Options for a cross-country move with a friend

My friend and I are currently in the same city on the west coast. We are both moving east for grad school in a couple of months. We're not moving to the same town, but we're about a 1.5 hr drive apart. We're both recent college grads so we don't have a whole ton of stuff to move; desk, chair, bed frame, mattress, plus a bunch of boxes and couple of miscellaneous items. We were considering sharing a UBOX container that would be shipped to one of the towns we're moving to, then moving half the stuff to the other town in a rental truck or something.

Trouble is neither of us has much driving experience, and we're not comfortable driving a truckload of items for a couple of hours on unfamiliar roads. It looks like it's kind of expensive to hire a separate moving company to do the last leg (moving half the stuff to the other town). Without the cost of this last leg, the cost of shipping the container is already a little higher than the value of the items we'd be shipping, but I also value not generating a bunch of waste by tossing our stuff out (nobody is going to buy the rickety old shit we have right now). The extra cost of that last leg is pushing moving our stuff into not-worth-it territory, but I really don't want to toss all this stuff.

Is there a cheaper alternative to hiring movers for that last leg of the move? Is there a cheaper way to pull this off overall? Getting 2 separate UBOXes is definitely more expensive, but is there a cheap moving company that will make 2 stops, or something like that?