Okay, folks. The web album has been updated. There are a few new ones in the 4 Months folder. And I have added 5 Months, Fall Festival and Mallory’s First Trip to Louisiana. The trip was great. It was so fun watching my grandmother with Mallory for the first time. And my dad is just silly over her. Shoot! Now that I think of it, we should have gotten all three generations in one picture. Dang it! I guess we’ll just have to go back. ;)
Have you ever traveled with a 5-month old? It is not for the faint of hearts. They are only happy for the first 4 hours or so in a car seat…that includes there and back. After that, they start plotting against you. Case in point – on the way home from Louisiana, Mallory was having a fit. We finally got her settled down, but a couple of hours later, we ran into issues (I think she has a voodoo doll shaped like the bus). We stopped in Good Hope, Alabama (the name is just full of irony). Kylie and I went into Hardee’s to utilize the facilities and grab some food. Johnathan stayed in the bus because Mallory was asleep (quick side note: the bus rocks for road trips…despite what you are about to read). While we were inside, a guy taps on Johnathan’s window and says, “Hey, d’you know you got gas pourin’ out the bottom of yer car?” Shoot yeah…we figured it was getting such good gas mileage that we could just waste about 9 bucks on the ground (I pick but I’m very grateful that he told us). Hint: it is not a good sign when you come out of Hardee’s in Smallville, Alabama, and your husband and a stranger are laying on the ground looking underneath your car…and there’s a big puddle of something running across the parking lot.
So we called AAA. The good news is that it stopped leaking when he turned it off. The bad news is that you can’t start and run a vehicle that is literally pouring gas. The worse news is that you can’t find a garage on a Sunday night at 8:00 pm. The worst news is that you’re in Smallville, Albama so you can’t get a rental car on Sunday night at 8:00 pm, and the only hotel in sight is an Econolodge across the parking lot of a truck stop. It soon became very apparent that we were spending the night in Good Hope (starting the get the irony?).
Bear with me while I take you through this thought process. If they towed the bus to a dealership, we would have no way to get to it the next day. If we left it at Hardee’s we would have to carry all of the luggage plus the baby stuff through the truck stop (and trust me, we used every bit of space in that vehicle…we were loaded down). So we decided we would walk over to the hotel and have them tow it there. Then, Monday morning we would call them again to come tow us to get it fixed. Once we settled on the plan, the next step was helping AAA find us. Not as easy as you would think. The Hardee’s chick told us where we were…in local terms. Apparently, that doesn’t jive with Mapquest or whatever it is that AAA uses. It only took about 20 minutes to work out the minor details of where the heck we were. After everything was lined up, we walked over to the hotel and got a room. The guy at the front desk was really nice…even offered to call some of his buddies to see if any of them were interested in working on our car (something that the tow truck guy later told us to be vary wary of…warned us that “bubba” might show up with duct tape). The room was decent. But to add insult to injury, we had very little cell phone coverage. The only way my phone would work was if I was standing at the front of the room, leaned up against the window. On the bright side, they did have free wifi (woo hoo).
The next morning, we had to make a decision. Either we could all go to the dealership, or Kylie, Mallory and I could stay at the hotel and risk paying for late check out. My vote was to not sit at a dealership for an undetermined amount of time with an infant. I won. ;) That turned out to be a very good thing seeing as how Mallory decided to give me back her breakfast after renting it for a couple of hours (meaning – she puked…lots). Johnathan went with the tow truck to get the bus fixed. He was back in about 2 hours. We packed up, checked out (only 10 minutes late) and headed home. Frustrated and tired…but at least I had something to blog about. ;)