Road Trip!

So we took off to Florida last Saturday afternoon, after getting the entire house packed into our Honda Civic, Toothless. Everything was going great until in Ogden we noticed the Odometer wasn’t working. Andrew was very worried. “What?! Why isn’t this working?! Is anything else not working? No… just the Odometer… that’s weird… Something else to be wrong. Who ever heard of just to Odometer not working?!” He spent the rest of the way to Utah trying to work the car’s malfunction out in his head. We were aiming to stop at my sister Heidi’s house for the night. But alas… her house was playing hid and seek with us and we were losing. After at least four major directional corrections we called Heidi. Somehow we made our way  to her house and found out we had soccer tickets waiting for us. Andrew and I both love soccer so this was exciting, the only downside we had to go back out in to stupid Utah roads and stupid Utah drivers. We both felt it worth the risk and we departed 30 minutes late for the game. I had had a headache all day, but it seemed to explode right then, all the sounds and noises and movement caused me great pain. I felt like a stinker since I was running a great soccer game for Andrew. Despite this, I think he had a good time. He especially enjoyed the little girl behind him waving a team towel in circles hitting him every other turn, or at least I enjoyed it. There was a large Hispanic fan club with humungous drums, a tambourine, and a trumpet, which played vigilantly the entire game and sang songs that would rival any cheerleaders. I picked out my favorite player right away, a smaller man who looked like he could have been a dancer and done ballet but he did better than anyone out there. After the game we somehow found our way back to my sister’s. When we got inside, Andrew accidentally squirted my sister with a squirt gun lying on the table. He had thought it was empty and was just playing but little did he know than there is never an empty squirt gun in my sister’s house. She in turn deducted 10 points from Andrew in some tally that she had in running  her head. It reminded me of the teachers in Harry Potter when they punish the trouble making students.  To reverses his shocking loss of points he sprayed me, Heidi enjoyed this and restored him to his original score, whatever that was… The next morning was Father’s day and Heidi’s kids made their dad breakfast in bed. They were so thoughtful that they even brought us breakfast in bed!  It was fun to see them again. We stay till just before noon then started the painfully long drive to New Mexico.  After four or five hours of sitting in the car, both Andrew’s and my legs were going numb and our backsides hurt with vengeance.  I knew there was a random sand dune just before Moab that we could play on. We stopped there and tried to sprint up this dune which was 80 degrees vertical.  Our flip flops were kicking sand everywhere… mostly up our backs and either into our hair, or up the backs of our shirts (which would inevitably trickle down into our pants.) The shock of scorching hot sand all over our bodies lead us to the brilliant decision to abandon our sandals as we charged up the hill. Somehow it did occur to us that if the sand was hot as it flipped up onto us then if might be somewhat warm to walk on… The bottoms of our feet were now at the temperature of a hot frying pan!! There were some rocks a little more than midway up the dune that created shade enough to offer our feet some kind of relief as well as excellent things to jump off of. After resting in the shade a bit we climbed up the rock then with a running start of about two steps we threw ourselves off the rock and half way down the dune back into the hot sand. We repeated this until the doom of getting back in the car could wait no longer.  Retrieving our sandals, we headed toward Toothless.  It was my turn to drive and I was glad that Andrew could get some sleep.
 Unfortunately, after diving for another six hours we realized that for an hour or so we had been going in the wrong direction. I had missed my turn and made wonderful time back up north. AH! My other sister Rebecca lives in New Mexico.  She was going to put us up for the night and we expected to arrive there at about 11 at night. With the “little” detour I took we wouldn’t be there till much later. Andrew’s turn to dive!! I quit.
    We were had just entered New Mexico that night around 12 when we saw a single head light shining in the middle of the  highway that cut through the mountains that divided New Mexico from Colorado. I assumed it was a motorcycle and went back to what I was doing.  Andrew, on the other hand, heard the car horn coming from the single head light and he pulled to the side of the road and slowed down. Something big and black caught his eye in the barrow pit, he braked to a stop just as an adolescent bear came ambling out and ran into the right side of our car. It fell down, got back up and tried to continue forward but crashed into our car again.  The appearance of a bear cub bounding into our car caused me great surprise. As I looked at it I could see that its back leg was ripped open and it fur was drenched in blood. I looked around and saw what I had thought to be a motorcycle to really be a car with an enormous dent in the middle of the hood and the right head light was completely shattered. The car horn and been jammed on and I could see a bit of the engine due to the scrunched up hood of the car. I looked back at the bear and saw that as it ran to the middle of the road that not only was this bear disoriented and shock but that its’ back leg with the gash was dragging limp. It was been broken very effectively by the now wrecked car in front of us. It finally seemed to regain some of its wits and ran off up the mountain. I called 911 as Andrew got out seeing if the girls that had been driving the car were alright. We turned our hazard lights on and moved Toothless in front of the wrecked car so that other drivers would know that this single headlight wasn’t just a motorcycle.  We, and two other cars that stopped to help tried to get the girls to let us move the car off the road or at least turn it off but they were just gabbing away on their cell phones and left it up to us to direct traffic around them. Finally their dad showed up and the second he got there guess what he did? Oh that’s right, moved the stupid car out of the middle of the road!  Kind’a like what we tried to do a half an hour ago. I hope that Animal Control was able to find the bear. It left a good amount of blood on our car from when it hit us. It either needed to be put out of its pain or fixed up. We left before the police showed up so I don’t know the outcome for the cub.
At long last we made it to Rebecca’s house and crashed on her air mattress. The next morning Kris went to the dentist, we slept, the girls went to tennis, we slept, Kris came home and made an amazing breakfast, we kept sleeping, the girls came home and got sick of us sleeping so they woke us up.  We enjoyed our stay with Rebecca. I wish I could have spent more time with my sisters. I don’t get to see them much and I miss them. Oh well, oh our way back we will have more time to visit with them. We left Rebecca’s house at one and drove through the night toward Florida, finally making it there after countless bathroom stops (Andrew says I have a ridiculously small bladder) and our debit card accounts getting frozen (the banks thought someone had stolen them and was fleeing South) we pulled into Andrew’s house. As his mother was giving me the grand tour of the place I pushed Andrew into their pool. Ah, it’s good to be in Florida!