Carole and Kelvin's big adventure

So, we went to Port Aransas this weekend for the sand festival. I took off work on Friday thinking we could pick the kids up at around 12:30 to 1:00 and be down in Port A in time to play a little before the end of the day. We left the house at 1:00, and didn't get out of Austin until 2:30 because it took so long to get the kids from school and then get through Austin traffic. Don't ask me what the hell everyone in Austin was doing on I35 at 2:00 in the afternoon, but they really pissed me off.

Normally we take 183 to get down there, but to do that, you have to take the ferry, and on sand-fest weekend, the ferry can get VERY backed up. So we decided to go through San Antonio and Corpus. That decision turned out to be pretty fortuitous.

We were driving into SA, when the transmission light came on in the Suburban. It's never good when your car says "transmission hot. Idle transmission immediately." It's basically like your car telling you that it acidentally lit your bank account on fire. Kelvin pulled off into a wal-mart that was right off the highway, and after some discussion with the mechanics there, he decided that the transmission pump was going out. I could explain what that means, but I already tried once, and I fell asleep typing.

Anyway, we figured that we could limp it along to the SA airport, where we could leave the car for the weekend, and then limp it back to Austin on the way back. Yes, that's a lot of limping, but desparate people don't always think clearly. So my awesome secretary called Enterprise for me, and got me hooked up with a rental reservation at the airport, and off we went to pick it up...at least off we went for about 3 miles, at which point the car made what can only be described as unhappy noises and then stopped changing gears alltogether in protest to our limp-along plan.

We coasted off the highway and sat there trying to figure out what to do for a while. Of course, Emily immediatley had to pee, so I had to take her into the bushes on the side of the road to do her business. Meanwhile, David asked us if we were there yet about 347 times, you know, just to be sure. I wasn't annoyed because I encourage him to check for understanding.

I finally called my awesome receptionist who used to live in SA, and she got me the name of a reputable mechanic that we could tow the car to. Of course, by this time, it was about 4:30 and they closed at 5:30. We got a tow truck on its way to come give us a tow, but they couldn't put a family of four in the cab of the truck. We tried to convince them that leaving us standing on the side of the road was less safe than just letting us pile into the cab of his truck like a band of carny clowns, but for some reason, he wasn't buying it, so we called a cab.

Well, much to no one's surprise, there was some big festival going on in SA on Friday, and cabs were nearly impossible to find. The cab company said it would be 30 to 40 minutes at a minimum before they could have someone there. After about 15 minutes, Kelvin and I managed to combine a few brain cells and thought to ask enterprise to just send someone to pick us up. Of course, by that time, waiting on Enterprise meant risking the whole sit-on-the-side-of-the-road-after-the-tow-truck-takes-our-car problem, so I walked the kids to Denny's which was only about an exit away and on the other side of one of the busiest highways in the country at rush hour, so it was perfectly safe and wise.

Enterprise picked us up from there, arriving just as both kids decided they needed to pee. Seriously, what is it with kids having to pee at inopportune moments? It's like it's genetically coded or something. It turns out that the enterprise was probably only about a half mile away from where our car broke down, possibly closer than the Denny's, but we couldn't see it from where we were, so we had no idea.

Finally, at around 6:00, we had our rental (a mini-van which cost us $545 to rent for 3 days and return in Austin, but damn we looked good in it), and we had the Suburban at the repair shop. We had to leave the keys hidden in the car since the shop was closed. Unfortunately, nobody stole it over the weekend. I know, I don't think that's fair either. Yes, the transmission is shot, but it still has lots of other good parts.

We took off, with Kelvin driving and me navigating. I asked him if we were supposed to take I37, and he said, "no, we're supposed to be on I35." I know, I know, you are all saying "no, you have to take I37 to get to corpus." Yeah, I know that now. Thanks, though.

At any rate, being the ever-helpful navigator that I am, I found a "shortcut" to get us back to I35. If we hadn't made one wrong turn my shortcut would have ended up saving us about -1 minutes. As it was, the one wrong turn took us directly into a massive shopping center for San Antonio yuppies with nothing better to do than drive slowly to their tree-hugging-hippie stores and spend lots of money on spa treatments and grande-double-whip-chi-lattes with an extra shot of fat-free organic vanilla and a chaser of pretention. The wrong turn made my shortcut go from taking one minute longer to about 10 minutes longer...you know, to get to the wrong highway.

The kids were hungry by this time, mostly because it had been about 20 minutes since they needed us to do something inconvenient. So I said I'd find a Chik-fil-a for us to stop at. According to google, there was one just a little way off the highway, and just a few miles down the road. At first I was worried that it wouldn't be there, because, well, that was just the kind of day it had been. But I was wrong (probably). There it was (most likely), somewhere (presumably)buried inside a massive mall. Google doesn't reveal that sort of informatin when you tell it to find you a Chik-fil-a. That's a serious flaw in their design if you ask me.

