Every once in a while, you’re going to need a truck-shaped vehicle that you do not own. Maybe you need to move some furniture or perhaps you just bought that sweet rotary motorcycle you’ve been dreaming about. Whatever the reason, America is full of companies willing to rent you a truck with relatively few questions asked. Once you have that truck, you can basically haul whatever you want so long as the truck comes back in one piece. What’s the weirdest reason you’ve rented a U-Haul or similar rental truck?
My family used to move a lot. For a stretch of a little over a decade, we used to move at least once a year, every year. We were always too cheap to hire professional movers — look, cheapskate-ry runs in the family — so we always rented U-Haul trucks. Growing up, I got to ride in a surprising variation of U-Hauls from old Internationals with diesel engines, manual transmission, and a air suspension-based deck height lowering system, to reliable steeds like the GMC C6500. Sometimes we rented with more local outfits and ended up with trucks with liftgates or vintage Ford F700s.
But none of those trips were weird. That wouldn’t happen until 2017. Back then, I needed to move out of my apartment and do so on an impossibly tight budget. Now, I could have just rented a truck, but I slapped a trailer onto the back of my 2012 Smart Fortwo and moved an entire apartment.
To this day I remember the U-Haul people watching me drive away with their mouths on the ground. Though, they shouldn’t have been too surprised since I rented from the same U-Haul store that installed the hitch a few years prior.
Towing a trailer with my Smart was so fun that I sometimes rented trailers just for the fun of it. See this picture? Yeah, there was nothing in the trailer. I rented it just because I wanted to tow a trailer around.
In this shot, I was towing another empty trailer. I brought it to a regional Smart car meet just for the laughs.
For a while I was on a first name basis with my local U-Haul outfits and half the time I wasn’t even hauling anything in the trailers I rented. The other times I was using my Smart like a pickup truck, so the trailer would have a washer and dryer in it or the contents of parts of my brother’s house. Or, I’d rent the motorcycle trailer and use my car to pick up the countless motorcycle projects I had in the late 2010s.
Perhaps my weirdest U-Haul rental happened recently. Last week, I wrote about how I spent over a year renting trucks and now I want to buy a truck again. Well, one of the problems I had was moving a trailer just 75 feet. The trailer was too heavy to move by hand and I didn’t have the time to fish my Touareg V10 TDI out of the back of my storage warehouse. I suppose I could have just bodged something together, but I did things the right way by renting a proper tow vehicle.
Indeed, I drove 11 miles in the wrong direction to rent a U-Haul truck. I then spent a grand total of 5 minutes using that truck to move the trailer 75 feet before closing up the truck, driving that 11 miles back, and tossing the keys back to U-Haul.
This makes me wonder. What’s the weirdest reason you’ve either had or wanted to rent a truck?
Back in our childless days (I.e., two years ago), my wife and I shared a 900 sq foot apartment with two rescued Boston Terriers with territorialism issues; said terriers had done enough urine-based damage to our living room rug that neither our Bissell steam cleaner nor multiple varieties of Nature’s Miracle (IYKYK) could solve. So, I rented a Silverado from U-Haul, put the rug in the bed, and brought it to a self-serve car wash (no hose at our building, nor anywhere to spread out a rug). Once power washed, I parked it on a hill overnight to dry/drain.
(I also moved a couch with that truck, but that’s admittedly less exciting)
Dad rented a car dolly to go pick up a parts car in some hick town an hour away. An early 80s Honda civic towed home with a pilot. After we got everything we needed for my own civic, he Sawzalled in half, we loaded up it’s carcas into my civic and I went and threw it away at the recycling center.
