“Our daughter Marie moved to Santa Fe years ago,” Paula said. “But if you have adult children, you know how that goes: the kids move out, but their stuff stays with you. That was fine while we lived in Ipswich, where our home was larger. But now that it’s just Bobby and I, we’re downsizing. If Paula wanted to keep these things, they needed to live with her. We looked into many options to transport this stuff and it turns out that shipping coast to coast was much, much cheaper than any other strategy we could come up with.”
“Bobby insisted we go to a Boston shipping store for shipping crates. I thought we could pack everything into boxes, but Bobby was dead set against that. And when you’ve been married as long as we have, you learn to pick your battles. I said, fine, he wants shipping crates custom built for all her stuff, that’s what we’ll do. And that’s what we did.”
Packing up Marie’s possessions required three custom built wooden shipping crates. “Did I think it was overkill? Absolutely,” Paula said. “But I packed up all of her gymnastics trophies and the pieces of antique furniture she’d inherited from her great-aunt, and her stuffed animals and all of the things that we’d been storing – even her old snowshoes! Those crates were closed up, and the Boston shipping company arranged to have them picked up right from our house.”
“Well, there was a fairly major snowstorm that hit the middle of the country at that point. Marie’s stuff was in the back of a tractor trailer at that point. It was one of the vehicles involved in a multi-car accident. The truck wound up getting slid off of the road and rolling sideways. That meant everything in the back went every which way.” After a short delay, Marie’s possessions were extracted from the back of the damaged tractor trailer. “They got to Marie’s looking none the worse for wear, and when she opened them up, she found that nothing had been damaged. It was incredible and I have to say in this instance, my husband was right. Strong shipping crates saved the day!”