The all-day trip to Ikea

The day started with Mom hoping it would be memorable and me hoping I would have a good story to blog. Be careful what you ask for. Here is our little cautionary tale:
Mom and I went online to order our furniture from Ikea and found out it would take three weeks to be shipped to us. If we went into the store and bought it all there, they would ship all the stuff to our house in only four days. It sounded easy ad like a good, two hour trip. We started out at 12:30 took the tube and the train up there and got shopping. Quickly filling up two carts with mostly hangers and such we went down to the self help area to pull out the boxes of our unassembled furniture. I don't know why we thought the two of us could manage all of those boxes. Four more carts stacked high with boxes, lots of tugging and pulling, help from strangers, and some abandoned furniture later we had finished. Then we just had to manage to push all six carts to the cashiers desk and stuff all the loose items in big blue bags. Two of the carts took both of us pushing and pulling to get them to move. But, we finally got that all finished and only had to take some mirrors and goblets home with us because they couldn't ship glass. OK, I think I am making this story sound not as completely overwhelming and exhausting as it was. That "simple" little trip to Ikea took ten hours. Seven of which were spent in the store trying to figure out how were could pull the boxes onto our carts and manuveur them around. The only thing we had to eat were some crackers and yogurt. Let's just say it was a very long day. I'm pretty sure I still feel it. At least we amused a lot of people. No one exactly told us that, I'm just assuming from all the looks we got. Why didn't we bring along some muscles? Foolish mistake.