S/O: cross-country drive with a young child

[brgnmom]

we are planning for our cross-country move and my DH and I are considering doing an extended cross-country drive with our son. He will be 1 month way from turning 4 years old when we move. Have you ever done a cross-country drive with your young children? We would take at least 7 days to do the road trip from the east coast to CA, and take plenty of stops to sightsee and rest.

Also I have received recommendations for movers (like Moovers, Inc. and Starving Students) and wonder whether there are any other full-service interstate moving companies that you'd recommend around Boston. I've read the other thread recently posted about recommendations-- we have a lot of furniture and it wouldn't make sense for us to use ABF. I've read some articles and checked up on the forum at movingscam.com, and one of threads warns how the boston suburbs have a lot of moving companies that are sketchy.

I'd appreciate any feedback/insight with taking a cross-country road trip with a young child. And if you can add any reliable interstate movers that would be wonderful! Thank you.

[vonfirmath]

we are planning for our cross-country move and my DH and I are considering doing an extended cross-country drive with our son. He will be 1 month way from turning 4 years old when we move. Have you ever done a cross-country drive with your young children? We would take at least 7 days to do the road trip from the east coast to CA, and take plenty of stops to sightsee and rest.

Also I have received recommendations for movers (like Moovers, Inc. and Starving Students) and wonder whether there are any other full-service interstate moving companies that you'd recommend around Boston. I've read the other thread recently posted about recommendations-- we have a lot of furniture and it wouldn't make sense for us to use ABF. I've read some articles and checked up on the forum at movingscam.com, and one of threads warns how the boston suburbs have a lot of moving companies that are sketchy.

I'd appreciate any feedback/insight with taking a cross-country road trip with a young child. And if you can add any reliable interstate movers that would be wonderful! Thank you.

We did that -- with a 13 month old child (6 days of driving from Washington state to Texas when we moved. We stopped every 2 days of driving and took a day or two off to recuperate. So it actually took us a couple of weeks to drive))

I'm trying to remember the name of the moving company.

Warning: if you find something missing after you move into the house, do not just call the drivers and accept that they will "send it to you when they get home" (it's impossible to tell if you got everything off the truck at the time or not -- the sheets are so full of check marks a missing checkmark really does go missing) -- you only have 3 days to report anything missing so you can't wait for the driver to "get home"

I was VERY happy with our moving company, except for the issue of the vaccum and large broom that they forgot to unload from the truck (and I truly do believe it was forgotten). I never got my vaccuum despite that they said they'd send it to me when they got home :(

[hannah]

We used Wheaton to move from Boston to CO. Overall we were very happy with them. The local office came and packed us - and then took our stuff to storage while we went to CO to look for a house. Once we have a closing date we called them, they put our stuff on a truck and drove it to CO.
My DD was 10 mo when we drove (over 5 days). We drove about 8 hours each day. She wasn't crawling at the time we moved so she was quite content to sit in the car seat. My DH and I occasionally sat in the back seat to keep her company. For an older DC I would bring a DVD player, small new toys, new snacks, small games (auto bingo) to keep DC occupied.

[AnnieW625]

Now for the driving part if it were me I'd most likely only drive 6 hrs. per day because I don't like being stuck in a car more than that. I also like the idea of spending a day or two somewhere in the middle to recoup, maybe like Chicago, St. Louis, or Colorado. Where in CA are you moving to?

[brgnmom]

Thank you everyone for your helpful responses.

Annie, we are moving to the west LA area for my DH's fellowship and then we will need to wait and see where he can get a permanent job--hopefully in the bay area where we're both from originally.

[AnnieW625]

Cool, then somewhere like Denver or Zion National Park might be a nice place to stop for a couple of days as I know that Utah is about 600 miles from LA.

[jenmcadams]

Also I have received recommendations for movers (like Moovers, Inc. and Starving Students) and wonder whether there are any other full-service interstate moving companies that you'd recommend around Boston. I've read the other thread recently posted about recommendations-- we have a lot of furniture and it wouldn't make sense for us to use ABF. I've read some articles and checked up on the forum at movingscam.com, and one of threads warns how the boston suburbs have a lot of moving companies that are sketchy.


We really liked Broadway Express (similar to ABF), but slightly better prices and we were able to get more space in the truck. We actually hired people to come in and pack for us (a local moving company) and they also loaded the BE truck and then on the arrival we just hired Labor Ready to move us. BE is super reputable and easy to work with and the combined process (hiring moving co. to pack/load, BE to drive (incl. one car on the truck), and Labor Ready to unload) was way cheaper than a full service moving co. We had a ton of stuff, but we honestly didn't have any irreplaceable antiques or anything, so I wasn't as concerned about different parties and damage.

As far as the drive across country, we didn't attempt it. We put one car on the truck and my DH drove the other car while I stayed behind for a day or two and then flew out to meet him at our destination.

[vonfirmath]

Our moving company was Bekins

They loaded, they unloaded, they drove the truck. we could be a partial truck, too. No problems on the other end with wanting more money to unload.