Moving is pretty much always the worst. If it’s not a rival moving van blocking the service drive you have reserved (which happened during my second Chicago move), it’s your movers perilously hoisting your couch over an indoor courtyard (which happened during my move to Manhattan).

Our move was more complicated than a normal move since we weren’t simply moving to a new location. It sounded easy enough: sell the furniture, donate some stuff, ship some things.

Of course, it was more difficult than we had imagined. We had trouble finding buyers for some of the furniture, and then we had to schedule the service elevator (a task which proved more difficult than I thought was warranted). We were more emotionally attached to some of our stuff than we had expected, making the donation process difficult. And shipping things required either renting a Zipcar and driving to the post office or using a hand truck to move boxes down the Fulton Mall (both methods which we employed), and then waiting in line at the post office.

But we persevered, and, by noon on Thursday, less than 24 hours before we were to begin our move, we had just a pile of boxes sitting in the middle of our living room, destined to be loaded into a minivan and driven to my mom’s house in Illinois.

We had been holding our breath all week, unsure whether our pile of things would fit in the minivan that we had rented. We were delighted (and amazed!) on Friday morning to see that the minivan’s seats folded completely down into a well under the vehicle, basically turning the minivan into a cargo van. We rejoiced, no longer having to worry about making last-minute cuts. (Even the old Encarta dictionary, which I had been insisting that we did not have room for, made it into the van, as did a few cans of tuna, a jar of molasses, and a couple boxes of crayons, among other sundry items.)

We loaded up our spacious minivan and handed over the keys to our apartment, and were on the road shortly before one p.m. We had a long day of driving planned: our goal was to make it to Weirton, West Virginia, which was almost seven hours away. We were cautiously optimistic about how seamlessly the move seemed to be proceeding. Things were going so well, we were sure that it was only karma that something bad would happen to us.

We didn’t have to wait long.

We were on 33rd Street, proceeding west between 11th and 12th Avenues, so close to leaving Manhattan that we could taste it, when a tour bus that had been parked alongside the road pulled away from the curb and directly into us. Hearing the side of a rented minivan loaded with almost all of our remaining worldly possessions crunch when we weren’t even 1% into our journey was one of the worst sounds imaginable.

As it turned out, the damage to vehicle was minimal. Despite the dread-inducing noise, the minivan was definitely still operable. As with any accident, however (and probably even more so when the accident involves a rental vehicle), we had to call the police to obtain an accident report and fill out paperwork.

The ordeal wasn’t without some humor. The bus that hit us said “BIEBER” on the side in huge letters, so when we were trying to describe the vehicle to the police dispatcher or the rental car company over the phone, we got to say, “Bieber, as in Justin Bieber.” That always generated a laugh from the other party. And when the police dispatcher called me back to tell me that the police were near, she confirmed the details of our accident by saying, “I understand that you’re in a red minivan and that you’ve been hit by a school bus.” Through barely contained laughter, I explained that, while we had been hit by a yellow bus, it wasn’t a school bus.

An hour and a half after the bus hit us, we were back on the road … just in time to hit rush hour leaving the city and driving through New Jersey.

Part II coming soon …