And now a story...
Right after I got married, my grandmother offered a pile of family heirloom furniture in Vermont if we could take care of moving it. She even gave us $500 towards keeping the furniture in our family. My wife discovered a Penske box truck round-trip (even with the mileage charges) from New Mexico to Vermont was a few hundred dollars cheaper than a one-way U-Haul east-to-west, if we could pull it off in two-weeks.
I happened to be on the phone with an old friend about a month before the trip and he jumped on the opportunity to fill the empty truck in Dallas with stuff from his mother-in-law and drive it to New York. He paid for his gas and a portion of the rental. My wife drove the 22-foot truck to Dallas, picked him up at the airport (you could do that in those days), and helped him load the van, then stayed with her grandmother for a few days. On that Friday, my wife and I hopped on planes separately and arrived about the same time in Hartford, where my friend picked us up at the airport in the now-empty truck, and we dropped him at the bus station. It worked out amazingly because I was a new hire at the time and had almost no vacation days.
We decided to route through Kansas to visit some cousins, and I picked up a car-hauler and brought a car back that my cousin offered me for free if I took it off his farm.
Before we left, we picked up about two cords of Vermont hardwood firewood for about $50. All we have for the woodstove in New Mexico are softwoods - poplar/aspen/cottonwood and various pines and cedars. People in the north call this kindling or trash, and just leave it on the ground in the woods as fertilizer, because it clogs the stovepipe with creosote.
In New Mexico, we have a name for hardwoods - it's called furniture.
