Weekend Recap, and Landing

We spent some nice time at the hunting camp in Mississippi. I took pictures. (Here are some photos I took around the camp.) Marty’s mom got married. It was nice. :} I took pictures. (Here are all my photos from the 18th.) We ate good food and washed a lot of dishes. We stayed in a hotel for a few nights. (Thanks, Pat!) We did our best to understand the bad English of some very, very nice (and also helpful) Indian hotel managers. We ate Sonic. And then, Sunday morning, we got back on the road.

That was… a week ago now? …And although my brain is still fuzzy, I think I can recollect the basics. We drove for quite awhile with no problems. At some point an F150 pulled in front of the car and kicked back a rock that put a bigass crack in Marty’s windshield. It spread slowly for the next several hours. Oh yeah… and then the windshield wipers stopped working.

This wouldn’t have posed any problem, except that by then we were in Louisiana, and it was POURING.

We pulled to the side of the highway and stopped, horrified. There was a K9 van unit pulled not far in front of us when we got there, dealing with someone they’d pulled over. Marty got out in the storm and tried to fix the windshield wipers. He was unsuccessful. (And mad. And who’d blame him?) After ten minutes of trying, someone from the K9 unit finally sprouted an umbrella and came to see why we were sitting there. We followed them slowly along the berm to an exit and sputtered our way around town, looking for a place that would help us out. Even Walmart wouldn’t help us on a Sunday – but someone who’d been inside when Marty went to check ran over to the car with a bottle of Rain-X… and gave it to us.

Never, ever underestimate the power of Rain-X. It does not ONLY work with drizzle – it works with downpour. It was a lifesaver and it got us to an Advance Auto Parts (which wasn’t much help either), but when we got there Marty called his Dad, who suggested something clever… and Marty FIXED the windshield wipers! Score Marty’s Dad, and score Marty!

All we could do from then out was hope, and keep truckin’. That was the last real problem we had, and you have to admit that nothing we dealt with was as bad as it could have been. We got off really, really easy. We made it to Austin around midnight and spent some time finding Angel’s house. We got here safe and sound in the early morning. I had some hot chocolate and a benedryl, and we pulled out one of the sofabeds. And we slept. My god, did we sleep.

So… we’re here. We aren’t settled by any stretch of the imagination, and the Plan, as it were, is still incredibly tentative and incomplete. But we’re here, and we can get started.

Overwhelmed, relieved, encouraged… I’m a bit of a jumble. But at least now you know what the drive itself was like! Howzzat? :P

Tagged as: Blog