(no subject)
Do you guys ever have, like, sexy schlump days? I totally felt like I was working this stay-on-the-couch, live-in-my-pajamas, don't-brush-my-hair thing yesterday. Or I could just still be riding the high of being in my own space that is hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Winne-fucking-mucca. I needed a recuperation period from my vacation.
Ohhhhh my god, let me fill you in a little, and I'll try to make it snappy.
Basically, the car started overheating and steaming from the corner of the hood just outside of Twin Falls on Thursday, and because it was already 5:45 we had to wait until the morning to have anyone look at it. So we folded the backseat of the Subaru down and all three of us plus dog crowded in with our sleeping bags and had a rough night of sleep in the parking lot of some kind of visitor's center. Poor Hailey is massively allergic to dogs, so she ended up crawling out to sleep on the ground halfway through the night in order to continue that thing we call breathing. We took the car in to the dealership at eight the next morning, where they discovered a massive hole in the radiator. So they replaced that and we were up and running again by 11:30.
ONLY THEN. Ten miles outside Winnemucca (which is like all the worst parts of small towns, Nevada and lazy people shook around in a bag and spilled out onto the desert), the car started overheating again and we didn't want to blow through another radiator, so we pulled into a gas station and asked for the nearest auto shop. And that's how we discovered the worst town ever and the crappy garage of doom. They looked at it and decided that the problem was that the water pump and thermostat had gone out and needed to be replaced and they wouldn't be able to get the parts in until Monday, possibly Tuesday.
So we decided to abandon the car! Only the one car rental place in town had closed three weeks earlier. So Hailey was going to take the bus to Reno (two and a half hours away) to rent a car to drive back and pick up the rest of us. Only, see, she went down to the gas station at 5:30 Saturday morning to catch the bus, and three hours later she called to say that she was STILL sitting at the station because the bus was late and they had no idea when it was going to come. So we gave up on the bus! Only then the gas station attendant wouldn't refund her $42 ticket even though the bus never came because 92% of all Winnemucca citizens we ran into were incompetent dicks! Eventually, Travis's girlfriend, who was already down in San Francisco, drove the six hours to come rescue us. She's a hero.
So then we got to spend a day in San Fran and a couple days down the coast around Santa Cruz, and that part was really pretty good except for the part where Hailey and I got mean colds and Madeleine spent the better part of two days with the stomach flu. But we were in California and we got to go to Trader Joe's and drink gin and tonics on the porch and walk on the beach and eat tasty Mexican food. Good things!
On Friday we headed back to Nevada to pick up the other car (Madeleine decided to come back to Montana so at this point we're potentially a caravan) only to find that everyone at the garage we'd left it at had apparently been sitting around with their thumbs up their butts all week because it wasn't done. Once they got the parts, the actual labor that had to go into the job was about 3-4 hours. You know how many hours they'd had the car? Lots. Lots of hours in a not very big town that couldn't possibly have kept them THAT busy. And then they proceeded to string us along all Friday evening and Saturday, saying it would be done by closing Friday, then by noon on Saturday, then by two, then by closing, then they PROMISED it would be done at five. So at 5:45 we finally got in and drove away. Two blocks later we turned back because the check engine oil light came on and we weren't driving away with fresh problems that they'd created. They tinkered around in the engine for twenty minutes to fix that and then we took off again. Only to turn around four blocks later because THE ENGINE WAS OVERHEATING. They hadn't fixed our original problem AT ALL.
An hour and a half later, it's coming up on eight o'clock at night and they finally say, "Well, looks like your head gasket must be blown or cracked! That'll take at least another week." And then, instead of punching them in the face like we wanted to, we said fuck that and all piled back into Madeleine's car (now four people, a dog and all of our assorted junk, some of it tied to the roof) and took turns driving ALL night to get back to Missoula at nine in the morning. Where I took a shower and went to work at ten!
It was kind of ridiculous.
This picture is my favorite.
HAHA, yep.
I don't want to go back to work tomorrow. I'm not reaaady, I still have trauma issues I think.
Ohhhhh my god, let me fill you in a little, and I'll try to make it snappy.
Basically, the car started overheating and steaming from the corner of the hood just outside of Twin Falls on Thursday, and because it was already 5:45 we had to wait until the morning to have anyone look at it. So we folded the backseat of the Subaru down and all three of us plus dog crowded in with our sleeping bags and had a rough night of sleep in the parking lot of some kind of visitor's center. Poor Hailey is massively allergic to dogs, so she ended up crawling out to sleep on the ground halfway through the night in order to continue that thing we call breathing. We took the car in to the dealership at eight the next morning, where they discovered a massive hole in the radiator. So they replaced that and we were up and running again by 11:30.
ONLY THEN. Ten miles outside Winnemucca (which is like all the worst parts of small towns, Nevada and lazy people shook around in a bag and spilled out onto the desert), the car started overheating again and we didn't want to blow through another radiator, so we pulled into a gas station and asked for the nearest auto shop. And that's how we discovered the worst town ever and the crappy garage of doom. They looked at it and decided that the problem was that the water pump and thermostat had gone out and needed to be replaced and they wouldn't be able to get the parts in until Monday, possibly Tuesday.
So we decided to abandon the car! Only the one car rental place in town had closed three weeks earlier. So Hailey was going to take the bus to Reno (two and a half hours away) to rent a car to drive back and pick up the rest of us. Only, see, she went down to the gas station at 5:30 Saturday morning to catch the bus, and three hours later she called to say that she was STILL sitting at the station because the bus was late and they had no idea when it was going to come. So we gave up on the bus! Only then the gas station attendant wouldn't refund her $42 ticket even though the bus never came because 92% of all Winnemucca citizens we ran into were incompetent dicks! Eventually, Travis's girlfriend, who was already down in San Francisco, drove the six hours to come rescue us. She's a hero.
So then we got to spend a day in San Fran and a couple days down the coast around Santa Cruz, and that part was really pretty good except for the part where Hailey and I got mean colds and Madeleine spent the better part of two days with the stomach flu. But we were in California and we got to go to Trader Joe's and drink gin and tonics on the porch and walk on the beach and eat tasty Mexican food. Good things!
On Friday we headed back to Nevada to pick up the other car (Madeleine decided to come back to Montana so at this point we're potentially a caravan) only to find that everyone at the garage we'd left it at had apparently been sitting around with their thumbs up their butts all week because it wasn't done. Once they got the parts, the actual labor that had to go into the job was about 3-4 hours. You know how many hours they'd had the car? Lots. Lots of hours in a not very big town that couldn't possibly have kept them THAT busy. And then they proceeded to string us along all Friday evening and Saturday, saying it would be done by closing Friday, then by noon on Saturday, then by two, then by closing, then they PROMISED it would be done at five. So at 5:45 we finally got in and drove away. Two blocks later we turned back because the check engine oil light came on and we weren't driving away with fresh problems that they'd created. They tinkered around in the engine for twenty minutes to fix that and then we took off again. Only to turn around four blocks later because THE ENGINE WAS OVERHEATING. They hadn't fixed our original problem AT ALL.
An hour and a half later, it's coming up on eight o'clock at night and they finally say, "Well, looks like your head gasket must be blown or cracked! That'll take at least another week." And then, instead of punching them in the face like we wanted to, we said fuck that and all piled back into Madeleine's car (now four people, a dog and all of our assorted junk, some of it tied to the roof) and took turns driving ALL night to get back to Missoula at nine in the morning. Where I took a shower and went to work at ten!
It was kind of ridiculous.
This picture is my favorite.
HAHA, yep.
I don't want to go back to work tomorrow. I'm not reaaady, I still have trauma issues I think.