In 2007 bc (before children) my wife and I spent 10 days in Italy sightseeing and delivering half a suitcase of Kraft Mac and Cheese and Will and Grace DVDs to my niece and her college roommate spending a semester in Florence. Coming home from Rome our pilot came on the intercom to tell us that Philadelphia Airport was closed as a result of a ice storm and that most of the airports surrounding it were also all closed. We would be landing in Virginia Beach to refuel and return to Philly to land once the airport re-opened. After refueling we took off and were told shortly that we will be landing in Charlotte, the hub from hell. We were dumped in Charlotte along with about 15,000 other east coast airport exiles around midnight. No customer service people, 2+hour waits on hold at the airlines phone number and one small Starbucks as the only food available for everyone. Of course there are no hotels, car rentals, or taxis available. After a few hours we called our brother who lived in Myrtle Beach and asked if he could come get us (this is now early Saturday morning), he came with our niece and we returned to Myrtle Beach to see if we could get a flight from there to get home. Good time to mention my wife is a Pastor and has two Church services Sunday morning in PA. At the airport the rep from our airline told us they could not help us as their system showed our flight landed in Philadelphia on time the day before…we could fly on another airline but would need to pay and seek payment later. I went to the rental car counter–they had cars but would not rent one way to PA. We returned to my brother’s house to rest and figure out how to get home. I called several car rental agencies, none would do one way to PA. I then flipped through the Yellow Pages and found U-Haul. I called and found they had 15 foot trucks available so my brother took us to U-Haul (with a few hand me down prom dresses for another niece back home) and drove on through the night from Myrtle Beach to our home north of Harrisburg, Pa. With one brief stop in VA for a couple hours of sleep we made it to the parking lot of my wife’s Church with an hour to spare so she could get a quick shower and make it to her two services. I slept a couple more hours and then we drove off to Philly to retrieve our car from the airport parking lot. Monday after work I turned in our transport truck and never looked at the airline that stranded us again…. By the way, the U-Haul truck was also cheaper than any rental car price we were quoted before being denied a one way rental.
Back in ’93 I lived in rented duplex in Wilmington DE.
My landlord called me one day and offered me $50 off that month’s rent if i would help him load up about 50 wooden pallets from a storage unit near Fredrick Maryland into a u-haul and move them to a barn about 35 miles away in podunk West Virginia.
When we got to the barn, it was half full of wooden pallets. We off-loaded the new batch next to the existing piles and then drove home. When i asked about the pallets, the only reply I got was ‘they’re for a project.’ I didn’t really want to know any more.
Hypothetically, I used a 2005 4 cyl, manual Ford Escape to haul a car on a Uhaul dolly from Eugene to Seattle. Hypothetically.
The weirdest reason I rented a UHaul truck was because I had to move houses.
Which is to say I have a boring life and I never rented a UHaul for a truly weird reason.
I have friends who occasionally fly in from the West Coast for our annual canoe trip on the Shenandoah, and rather than bring camping gear they rent U-Haul vans and just sleep in them at the camp site. So not terribly weird, but certainly not a U-Haul’s intended purpose. Keeps you nice and dry, though.
My fondest personal (though not terribly weird) U-Haul memory was when I moved from a townhouse to a single-family right around the corner; less than a quarter of a mile. I rented a 26 foot truck from U-Haul. While I was waiting in line in the shop, a guy came back in complaining that his truck was a stick shift. The U-Haul employee shrugged and basically said you can either figure it out, or not take the truck, because we don’t have any automatics available. One of the mechanics gave him a 2 minute explanation of how to drive a stick, and off he went into Northern Virginia traffic. I signed all my paperwork and was told to wait for someone to come show me to my truck. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, a mechanic came into the shop and called for me. Stepping out the door, I saw a humungous cloud of smoke in the parking lot that eventually dissipated to reveal the most clapped-out 20+ year old International box truck I’ve ever seen in actual U-Haul service. The mechanic referred to it as “Smokey Joe” and apologized for the 10 minute wait, during which I can only assume they were emptying multiple cans of starting fluid into the intake. I climbed aboard and set off; as I shifted from 1st to 2nd, the mechanic yelled up to me “that son of a bitch will always pop out of second on you, but he’ll get you where you need to go”. He said this as I was letting the clutch out, and the 3 foot gear shift violently smacked back into my hand. Note to self: go straight from 1st to 3rd. I made the short drive to my old house without further incident.
Based on Smokey Joe’s hesitation when starting at the U-Haul store, I decided it was probably best to just let him idle while we loaded up. That plan backfired when he kept setting off the smoke detectors in my house, so I took my chances and shut him off. Ultimately, Smokey Joe did indeed get me where I needed to go; i.e. to my old house, and then to my new house with all my stuff loaded. But that was it. He was now completely dead in front of my new neighbor’s house. I was still young and stupid enough to have my friends help me move, and fortunately one of them had previously worked as a mover for United Van Lines, and was able to get about 98% of my stuff into that box truck in one shot. I finished the rest of the move using a borrowed pickup, left Smokey Joe’s keys in the ignition, and called U-Haul to come get him. A couple days later he was gone (and once again, I was not charged a dime; not even for fuel). I think I saw him a few months later with the U-Haul graphics hastily removed but the tell-tale orange and white paint scheme still visible, hauling landscaping equipment.
