The Joad Family prepares to depart for Catalina

Today we loaded the truck with all of the lab gear we'll need for almost two months on the island. In some ways, this is the culmination of all the weeks of packing. Mercifully, it has cooled a full 20 degrees from last week, to a high of a mere 85º.

Eric and I picked up the U-Haul in the morning, at a lone Union 76 Station out in the middle of a field. 

He even let us keep the big cardboard "LOWEST COST" banner to use as a sunshade.
I'm stoked!

I rented the 26-foot U-Haul, the largest one available. It's not small. The gas station attendant was pretty fun. He had a thick Middle Eastern accent, and kept asking us how to pronounce words, like "miles". We got to horse around in the back stockroom area while he completed our order on an ancient, buzzing PC, and a second attendant shoveled ice from an ice machine into bags for resale. "Oooohhhh, you get the big one! You ever drive one of those things? The back of it, it is as big as a whole house!" The vehicle is certainly as long as my apartment.

You know how U-Haul always has some kind of "nature and science" motif to the designs on its trucks? Well, this time I got the one with the zebra. Excuse me, I got the truck with the representation of the Pliocene-age Hagerman Fossil Beds in southwestern Idaho, a 3-million-year old deposit that includes fossil horses that are some of the first recognizable representatives of the genus Equus.
(Earlier horse relatives had 3 or 5 toes, instead of the trademark single hoof). The legend on the truck says that it's not clear from the skeletal remains alone whether Equus was a horse or a zebra. I visited Hagerman Fossil Beds in 2007 while on a cross-country trip. I get the feeling that not many people visit there.

Here I come with my zebra!

We get the big truck not because we are going to fill the entire interior volume, but because we have a lot of heavy stuff packed into big wooden crates. It's not really feasible to stack the crates on top of each other, especially when they're full. We seal off the crates with bolts the size of my uncle's thumb (too big to be my own thumb) and lift them with a hydraulic pallet jack. Once we get the crates into the truck box, we still need room to maneuver them around.

We got to the department building and prepared to load the truck. I was able to back the truck right up to the door, which was great! Then we had to get the pallet jack and remove the center strut so we could open both doors and fit the crates through. This required getting a special key.

... except that the center strut of the door didn't come out.

Right.

...and go down the hall to the main building door...

That meant that we had to exit through the other door...

...and over a half-inch lip with a squishy, fibrous brown mud mat...

...and then out onto the sidewalk...

...and all the way around the front of the truck...

...and up the ramp to the loading dock.
This is the loading dock that the doors with the center strut open out to directly.

 Then, from the ramp up to the loading dock, we could circle around and run the crates up the ramp and into the truck itself.

Except it didn't happen that way after all.

We got it loose! After almost an hour of patient wrangling with both arms overhead while standing on a stepstool, our amazing Team Foram triumphed over the clunky metal bar and removed it.

Heroes!

We were then able to put the pallet jack directly under the crates and take them out the door and up the ramp into the truck in a straight line.

Well, maybe not directly under the crates. Not all of them, at least.

You slide the jack beneath each crate and pump it up using the hydraulic pump.

Then you get it out the door and rumble it straight up the ramp.

This was much, much faster than going around. I'm sure of it.

Once we got the crates inside the truck, we had to maneuver them, as promised.

They are pretty heavy. Each crate weighs between 100 and 200 lbs. At least.
I think.
I haven't exactly put them on a scale to test it.

We loaded 9 crates total.

Then there's all of the rest of the stuff we are bringing, in addition to the 9 crates.

This is almost the entire load.

Now I need to finish packing and add my own stuff. My dive gear is dry, my personal packing list is extensive if not complete, and all of my paperwork is in order.

We leave tomorrow morning.