They should change the name to "U- Fix n' Haul and We laugh"

In case you can't tell from my title, U-haul blows.

I, when renting for myself, have had decent luck with them. The one truck I rented from them worked fine and got me to Denver. Unfortunately, that is not going to make up for the hassle that we went through this weekend. Or the hassle that my friends Joseph and Sabina went through when they were moving to Denver.

We'll start with them. Long story short, their truck broke down 4 times. Each time, U-haul sent out "U-haul approved" guys to "fix" the problem. And each time, the man fixing the problem would say that they were good to drive again. After the fourth time, Joseph hired some guys to move their things from the U-haul truck to the Penske (or Ryder, I can't remember) truck. He left the U-haul carcass where it was, and does not know what happened to it. They decided to file against U-haul and ended up getting reimbursed for everything.

I heard this story from them about a year or so ago. Needless to say, when I showed up on Thursday morning to help Kristina and her husband, Andy, move to Minnesota, I was not thrilled to see a really crappy looking U-haul sitting in front of their house. I tried to stay positive and kept telling myself the only reason I was thinking bad things about this U-haul was because of Joseph and Sabina's drama, and not because it was a 95 and had 220,000 miles on it. Then we were just about to get in the car to start the drive, when I heard, "Ahh... Shit" from Andy. And then I heard it from Kevin. Kristina and I went over to the truck and there was a pile of green liquid sitting under the truck. Apparently the hose that does something with the coolant had fallen out. I guess it was a quick fix, but it was problem number one.

The driving went surprisingly well. Extremely slow, but well. Kristina and I were in Andy's Volvo following the truck that Andy and Kevin were driving. We made it to Council Bluffs, Iowa around 10 pm or so. It had been pretty windy, but we decided to keep going a little bit further, hoping to make it to Des Moines. We were on the road for about 10 more miles, when mine and Kristina's hearts almost fell out of our chests. The wind caught the truck (which also had Kristina's car on a tow trailer behind it) and the trailer and just shook it back and forth several times. I think we both thought it was going to fall over completely. Luckily, it did not. But, that made us decide to stop at the next exit, which was in Underwood, Iowa.

At this exit there was a gas station and a motel that had a lounge. We got a couple of rooms, brought the dog and the fish inside, and went to get some dinner at the I-80 Lounge that was part of this motel.

You know in movies when the record scratches to a stop when a stranger walks into a place? Well, that exactly what it felt like when we walked in. It was me and Kristina and Kevin. Andy had stayed in the room with Niko. I opened the door and saw that the bar was right in front of the door and was packed. Right as we walked in, every single person sitting at the bar stopped what they were doing, turned to look at us and just stared for several seconds. It was very strange. What was even weirder was the contrast between the lack of people outside and the very lively inside of this bar. We assumed that this was the place to go in Underwood.

Okay. So we got some dinner, ate, and crashed. The next day, we started again. We were going for about an hour or so when we saw, what we originally thought, was a ton of snow coming out from under the truck. Then we realized that the truck was smoking. We were about a mile from an exit, so Andy just kept driving it to the exit and managed to make it to a gas station. Once again, we lucked out because this gas station also had the Valley Country Cafe, where we ate breakfast while waiting for U-haul approved guys to come fix the truck.

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but once again it had something to do with the radiator. All in all, it took only a few hours to take care of that. I was pleased with that, since I kept thinking we'd be stuck in the middle of Iowa forever. And we all got to eat a good breakfast.

That was actually the last problem we had with the truck. We made it to Minnesota, finally, and did our unloading of the truck on Saturday. By the way, a little bit of advice: Don't move to Minnesota in the middle of the winter. It was -17 degrees while we were unloading their possessions. That's just insane.

My point of this rant is to warn everyone to never use U-haul. These are not the only stories I've heard. If you know of, or have your own U-haul story, write it in a comment. U-haul just doesn't care about the trucks they give out to people. Penske, on the other hand, replaces their fleet every 2 years. They may cost a little bit more, but in the long run it is definitely worth it.