So we went to Whataburger, and the kids threw fits. But eventally, they calmed down and ate their damn chicken fingers. About 10 minutes after we got back on the highway, Kelvin realized that we really should have been on I37. Apparently, the giveaway was a sign telling us that said something akin to "Welcome to Laredo." So we had to turn around and make our way back to SA to cut over to I37.

Then, about 5 miles down the road after that fun little detour, David told me he was finished with his orange soda. I took the cup from him, not knowing that he had punched a hole in the bottom of the cup with his straw. FYI, Whataburger straws are too big for their kid's-size cups, and they're really sturdy straws. Playing with straws never gets old, you know? As I sat there in a frozen panic, orange soda poured all over my lap, my cell phone, and the seat. I tried to roll down the window, but, to my complete surpise, the child-safety locks were on, and I couldn't. We had to pull over so I could clean up the mess.

At that point, Kelvin took the opportunity to "explain" to the kids that if they didn't start behaving we would just go home. So I decided to just get out of the car and express my dissatisfaction at the day's events in my own way. Apparently my scream was so loud that Kelvin thought I had slammed my hand in the car door. Thankfully though, he didn't waste prescious kid-yelling time to check and see if I was ok. That would have been so wasteful.

Finally, though, we were on our way. After about 30 minutes, Kelvin got tired of driving, and asked me to take over. We stopped at an exit with a gas station off the road, but Kelvin said "let's just switch drivers at the stop sign to save some time." Yeah, that's what happened. We "saved time." I took over, got back on the highway, and then looked down at the gages. Guess what? The gas light was on. No, really, it was. Of course, Kelvin had no idea if it had been on for ten minutes, or if it had just turned on when I looked down. We almost turned back to go to the gas station we just passed, but Kelvin assured me there would be a station not far down the road if we just kept going. So we did. And, yeah, there wasn't a gas station just down the road. Well, actually there was, but we didn't go there. That would have been too easy, and on Friday it was all about doing things the hard, inconvenient, risky, and expensive way.

Kelvin looked for the nearest gas station on the google map app on his phone because it had been so helpful withthe whole chik-fil-a-in-the-mall ordeal. Google assured us that there was a Stripes at the exit just a few miles away. We got to the exit, I got off, but...wait for it...there was no gas station. Kelvin said "turn right. It's just down the road." So, I turned right. I know this will be surprising, but, there wasn't a gas station just down the road. I know, I know, you didn't see that one coming, did you?

Then Kelvin said, "just keep going. There's a little town with 3 gas stations just a few miles ahead." Yes, you would think that at some point I would have stopped listening and just turned the damn car around. But, again, where's the fun in that? For the next several minutes (if you ask me, it was about 15 minutes, but Kelvin swears it was only about 5) two thought kept floating through my mind (and, as Kelvin will willing tell you, out of my mouth): 1) Dear God, please don't let us run out of gas out here in the middle of nowhere; and 2) I'm going to f*ing kill Kelvin if we run out of gas out here in the middle of nowhere, but I'm going to wait to kill him until after he gets back with gas.

It was dark; we were approximately 8 miles past nowhere, and we were surrounded by fields of nothing. If the blair witch had jumped out in front of my car, the only thought that would have gone through my head would have been "dude, I wonder if she has any gas." Well, that and "she can take Kelvin." We kept going, and eventually hit highway 59. Kelvin said that according to the map, we could turn left and run back into I37 about 5 or 6 miles down the road. Or we could turn right, and supposedly hit some small town with 3 gas stations about 3 or 4 miles down the road.

We decided to turn right, and sure enough, a few miles later, we came up to a gas station in George West, Texas. Home to..well, not a hell of a lot other than a gas station. I decided that it was fate that I eneded up at that gas station, so I went in and bought a lottery ticket. I also took Emily to the bathroom where her reading skills came in handy. As she was peeing, she said "mommy? What does C-O-C-K spell?" I hesitatingly told her, and she said "oh, I love cock! This person loves cock!"

It turns out, though, that I was right about the whole fate taking us to George West thing. I got 5 out of 6 numbers on my quick pick, and I won $2,491.00 and an "I'm a winner" t-shirt. It took us almost 10 hours to make the 4 1/2 hour drive to Port A, but if all of that crap hadn't happened, we would never have ended up at the Shell station in George West at 8:30 at night, and I would be paying money out of pocket to get the car fixed. As it is, I lost about half of a day, but I got a helluva good story out of it, and we are going to be out little to nothing for the transmission repair.