Lucy and Ethel ship a steamer trunk to Florida

Vic's beloved Grandma Jones had a steamer trunk. Can you imagine the days when steamer trunks were your luggage? (Can you imagine traveling by steam ship??) This thing is 4 ft. long and 2 ft. high and wide and weighs about a hundred pounds completely empty. I have to pay extra if my bag completely full weighs more than 50 pounds. But I digress.

Grandma Jones's steamer trunk

 When Grandma Jones passed away, her steamer trunk came to live in our house. We put it in the basement, and Vic filled it with his treasures—all the cards he received from people over the years, keepsakes from IBM, awards and ribbons from his photography days, stuff like that. Even though it was in the basement, it had a huge presence in our house because Grandma Jones was a huge presence in the life of anyone who knew her. Like Vic's daughter, Laurie.

Laurie was the first of Grandma Jones's great-grandchildren (as Vic was the first of her grandchildren), and she adored Grandma Jones. (I mean, let's face it—everyone adored Grandma Jones. I only knew her for barely a decade and I still think of her every day, usually when I look at my wedding ring, because it is her diamond I wear with that ring.)

So it was only natural that when Vic passed away, Laurie was the one who wanted anything that came from Grandma Jones.

But how do you get a steamer trunk to Florida?

I found a lot of options through my old friend Google, but then I thought, what if I just took it to her myself? Vic and I drove to Florida once—it was not that hard. My family wants to go to Florida next year to go to Harry Potter World—what if I just drove to Florida, dropped off the trunk and spent a few days in Jacksonville with Laurie and the kids, drove down to Orlando, and then flew home?

A cross-country trip sounded great! So I set about planning one.

Step 1: Get mileage to Jacksonville. Google: 1,772.4 miles.

ALMOST EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES??? I swear it was not that far when Vic and I drove there. But, OK, 600 miles a day. How hard can that be? 

Step 2: Plan stops. So, Google wants me to take I-70, but if I take I-80, I can stop in Nebraska and visit my stepmom. Yes, it adds 50 miles and an extra day (what, I'm just going to spend the night? No! If I'm going to stop in Nebraska, I'm going to spend a day with my mom), but it's totally worth it. OK, so what's next? Well, last time we stopped in St. Louis, so I don't need to do that again. Nashville is on the way—I'll stop there. Yes, it is a very long drive from Nebraska to Nashville, and it adds an extra day (what, I'm just going to spend the night? No! If I'm going to stop in Nashville, I'm going to visit the Opry), but how often do you get to Nashville?

Step 3: Make a budget. Rental car: $1,000—wait, $1,000 for a rental car? That alone makes the trip cost-prohibitive—and we haven't even added at least six tanks of gas and at least two nights in a hotel! And what was I thinking, driving 1,772.4 miles by myself? When Vic and I took that trip, we split the driving: He drove 1,722.4 miles, and I drove 50. So there's no way I can make that trip in three days, which means more nights in a hotel, more food on the road, and—let's face it—probably a car accident because I fell asleep at the wheel or tried crocheting while I drove.

How much can it cost to ship the trunk?

Turns out FedEx has some pretty good options for half the cost of the rental car in the scenario above, and I have a friend, we'll call her Ethel to protect her privacy and because it works better for this story (in which I am Lucy, but to be honest, I'm not sure which of us is truly Lucy and which is Ethel), who says she will help me pack the trunk and get it ready.

Before that happens, though, I have to get the trunk out of the basement, which I can't do because (a) it weighs a million pounds and (b) it has been sitting in the same place for decades, soooooo bugs.

Fortunately, I have another friend, we'll call her Colleen because that's her name, and she thought the two of us could get that trunk upstairs, and although she showed me by example that a woman can clear spiders out of boxes, she also recognized that I was not ready for the amount of buggage on the steamer trunk so she cleaned that off for me. We got the trunk up the stairs without incident. (I should also mention that Colleen helped me with a lot of other stuff the day she came over “for lunch.” I have some pretty awesome friends.)

Colleen helped me “install” these birdhouse
decorations my neighbor Sam made.

 

 

Ethel comes over on Monday. I bring her everything for the trunk, and she packs it (she is a very good packer). My entire contribution is taping down the lock so it doesn't flap open during shipping. This will become a sticking point later, so to speak.

