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We're Simon and Tamara Brann, both 29, both born and raised in Columbus, married three years. In the spring Simon got an offer from a structural engineering firm in downtown Denver, and after about two weeks of lists and one long night at the kitchen table, we said yes. Tamara is an ER nurse, and it turns out emergency rooms in Denver need nurses too.

So on June 5 we put everything we own in a 24-foot rental truck, put Tamara's car on a tow dolly behind it, put the cats in a carrier on the seat between us, and drove west on I-70 for four days. Simon bought a digital camera for the trip, the kind that saves the pictures right onto a regular floppy disk, so we could put them on the Web for our families as soon as we got here. We filled eleven floppies.

Day 1 · Saturday, June 5
Columbus, Ohio, to Effingham, Illinois · 320 miles

6:02 a.m. in front of our old half of the double in Clintonville. Checking the dolly straps for the first time. I would check them roughly four hundred more times before Denver.
We'd been up since 4. The porch light next door was on because our neighbor wanted to say goodbye and then fell back asleep in her chair. Note the truck is already bigger than our old kitchen.

Saturday was all Ohio and Indiana. Biscuit, our orange tabby, yowled every single mile across Indiana. Olive, who is little and gray and three years old, slept on top of him. We stopped in Indianapolis for gas and lunch, and learned that a truck with a car behind it cannot back up, ever, under any circumstances. We found a motel in Effingham that took cats and fell asleep at 8:30.

Day 2 · Sunday, June 6
Effingham to Kansas City · 350 miles

Crossing the Mississippi into St. Louis, Sunday morning. That's the Arch. That's also my elbow. Driving a 24-foot truck over a river bridge with a car behind it is not the time to sightsee, so Tamara sightsaw for both of us.
Look in the left lane: ANOTHER box truck towing ANOTHER teal car. We waved. They didn't wave back. We decided they were moving from Denver to Columbus and we'd swapped lives.

Missouri is wider than you think, and greener. Most of Sunday was hills and trees and billboards for fireworks stores, and then Kansas City at suppertime. Motel number two. Biscuit had figured out how to open the bathroom cabinet by morning.

Day 3 · Monday, June 7
Kansas City to Hays, Kansas · 280 miles

West of Salina, 2:15 p.m. This is the one time the dolly straps came loose. A trucker behind us flashed his lights and pointed, and we pulled over just in time. The left front wheel strap had worked its way off. I fixed it in about ten minutes and checked it every hour after that.
While Simon was lying on the gravel fixing it I climbed up the bank to get this picture, because that wheat was gold and the sky was enormous and I figured if we were going to die on I-70 I wanted a nice picture of it. We did not die. Thank you, Mr. Trucker, whoever you are.

Kansas is everything people say: flat, wide, beautiful in a way you don't expect, and longer than you can believe. The wheat was turning gold and the farmers were getting ready to cut. You can see a grain elevator for twenty minutes before you get to it. Motel number three was in Hays.

Day 4 · Tuesday, June 8
Hays to Denver · 320 miles

Tuesday morning, west of Limon. See that faint line on the horizon? Those are the Rockies. I made Tamara take about nine pictures of them, because they got bigger and every one seemed better than the last.
I cried. Simon says he didn't, but he got very quiet and drove 55 for a while. We'd both been waiting four days, and twenty-nine years, to see those.

We got to our new apartment in Denver at a little after three. It's on the second floor of an old brick building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, with wood floors and big windows and a radiator that clanks. Two college kids the building manager knew helped us unload, and the truck was empty by seven.

Tuesday night, our new living room. Box count: 61. Of those, 14 say BOOKS, which turned out not to be a helpful label.
Biscuit claimed the tallest box in about four seconds and stayed up there all night like a king surveying his new kingdom. Olive hid in the bathroom until Thursday.

The Numbers
(Simon kept these. Of course he did.)

What We'd Do Differently

• Pack the cats' litter box last, not first. It was behind the couch, in the very front of the truck. We bought a new one in Indianapolis.
• Two people cannot fold a futon frame. Take it apart with a screwdriver like the instructions say.
• Call ahead for motels that take cats, before you leave, not at 9 p.m. in Kansas City.
• Buy an extra wheel strap for the dolly. Ours was fine. I would just sleep better.
• Label the boxes by room AND what's in them. "BOOKS" times fourteen is not a system.
• Plan your gas stops for places you can pull straight through. See: cannot back up, ever.

Next: Denver So Far »
our first two months, and our first hike in the foothills

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Last updated Sunday, August 15, 1999