All the best trip planning in the world can't prepare you for unexpected car troubles, and BOY oh boy, did we have a doozey...10 hours and 656 miles from home and husband...on Labor Day...when every car repair shop in town is closed.
On the first day of our 2 day trip to TN I had noticed that if I needed to slow down below 60 mph the car had a REALLY hard time getting back up to speed again and once it hit 70 mph it would act normal again. I wondered if the car was going to puke out on me, but there wasn't much I could do about it, and it wasn't happening continually, so I hoped it was a fluke horsepower type thing and kept trucking to our hotel for that night.
We were through about 2 1/2 hours of the 2nd day with only 1 stop for gas and bladder relief, and I was feeling pretty good about the good time we were making. That's when the fecal matter began to forcefully contact the air redistribution device.
Turd #1 The air conditioning stopped working
Turd #2 I could no longer accelerate beyond 60 mph
Turd #3 I could no longer accelerate at all
Turd #4 I didn't make it all the way out of the turn lane at the end of the exit ramp before the car died completely
Turd #5 As we exited the car I smelled burning rubber
Turd #6 I had to embarrassingly walk into a busy KFC with my small dog under my arm so I could use the phone to call for a tow
Turd #7 The tow guy can't help me till I know where I want him to take the car
Turd #8 The ONLY car repair shop open on Labor Day won't even be able to look at the car till the next day
Turd #9 After deciding to leave the car till the morning (the KFC manager had called police dispatch, told them my situation and they had told her it was fine to leave it where it was) spend the night in the hotel next door and then have it towed the next morning when everything was open, we grabbed a bite to eat and saw a policeman an a tow truck next to our car about 50 yards away loading it up to take it away, with all our stuff still in it.
We had been eating outside on rough and prickly patch of grass since we had the dog, and couldn't eat inside, so I grabbed the dog, told Bre to grab my purse, left all our food on the ground and began running toward the car yelling and waving our arms.
Turd #10 As I was running to rescue our belongings I stepped squarely into a pile of what appeared to be a large pile of freshly dropped horse poop
Turd #11 As soon as we reached the car the officer treated me VERY harshly and rude, fussing at me for not pulling the car all the way out of the turn lane (like I had done it on purpose) and roughly stating that he had every right to have the car impounded but instead was going to have the tow truck pull it 10 yards to the right and I would most certainly have to pay the driver for that tow and then pay for a separate tow to a repair shop later.
I couldn't take it anymore and was reduced to a flood of unstoppable tears and almost unintelligible sobs of explanation, to which the kids quickly followed suit, thinking they were going to take all our things away...forever. At this unexpected display of raw emotion from a bedraggled, travel weary woman, her 2 children with mashed potatoes and gravy still on their mouths and their tiny dog, the officer AND the tow truck driver began attempting to console us with words of comfort and consolation. The tow truck driver offered to drive us to a hotel down the road from the car repair place, drop our things off and then take the car to the shop, only charging us for 1 tow.
As we walked away to go clean up our cut-to-short picnic, the officer called Wes back over and gave him a real Indiana State Police shoulder patch. I think he was trying to make sure the kids didn't walk away traumatized from their emotional encounter with the law. Wes asked me if I had any sewing stuff. I didn't.
When we arrived at the hotel the tow truck driver wasn't sure if they allowed pets or not so I put Jak in the car while we went in to register (at this point I couldn't have cared less about a pet friendly policy). I figured I could just keep him in his kennel once we were in the room and everything would be just fine.
Turd #12 As I went to get our things out of the car, on the back of the truck, I discovered that all the doors were locked, and the key was still in the ignition. Jak had stepped on the lock button while waiting for us to come back outside. I hadn't cracked the windows, but before I could fall apart again, the driver grabbed his lock bag and assured me he could get it unlocked, which he did.
Turd #13 As I was removing our things from the car, not knowing how long we would be staying, Bre's pencil box flipped out of my hand, and all the contents fell to the ground and rolled under the bed of the truck. With arms full, I muttered something under my breath, and when I came back out the driver was retrieving them for me
Turd #14 I had called Matt when the car had first broken down, but quickly realized that I did not have enough minutes on my prepaid cell phone to stay on the line while I worked out this mess, especially with roaming charges. Once at the hotel I could only text Matt to try and inform him of our situation because texts are so much cheaper. It is VERY difficult to relay such a story via text, especially when all your have is a querty keypad on your phone. So I wasn't even going to try.
Turd #15 Matt could not call me at the hotel because our prepaid long distance had run out and he nor I could remember out log in information to purchase more.
Turd #16 I could not get the wifi functioning in our hotel room so that Matt and I could at the very least chat with each other to work out the whole mess.
I finally gave up and used the room phone to make a long distance call home, not caring a single solitary second how much the Best Western would charge me for such a transaction. As I lay on the bed and attempted to relay all the information of the afternoon to Matt, I began sobbing once again, this time with total abandon, and it felt really good to let it out.
Turd #17 Wesley pushed the disconnect button in the middle of my call. I had to apologize to him later for yelling about it.
Once Matt got the full story he shifted into knight-in-shining-armor-mode, called my mother, the uhaul place down the road from our hotel, and worked out a plan to rescue his use-to-being-super-active-and-on-the-move family from sitting in a pool-less hotel for another day, possibly more. My Mom drove up to Clarksville with a Jeep. A uhaul tow hitch was rented, and the plan was decided; to haul Matt's car with us to TN where it could be repaired while we commenced with the purpose of this whole trip in the first place, visiting my family. Hopefully there are no more hiccups while executing Drive To TN and Back Again version 2.1.
I'm not a believer in the "everything happens for a reason" philosophy. Never have been, but it seems like it would be very convenient, comforting even, in a situation like this. Instead I usually find myself walking a "sometimes life is good and sometimes life is shitty and that's all there is to it" line of thought, and that pretty much accurately sums up how I feel about today's events. Today was pretty shitty, and that's all there is to it.
I'm very relieved that we didn't break down in the middle of nowhere. I'm very grateful to the gals at KFC who were so kind and helpful to us when we needed a phone, and to the tow truck driver who went above and beyond his job, on a holiday weekend even, to make this as easy as possible on me and my checkbook. And I'm especially happy that I got to have supper with a friend that only lives 30 minutes away from our sidelined local which was definitely a silver lining to this whole menacing and ugly, rain cloud over my head of a day.
This kids did really well, all things considering.
They rode their bikes in the parking lot, got to watch as much tv as they wanted, jump on the beds, play rock games on the pavement, eat pizza @ 10:30pm,
and share their very first Steak & Shake shake.
It's been one hell of a day, one that I don't hope to repeat...ever, but at least we could squeeze a little bit of fun and adventure out of it, together, and that's probably what matters most.
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| All 3 of my babies tucked in for the night after our harrowing day of adventure. |
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