Friday, August 07, 2009

Travel Issues

So two weeks ago we made the trip over to central Washington for my great aunt's 90th birthday and a somewhat impromptu family reunion. If you read the blog, you'll remember the post about 1311 miles. Well, we're doing the same thing this weekend (or at least close to it). We're driving from home back to central Washington to drop The Kid off with grandparents who will then take her to the airport for her trip to Germany.


Now . . . here's the back story:

On our way home from the reunion/birthday party I dropped the girls off at Camp Marshall and then drove home. After their week at camp, they were going to take the camp bus home where I would pick them up at the designated drop off location.

As they were coming home, there was a nasty car accident on the freeway that had traffic at a standstill for well over an hour. Then, after moving again, the engine on the bus began burning oil and they had to pull off the road and wait for a replacement bus to be sent to pick them up. This was a delay of another four hours. After 8 hours on a bus full of campers who wanted to get home, the girls were just done (and that's not to mention the other kids who were going to further points east and didn't get home until 2 a.m.).

They called me and said they'd be at the drop point at 9. So I jump in my car to pick them up . . . only to find out that I had a flat tire. I managed to borrow a vehicle and got them picked up. The next day, Sunday, one of my parishioners offered to take me up to VC for services. And then we got the tire changed later in the day.

Monday I drove to Butte on my little donut wheel and had the two bad tires (one flat and bald, one just bald) replaced; as well as asking them to do an oil change since I was traveling to Washington later this week.

Drove home. Drove to work on Tuesday. Drove to work on Thursday.

Thursday late afternoon, we got everybody packed up and headed for Washington.

Stopped for gas just outside of Missoula.

Mrs. Ref says, "Why's our engine smoking? That's not normal? How come our engine's smoking???"

I popped the hood to take a peek and . . . hmm . . . Let me just say that it's generally a good idea to REPLACE THE OIL CAP when you change the oil.

Yeppers . . . oil ALL OVER the engine. Luckily, that's what was burning and not the engine itself. So I put some more oil in the engine and covered the hole with duct tape (what would we do without duct tape?), and drove to an auto parts store that was open late and had an oil cap.

All I can say is that I hope our latest travel adventures have gotten themselves out of our collective system and don't do anything to bugger up The Kid's flight to Germany.

Oy

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