I’ll always have a place in my heart for ol’ Smokey Joe; one of the finest true beaters I’ve had the pleasure of encountering over the years.
I rented a 2 axle enclosed trailer and purchased an entire vintage/antique chainsaw collection (about 200 whole saws plus multiple parts/partial saws). Drove from central WV to northern PA.
I’m sure that trailer still smells like bar oil and varnished gasoline.
Holy crap you win. A “200 chainsaws” answer pretty much wins every question contest.
Changing jobs.
I’m a mechanic with a toolbox that’s 8 feet long, 6 feet tall, and 2 feet deep, with every drawer full, as well as a six drawer rolling cart and a service cart, not to mention the big stuff that doesn’t fit inside like my fluid evacuator, pole jack, bolt bin, creeper, mechanic seat, and underhood light.
For my last two shop moves I’ve rented the double-axle U-haul ramp trailer, and for one of those I rented one of their pickups as well. That trailer works surprisingly well for toolbox hauling.
When I was in the Navy we made a deal with a local bar that if we brought in enough business for them they would take care of us. So we rented a Uhaul box truck, loaded it with sailors, and drove up to the front door. When the bartender ‘took delivery’ of about 30 sailors we didn’t pay for a single drink that night. Plus it doubled as a pretty good drunk tank at the end of the night.
I worked for Picture Car Warehouse in Northridge,CA and we were tasked to make three identical mid 90”s Coupe DeVilles for a movie about 5 years ago. Finding three involved a nationwide search. I found the third one in Georgia. Called the guy and of course he said it ran great and could easily make a drive back to Hollywierd on its own. I flew to Georgia, met the guy at the airport parking lot and headed west. I made it to Alabama before the engine blew on I-10.
I had it towed to a parts store about 9:00 pm, and left a note on the windshield stating the situation, got a hotel and a poor night’s sleep.
Next morning I rented a U-Haul van and dolly, asked the parts store guys to help me push the POS on the dolly and began my drive west again.
When entered California I had to stop at the agriculture inspection and they asked if u had anything to declare. I said I had a nut behind the wheel thinking a 4.1 V8 could make a three thousand mile drive and an lemon on a dolly.
I moved a free hot tub from FB Marketplace
Of course, it never worked right. It leaks and doesn’t get very hot. But it was free!
Didn’t think I had an answer, then I realized I have a great one.
About 7 years ago my wife found a new Samsung refrigerator that has the a Soda Stream built directly into it. It was about $1700?, IIRC. It was in the ghetto of Philadelphia. I live in Connecticut.
Packed the kids up, went down, spent the day eating cheese steaks and visiting museums.
Rented a Uhaul, which was in the same exact parking lot as the sketchy wearhouse where the fridge was sitting (in a sea of other fridges and appliances). Loaded it into the empty Uhaul truck and drove it home that night, and we still use the Soda Stream feature in it to this day.
I even hacked a Soda Stream container so I can refill them myself at home (I bought a CO2 tank for $150 shortly after acquiring the fridge). I have refilled the CO2 tank 3 times at a cost of $25 each time. A Soda Stream tank is ~$30 each. So, I’ve saved a ton over the years.
I’ve got another!!!
Back in college, a few of us pooled our cash to buy old snowmobiles (this was Buffalo, NY circa 1998). We rented a Uhaul to transport the snowmobile to where we wanted to ride it.
Need-less-to-say, my tools were stolen that night right out of the truck. It was my first set of tools. I was majorly bummed. Oh, did I mention we did this at midnight and rode until about 3am?
College kids do stupid shit.
As a college student who used to drive from Austin to Nuevo Laredo to buy cheap bottles of Jose Cuervo, I concur.
I just rented the 15 footer recently for landscaping. I filled the back with branches, old nasty mulch and stumps. I got the 15 with the ramp because the stumps were too heavy to lift. We rolled them in on a dolly.