Third Time's the Charm!

With a forecast of sunshine, we trekked down to Regina for the third time to try and retrieve Rob's MGB from his mom's garage, to put in Trevor's garage, which used to be our garage, which we sold, because as you know, we are building Monster Garage this summer.

Yes, our lives are complicated.

So, on Saturday about 4:30 p.m., Rob starts digging out the car from him mom's garage. Did I mention that is in one million parts? Rob bought the MGB in the 1990s, with the hopes of dismantling it and rebuilding it. He mastered the dismantling phase....and that's where we are today. But I digress.

Earlier in the afternoon, Rob went and rented a car dolly from UHaul. I though it would be a huge flatbed, but he comes home with this flimsy thing. Should work... (and then we discovered that one of the tie down straps was almost frayed through, but we compensated with extra straps we had on hand. Geez).

And we call our give friend Jim to come give us a hand, as I'm not really that robust to heft a car and car parts.

It takes them three hours to move all the parts off the car and into the truck bed, to tarp, to push the car out and swivel around,

and push it onto the dolly.

Then after much technical discussion, Rob and Jim determine that they need to loosen the drive shaft (?) or else it will spin madly and bump and grind on the highway. Then of course, one has to tighten lug nuts on one's wheels, or they will fall off. All bad things. Who knew such tasks would take two more hours?

But five hours later (9:30 p.m.) we are done! Quick bite to eat, and tumble into bed for the big journey back to Saskatoon. We want to leave early to avoid traffic and any bad weather.

So we head out on the Lewvan (like Circle Drive freeway), and wouldn't you know, we run into road construction. And not just any road construction, but a diversion with our lanes narrowing to one, then weaving into the oncoming lanes to create two way traffic. So there's Rob, slaloming through a narrow lane lined with pylons, dragging a car on a dolly that has wheels that protrude one foot on either side of the truck. He did it without taking out one pylon!

Finally we reach the open road.

It only takes us about three hours to drive from Regina to Saskatoon. We were only doing about 80 km an hour--any faster and the dolly would start swaying--bad, very bad. Traffic was not that heavy, and they all passed our little convoy.

In Saskatoon, we try and take the back roads to our house, but end up slowing down traffic wherever we go. Sorry about that. We make it to our house and then to Trevor's garage. A quick unload of the car (yes, Rob and I pushed it off the dolly, swivelled it, and pushed it into the garage--you know, it's not that heavy when it doesn't have any doors, seats, steering column, roof, trunk, hood, transmission, or engine!) and then we are off to UHaul to return the dolly.

We discover that UHaul is closed on Sundays. Yikes. We see another UHaul truck going cross country through a field to reach the compound, and are about to do that ourselves, until he stops and tells Rob just to drop the dolly at the locked gate.

Then it's back to the garage to unload the car parts out of the truck bed. But finally, finally, the MGB is in its new home!

Yay!

We certainly had our share of adventures along the way.

Now it's onto the next phase of our crazy summer...drawing up the building plans for Monster Garage!

Car Moving Delayed Due to Weather

Guess what we woke up to in Regina?

Yes, more snow! We are cursed. So needless to say, we did not move the car up on the flatbed--too dangerous with wet roads and the wind.

We will try for this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for good weather.

So we are into a holding pattern. Rob will continue working on the garage plans and layout. We'll try and get more excitement going soon!