreement to leave certain items for last. Specifically, the box springs for our bed, John’s work bench, our big dining room table, and the chairs. We started loading what we could, then I took the Boyo to school and ran by the escrow company to pick up the check while John and our friend continued plugging away.

Soon we learned that the pod company had lied to us about something else. Supposedly, according to customer service at least, we were supposed to have the pod for most of the day. Instead it turned out we only had it for three hours before the driver was supposed to come get it. The driver took pity on us and let us keep it for longer, but every hour on the hour up until we were finished he would call to check on our status.

We took a break around 230 to go get the Boyo from school. Then I tried to keep him occupied on the iPad while John and our friend loaded up the last of our stuff into the pod and our cars.

Unfortunately, the iPad was not nearly as interesting as a completely empty house – so we had to clean up the place while a hyper three year old ran around every room. He pulled up the floor vents. He knocked over the fans. He climbed up the shelving, and splashed water everywhere in both bathrooms.

It was chaos.

But somehow, we got it done. We loaded the cats and the kid into the car, said farewell to our first house, and hit the road.