Home Again
Well we are home, in one piece, or mostly anyway...
I feel like I've gained about 20 lbs over the past week. I don't think I'll be taking a look at the scale any time soon. D:
We had some pretty rough hurdles to overcome on our way home.
First we drove and drove until ~1am, stopping at a rest area in Kentucky right past Louisville. We found a good spot, folded down the back seat of the hatchback and curled up in the back. We left the CD player playing, but little did we know that the stupid car also apparently had turned on its automatic headlights; they're dimmer than the regular headlights but still bright enough to kill the battery. Joe woke up about two and a half hours after we fell asleep because he heard the music stop playing-- do you know how hard it is to find someone to jump your car at 4am?? And Highway Patrol isn't even open until 8am. (And this was central time so to them it was only 3am-- that would've been 5 hours to wait for Highway Patrol!) Thankfully there was a guy in a mini van that was willing to jump our car. Lots of people passed us by even though we were sitting there with our hood open and the cables hooked up just looking for someone to give us two seconds of their time. ._.
That wasn't the worst of it though! Oh no, there is more... we kept driving through the rest of the morning and finally we were both just dragging soooo bad, we decided to drive through a Starbucks. (Remember the time I was high on the Java Chip frapp? Yeah, I was counting on that kind of buzz to get us home again.) We ordered, paid, and then had to wait a minute for our drinks. Joe put the car into park to wait. We got our drinks and Joe goes to shift it into drive aaaand... the thing slides, but the car won't actually shift out of park. WTF?? He tries again, no luck. He turns the car off and then on again, no luck. We try pushing but because it's in Park and we can't get it to Neutral, we can't get it out of the way. So here we are, blocking the Starbucks drive-thru window at 10am! AUGH! Joe called AAA, and the kids working the Starbucks window just kind of chuckled and said "Well, don't worry, we could use a little break anyway." So they closed the drive-thru as we continued to look around for what the problem was.
Joe popped off part of the console and we started from one end to try and find out what the problem was. Nothing wrong inside the console; the cables still seemed to be working on that end. We're looking and looking, and finally after about half an hour Joe was going to have me try shifting again to look under the hood by the engine to find the right cable, when he noticed... the little cap connecting the cable to the engine had simply popped off and was sitting on the little box NEXT to where it should have been sitting. O_o He popped the cap back on, we try it, and sure enough, it works!! Thankfully nothing major was wrong and we didn't even need AAA to come help us out. Joe called & cancelled the order for the guy to come out, and we were back on our way again.
We had been TRYING to get back in time to pick Reo up from the vet's, but we didn't even reach Atlanta until ~1pm, and we *know* it's at least a 6 hour drive from Atlanta (assuming no traffic/construction) so we decided not to even panic about getting home "in time" any more. We resigned ourselves to getting there whenever we got there. Good thing, too, because just after we made it through Atlanta we got hit by a really bad storm. It was pouring rain and lots of loud thunder/lightning. So we went and walked around a Wal-Mart for a while, then got back in the car and off we went.
We stopped @ "The Smokin' Pig" in Valdosta for some awesome BBQ (we had stopped there after FWA this year and loved it!) and their excellent peach and pecan cobbler.. yum! Just what we needed after a long day. (And I even have some BBQ leftovers for lunch today!)
We finally got in around 9:30 last night. Oy! What an adventure. So we slept pretty hard last night.
Otherwise our week was a good one. Sad, of course, that we had to go to Joe's grandpa's funeral, but it was good that so much of the family could be there. We also got to see a lot of Joe's mom's side of the family. Then we went on up to Michigan for a couple of days to see my mom, my sister and her kids, and my youngest sister was supposed to be there too but I think we saw her for all of three hours, and even then she was too busy being prissy to worry about her sister that she "came up from Illinois just to see." We had lots of fun with the nephews though, including getting to go with them to Chuck-E-Cheese's (I haven't been there in years!) and the zoo. Needless to say the whole week was PACKED with activity.
So now I have a week and a half to work before Ancient City Con arrives, and a week beyond that before Megaplex.
