It Begins.

So the woes began as we set apart from vegas. It was about 630 in the morning on Thursday, June 17th and we had packed everything as tight as could be and were ready to start our venture down to Phoenix. Jen got in the Mercedes and I plopped into my truck, turned the key, and was severely let down. The truck would not turn over. After messing around with it, trying to jump it, and everything else imaginable we waited until about 8 to call our mechanic, Roje, who had worked on both cars over the past two weeks, he offered to make a house call and try to get us on our way. The only problem was that someone obviously put a hex on us leaving town and it threw a monstrous wrench into our gears. We tried all day to no avail to make the truck start and after giving up Roje graciously allowed us to leave the truck overnight so that Supermom and her sidekick Ultra Brother could come to our rescue. So, the next morning, Sean and friends came with a tow trailer and we popped the truck on the trailer and were on our way.

Sean towed the truck down to Phoenix while Jen and I packed the car a bit better and set off in the Mercedes. We were on our way to a lovely drive from Vegas to Phoenix in the nice hot weather that the mojave desert is so notably known for when we hear a nice rumble from the front of the car. I look in the side mirror to see some of our tire tread trailing behind us, I could have sworn I saw a middle finger pop up from the rubber as it skipped along the asphalt. I pulled the car over to the shoulder and looked at Jen as we both start laughing our asses off. It was perfect. Honestly what else could go wrong?

The fun part of changing the tire was that we had to move all of our stuff, that was completely packed inside the car with pretty much no wiggle room to begin with, to get to the spare tire. The fun began as we unpacked the car, got the spare, put it on the car, and repacked. It was all accomplished in a rather quick 20-30 minutes, not too shabby if I might say so myself. Now, you might say all is done and well, what else could possibly go wrong, and we would agree, but for starters the spare tire which looked to be full sized is in actuality a tad bit smaller than the rest, which caused a nice pull in the steering, and per Murphy's law we decided to take it a bit slower than we wanted to.

So the tire adventure started a bit outside of Laughlin and right around that time the AC stopped being as cold in the car. At this point we have a laundry list of negatives so one more can’t hurt, so why the hell not, right? Windows down, heads up, we marched on to Laughlin to find a Walmart to get some tires that will be covered across the country. We finally got there and it was going to be at least a 3 hour wait said the lovely Laughlin native who had about 5 or 6 teeth that I could count. Jen and I glanced at each other and decided to keep moving to Kingman.

Kingman Arizona is also known as the butt cheek of Arizona, because it’s not as bad as some places, but its pretty darn close. We get to the Walmart and it too was going to be about a 3 hour wait, but we had to do it, so we dropped the car off and went to get some lunch. We walked outside into the roughly 105 degree heat and spotted a cracker barrel, of which I had heard good things about. We trudged on over and sat down and ordered up a nice little chicken platter to share. Why share you might ask? Well we’ve come to terms that when we eat out we almost always have food leftover that gets trashed or we eat too much and regret it. The solution to our problems is to share food and if we are hungry order more. It is a simple plan that will continue through the rest of the trip. The food was pretty good and the waitress we had was very nice as she must have caught wind of our magical fifty dollar bill and didn’t want any part of it.

After lunch there was a bit more time to kill so we stepped outside and noticed some pretty sweet rocking chairs and decided that a nice rock or two would feel pretty nice right about that time. After rocking it for a bit we noticed an over sized checkers game set up that took up the next chunk of our lives. Game over. Jen won. It was a fluke.

Walmart was done with our car and we were pretty much set for the rest of the trip to Phoenix.

On arrival to the parents’ house, it felt so damn good to finally be done with the day. We had been working on getting from Vegas to Phoenix for roughly 36 hours and it was finally done with. Enter relaxation mode. Never was sleep so welcomed in my life. It's not that we were tired as much as we were just flat out exhausted. There was a lot of sitting around and doing nothing until the Yankees/Diamondbacks game. Long story short D-Backs scored about 4 or 5 runs in the first inning and the Yankees got their asses kicked. Bummer.

The next couple days were fairly productive as I made some blueberry muffins and granola bars for our trip, changed the fuel filters and such in the car and after a bunch of trouble shooting got the AC running again. This is when we decided that our bad luck had come to an end. (fingers crossed)

The moral of the story is that Roje from Top Car Service is an awesome guy and my family is the best in the world. Despite the shortcomings the trip is already a good decision.