Inspiration Arrives in Droves

...or, more specifically, in drives. I'll start from the beginning:

Finally, events in my life have attained the slight absurdity that is so necessary for a successful "events" post. To start with, Bria, Cara, Ryan, and I went to the Holschers’ house in NY for the weekend. We had a wonderful time, and I’ll write more about that later. We had an interesting trip back, and I'll write about that later, too. For now I’ll just write about the trip going TO The Hills. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a long time may remember my post in late May or early June about the Mazda breaking down on the way to Cape Cod. To ensure that a breakdown of the same type did not recur, Daddy sent the Mazda to a transmission repair shop. There the car was worked on for a period of about one week, and came out good as new!

Or so we hoped. With great faith and hope, we set out early Friday afternoon for the long journey out. We decided we would time and see how quickly we could make it to the Holschers’. Bria drove. The car drove fairly well, although it felt very under-powered and was shifting a little late. Still, its performance was adequate....until we were about halfway between Bennington and Brattleboro. We were roaring along Rte. 9 (the car was having trouble on the hills; the RPMs came quite close to redlining multiple times.) when suddenly Bria said something like, "Is that smoke coming out from under the hood?" We realized that it was, and began quickly looking for a place to stop. After about a mile, we finally found a place. It was called something like "The Spiral Shop" and was a nice little isolated shop that sold such things as garden signs, sun catchers, and chimes. Bria pulled into the small parking lot and shut of the car.

As soon as we stopped, Bria popped the hood, and I jumped out to open it. This proved to be easier said than done. The smoke was pouring out so fast that I was not able to see the latch. After about five minutes I finally found it by feel and propped the hood open. The smoke continued to pour out.

In the meantime, the man who was tending the shop came over to see what was going on. "What have we here? Fair damsels in distress?" (He hadn’t seen me or Ryan yet apparently) Upon receiving an affirmative answer from Cara, he immediately removed his shirt and sat down to wax glass sunflower petals. He let us use his phone, and was quite nice if a bit strange.

After about one hour of waiting for the engine to cool down (the apparent problem was that the radiator had overheated; the root of the problem we later found to be a broken belt that was supposed to run the pump for the radiator coolant), we set off up the road again hoping for the best. The best never came. For the next mile or so we watched the temperature gauge steadily move from left to right until it was past the "H." We pulled to the side of the road again, and were glad to find that we had cell phone service. (We didn’t at the Spiral Shop.) We called home to find that Daddy had already left with our Toyota Camry and was approximately 1.75 hours away. We settled down for a long and stressful wait.

Fortunately, however, the wait was nowhere near as stressful as we had anticipated. We actually had a rather fun time. The first twenty minutes were a bit tense, but after that I actually enjoyed myself. Cara and I played Catch Phrase while Bria and Ryan read books. Ryan joined in, too, after a while. We tried playing alphabet, but the only sign we could see said "Marlboro ® 1" and that only gave you two letters to start with. The rest of the time was passed just watching cars and their license plates and their passengers. One man stopped and asked if we were all right, and we told him we were, thank you, and he left. About an hour later, Cara cried, "Oh great, another car is sto—" and we all looked to see that Daddy had arrived. I didn’t even feel like he had taken a long time.

So off we drove—this time with me at the wheel ‘cause Bria can’t yet drive a standard—into the wild blue yonder. I stalled once while trying to get onto the road, but after that we were fine until Stamford, NY (where I drove over the curb at a gas station). From there we were fine the rest of the way. The entire trip took only seven and a half hours!!!!!