I think I'll go collapse for a bit, now, before getting to work. D:
I feel like I've gained about 20 lbs over the past week. I don't think I'll be taking a look at the scale any time soon. D:
We had some pretty rough hurdles to overcome on our way home.
First we drove and drove until ~1am, stopping at a rest area in Kentucky right past Louisville. We found a good spot, folded down the back seat of the hatchback and curled up in the back. We left the CD player playing, but little did we know that the stupid car also apparently had turned on its automatic headlights; they're dimmer than the regular headlights but still bright enough to kill the battery. Joe woke up about two and a half hours after we fell asleep because he heard the music stop playing-- do you know how hard it is to find someone to jump your car at 4am?? And Highway Patrol isn't even open until 8am. (And this was central time so to them it was only 3am-- that would've been 5 hours to wait for Highway Patrol!) Thankfully there was a guy in a mini van that was willing to jump our car. Lots of people passed us by even though we were sitting there with our hood open and the cables hooked up just looking for someone to give us two seconds of their time. ._.
That wasn't the worst of it though! Oh no, there is more... we kept driving through the rest of the morning and finally we were both just dragging soooo bad, we decided to drive through a Starbucks. (Remember the time I was high on the Java Chip frapp? Yeah, I was counting on that kind of buzz to get us home again.) We ordered, paid, and then had to wait a minute for our drinks. Joe put the car into park to wait. We got our drinks and Joe goes to shift it into drive aaaand... the thing slides, but the car won't actually shift out of park. WTF?? He tries again, no luck. He turns the car off and then on again, no luck. We try pushing but because it's in Park and we can't get it to Neutral, we can't get it out of the way. So here we are, blocking the Starbucks drive-thru window at 10am! AUGH! Joe called AAA, and the kids working the Starbucks window just kind of chuckled and said "Well, don't worry, we could use a little break anyway." So they closed the drive-thru as we continued to look around for what the problem was.
Joe popped off part of the console and we started from one end to try and find out what the problem was. Nothing wrong inside the console; the cables still seemed to be working on that end. We're looking and looking, and finally after about half an hour Joe was going to have me try shifting again to look under the hood by the engine to find the right cable, when he noticed... the little cap connecting the cable to the engine had simply popped off and was sitting on the little box NEXT to where it should have been sitting. O_o He popped the cap back on, we try it, and sure enough, it works!! Thankfully nothing major was wrong and we didn't even need AAA to come help us out. Joe called & cancelled the order for the guy to come out, and we were back on our way again.
We had been TRYING to get back in time to pick Reo up from the vet's, but we didn't even reach Atlanta until ~1pm, and we *know* it's at least a 6 hour drive from Atlanta (assuming no traffic/construction) so we decided not to even panic about getting home "in time" any more. We resigned ourselves to getting there whenever we got there. Good thing, too, because just after we made it through Atlanta we got hit by a really bad storm. It was pouring rain and lots of loud thunder/lightning. So we went and walked around a Wal-Mart for a while, then got back in the car and off we went.
We stopped @ "The Smokin' Pig" in Valdosta for some awesome BBQ (we had stopped there after FWA this year and loved it!) and their excellent peach and pecan cobbler.. yum! Just what we needed after a long day. (And I even have some BBQ leftovers for lunch today!)
We finally got in around 9:30 last night. Oy! What an adventure. So we slept pretty hard last night.
Otherwise our week was a good one. Sad, of course, that we had to go to Joe's grandpa's funeral, but it was good that so much of the family could be there. We also got to see a lot of Joe's mom's side of the family. Then we went on up to Michigan for a couple of days to see my mom, my sister and her kids, and my youngest sister was supposed to be there too but I think we saw her for all of three hours, and even then she was too busy being prissy to worry about her sister that she "came up from Illinois just to see." We had lots of fun with the nephews though, including getting to go with them to Chuck-E-Cheese's (I haven't been there in years!) and the zoo. Needless to say the whole week was PACKED with activity.
So now I have a week and a half to work before Ancient City Con arrives, and a week beyond that before Megaplex.
I think I'll go collapse for a bit, now, before getting to work. D: