unscheduled non-powered vehicular movement

i moved into my new house this weekend. a whole bunch of awesome people showed up on saturday to help me load and unload the massive u-haul that i rented, which made quick work of the move -- all told, it was about 6 hours, including the 45-55 minute drive from my old house to my new house.

what also took 6 hours, on wednesday, was moving my 54 chevy pickup, "peanut," to my new house. peanut isn't currently running (i had to take apart the fuel system, long story), so i borrowed a cargo van and rented a flatbed trailer. now, problem 1 here was that i was doing this alone. problem 2 was that i only had one vehicle with which to both tow peanut and load her onto the trailer.

i began by disconnecting the trailer in front of my neighbor's house, then going to look at the logistics of pulling peanut out of the garage, turning her, and then pushing her onto the trailer. it became quickly apparent that the trailer was in entirely the wrong spot, so i re-connected it, drove around the block, and put it in front of my house, facing the other way. i then backed the van into the driveway, and hooked up a come-along between the two vehicles, and slowly towed peanut out into the street, stopping every few feet to adjust the steering wheel on peanut. this was not a trivial task, because a) peanut was moving backwards, and b) the come-along was between the eyehooks on opposite sides of the tow hitch, inducing a moment (i.e., turning motion) on peanut instead of just a pulling force. but somehow, i managed to get peanut out into the street, pointing more or less toward the trailer.

i started pushing peanut toward the trailer using the van, stopping every few feet to adjust the steering wheel, when a lady who was jogging by stopped and offered to steer peanut. despite not having any seats in the cab, she was able to keep peanut aligned in the proper direction while i pushed peanut onto the flatbed trailer with the van. now, at this point, you may be asking, "but tim, if the van was pushing the truck onto the trailer, what was keeping the front of the trailer restrained?" which is a perfectly good question, because, as it happens, nothing was. which means that as peanut's front wheels reached the rear of the trailer, said rear was pushed downward several inches, as the unconstrained front moved up. but i kept pushing peanut forward, and once the front wheels moved across the trailer axles, the trailer front was pushed back down into its normal, flat orientation.

the loading of the trailer having been accomplished, i thanked the kind jogger, strapped down the tires, reattached the van to the trailer, and cautiously drove the 45-55 minute drive to my new house.

upon arriving at my new house, i sized up the task of removing the truck from the trailer, and moving it up the inclined driveway into my garage. the plan for doing so involved pulling the van & trailer a bit into the driveway so as to incline the trailer, using gravity and peanut's brakes to back peanut off of the trailer, and then using the van to push peanut up the driveway into the garage. this all worked fairly well up until the point that i released the last strap holding down peanut's wheels, at which point i realized that the parking brake was not, in fact, set all the way, which was made evident to me by the rate at which the front bumper was moving away from me. peanut rolled across the street at about 5 mph, aiming her rear bumper squarely at my neighbor's living room, with me running after, holding onto the front bumper as if my 160-odd pounds and converse chuck taylor all-stars could provide enough braking force. the truck knocked over a street sign on a wooden post, then miraculously veered off to the right, aiming for (and hitting) a streetlamp on a wooden post, rather than my neighbor's house. the soundtrack to this comedy of errors was approximately thus: "fwang shit crunch smash pow fuck!"

at this point, my neighbor came out of his house, apparently unaware of the damage to his home that he'd just avoided, and helped me push peanut far enough away from the streetlight so that i could push the truck up the driveway and into the garage. my roommate then came out of the house and steered peanut while i pushed with the van, and we uneventfully placed the truck squarely in the center of my garage.