Cross-country moves really screw with your daily routine. Before we left Oregon, here’s what my day usually looked like:
5:45am: Alarm
6am: At my desk, 9am (eastern) meeting started.
6am – 9am: Work. Coffee and toast around 7am.
9am – 10am(ish): Run in the park. Maybe. If not in this hour, then it happens after work.
10am(ish) – 2pm(ish): Work.
2pm(ish) – 6pm(ish): Run, if it didn’t happen at 9am. Maybe a riding lesson. Errands. Read. Your standard after-work stuff.
6pm(ish) – 9pm(ish): Dinner, TV, clean-up, shower.
9pm(ish): Bedtime.
Repeat.
Then we started the cross-country drive. Over 6 days, we developed a pretty good routine.
7am: Get up and work out, if the hotel has a gym. Shower. Check out.
9am: Hit the road. Breakfast and coffee somewhere.
9am to 2pm(ish): Drive drive drive. Usually John took the morning shift. Maybe lunch.
2pm(ish): Switch drivers.
2pm(ish) to 7pm(ish): Drive drive drive. Usually I took the afternoons and evenings. John got sleepy.
6 or 7pm: We figure out where we’re stopping for the night and John books us a hotel room.
7pm or 8pm: Check in to hotel, find dinner.
9pm or 10pm: Crash hard.
Repeat.
We knew exactly what had to come out of the car each night, and we knew exactly how to put everything back in the car each morning. We listened to audiobooks (the first Ellis Peters monk detective book (good enough, but MAN it was slow-going), two MC Beaton Hamish Macbeth books – I love Hamish Macbeth), podcasts (mostly Hello from the Magic Tavern), and music (Sirius XM’s Pop Rock channel is good, and for Labor Day weekend, they had a road trip channel that was fun), and mostly stayed off the internet because we had basically zero reception nearly the whole way.
Then we got to Providence and moved in to our empty house. Since hardwood floors are not a comfortable place for sitting and I still have to work, we’ve had to develop a new routine.
7am(ish): Get up. Run. Breakfast at home (cereal – we did some basic shopping).
9am(ish): Arrive at the office, otherwise known as the Starbucks about five blocks away, to work where we can have internet, tables, and chairs.
9am(ish) to noon(ish): When I can work quietly, I work inside where there are outlets. When I have to talk during a conference call, I pop outside, where I can speak loudly enough to be heard (and also where I mute for passing traffic). Then back inside. If I have a call with clients, I head back to the house to avoid the background noise.
Noon(ish) to 1pm(ish): Back home for lunch (sandwiches).
1pm(ish) to 5pm(ish): Same as the morning, back at Starbucks because chairs are a wonderful thing.
5pm(ish) to 9pm(ish): Clean the house or run errands or take a long walk (one afternoon we drove to Narragansett to find a beach) or otherwise kill time outside of the house, find dinner, bed.
Repeat.
And it is a routine – we’ve been doing approximately this for a week now. The baristas at Starbucks recognize us, and a number of the regulars recognize us, too. Oh, the regulars. I don’t mean regulars in the sense of people who always go to the same place at the same time every day and order the same thing. I mean the people who come to this Starbucks every day to work. Like, every day. And they stay all day. I mean, it’s exactly what we’re doing, but we’re only doing this until our furniture gets here. These people have been doing this for years. One guy brings a power strip to get past the limited number of outlets and has been nice enough to let us use it. So, you know, we’re making friends, but I’m not going to be too sad when I can go back to something resembling my Oregon routine again.