She starts ruminating on what we need to do to get the trunk ready to ship. Do we need a box? A pallet? How much can we put in the trunk to stay under the weight limit? She starts calling her shipping friends (who even has shipping friends??? Ethel) and she comes up with a plan. We don't need a box, but we'll need zip ties and bumpers. Ethel calls more of her shipping friends. No one has what we need. What can we use for bumpers? Pool noodles! (Ethel is very resourceful.) Where can we get pool noodles? Nowhere! (Resourcefulness only gets you so far.)

We decide to head to Lowe's to see what we can get there. But first, we have to get the trunk in the car. It is much heavier than when Colleen and I brought it up the stairs, and it was already ridiculously heavy then (but blissfully bug-free). Fortunately, we are able to slide it on my throw rugs to get it out the door, and then we rolled it over to the car (even though it's square, you can still roll it).

We put my throw rugs on the edge of the back of her car and are able to pick it up and slide it in. Yay! At this point, one of us mentions that it looks like we have a body in the trunk. I hope Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are not spying out their window and calling the cops.

We stop at Lowe's and find the zip ties there—but no pool noodles. Ethel (as usual) uses her noggin and gets an inspiration—pipe insulation! So we buy the zip ties and the pipe insulation and head over to the FedEx.

We get the trunk out of the car and realize we don't have anything to put an address on. I go in to see if the FedEx people have any paper and wait in line so long that Ethel comes to get me. This is when we start talking about the weight of the trunks. There is a 150 lb. limit to ship via FedEx Ground, which is our best option. We start talking to the FedEx people and they tell us to bring the trunk in. We put the trunk on the scale: 148.8 lbs. Lucy thinks, “Hallelujah!” But level-headed Ethel says, “That's too much.” Apparently, at any point on its journey, FedEx could weigh it and if it weighed in at more than 150 lbs., we would have a problem on our hands.

Ethel decides we can just take out a box we had packed inside one of the drawers of the steamer trunk. We take off the tape holding the lock down ... and the latch won't open. The tape, or perhaps the rolling, caused the latch to get stuck. (It certainly cannot be locked because we didn't use a key to lock it. It's totally just stuck.) This is where Lucy and Ethel really start to emerge. Ethel tries to turn the lock with a pair of scissors—and snaps the tip off in the lock. Lucy tries to use a different set of scissors to pry the latch open, which doesn't work because the scissors are too thick to fit between the latch and the trunk, so we can't get any leverage.

This goes on for several minutes before we finally decide to load the trunk back in the car and take it home, where I have many other tools that are much narrower.

We get the trunk home. I get some narrow flat screwdrivers and we start trying to pry the lock open again. No success. Ethel tries prying the hinge open. No success. We try digging the broken point of the scissors out of the lock. No success. Lucy gets her fancy magnet and tries to attract the broken point of the scissors. Success! Lucy and Ethel continue to try to turn the lock to see if that makes any difference in prying open the latch. Several different scenarios are all unsuccessful. Lucy and Ethel must have been quite a sight, lying in the back of an SUV trying to pry open a steamer trunk.

Lucy says, “I guess I could get the key.”

Ethel stops what she is doing and looks Lucy square in the face. “You have a key? WHY DIDN'T YOU MENTION THAT?”

“BECAUSE WE DIDN'T LOCK IT,” Lucy says.

“Get. The. Key.”

Lucy gets the key and repeats the “turn the lock while prying open the latch” exercise. No success. Lucy feels smug.

Ethel tries jiggling the key. Jiggling is a time-honored way of opening locks. The key turns an eighth of a turn. Ethel feels smug.

Long story short, eventually Ethel uses pliers to turn the key gently (not wanting a repeat of the “scissors breaking off in the lock” incident) while Lucy pushes down on the latch—AND THE KEY OPENS THE LOCK!

In short order, Lucy and Ethel take out the box and prepare it for separate shipment, Lucy makes address labels, Ethel tapes down the latch so it won't lock again—but puts the key in the extra box for good measure, they get the trunk back in the car, drive it back to FedEx and anxiously await the new number on the scale.

Winner winner chicken dinner!

Most special thanks go to my partner in crime, Ethel. This was the last of the big things I wanted to get done, and I was paralyzed with indecision until Ethel came aboard and took charge. I am pleased to report that the trunk has reached its destination, and my stepdaughter has been reunited with treasures that belonged her cherished grandmother.