When Trips Go REALLY Wrong

It all started back on Halloween when Husband and I totaled our car in a collision with a very large military vehicle. Since then we've been borrowing a co-workers car while we made arrangements to get a new vehicle. It was finally decided that my mother wanted to give us her current vehicle... the only hiccup being that it was still in Maryland.

After getting the run around from transportation companies we finally decided that it would be best if I just flew home and drove the car back across country. My dad was nice enough to go along with me so I wouldn't have to do it myself. The trip started out wonderfully with amazingly mild weather for January on the East Coast. We took the same route that Husband and I did when we made the trek out when we moved.

Then the blizzard hit. Dad and I got stuck in Kansas for at least a day while the interstate was closed due to bad weather conditions. When it finally did reopen it was still pretty disastrous and we managed to slide off the road once. No damage was done to either us or the car, just a bit shaken, and we got back on the road and headed forward. We were planning to drive through Denver, CO and up into Wyoming before stopping for the evening. Of course, my "new" car had other plans. We got just out of Cheyenne, Wyoming when we started hearing this terrible knocking from the engine. We pulled over and when Dad checked the oil... we had none. We called for service hoping that some fresh oil would be all we needed before we got back on our way... a long story short (too late!) was that new oil did not fix the problem, we needed a whole new engine.

That was last Saturday evening and since then Dad and I have been holed up in Cheyenne while they find a new engine to put into the car. The latest update is that the rebuilt engine should be arriving sometime this morning and they'll do their best to get us back on the road this weekend.

In the meantime we've been discovering Cheyenne in a rental car... which I suppose neither of us would have ever done had we not been stuck here. So far we've been to the Old West Museum, a railroad museum, and the museum on Warren Air Force Base. I also managed to turn a sweatshirt into a cardigan in our hotel room, and I'm currently in the middle of a cross stitch pattern.

I think the most fun I've had so far though was getting to photograph these antelope. They were about 10 feet away from us and were obviously very used to people. We didn't get out of the car to try and bother them, just drove very slowly up to them and got some great shots.




Hopefully we'll be on our way soon and I can get back to my regularly scheduled life in Yakima. Until then, I guess I'll just have to continue to look for the fun in our adventure.