Living It Up For Less: You Cannot Seriously Be Serious!

As you know, we were taking off and heading to the beach last weekend. There is a whole list of things that I'm grateful for and one of them is my mom's beach house. In my eyes, this is the best purchase that my mother has ever made. Especially since I get to enjoy it pretty much any.time.I.want! So, I try to get down there as often as possible. It has come to represent an oasis for me. A place to get away and de-stress. To pretend that "normal" life like jobs, bills, school, and responsibility don't exist. A breath of fresh air.

Well, that breath of fresh air came to a startling halt on Thursday night while I was on my way down. As I was driving along the highway in North Carolina, I heard a strange sound. It sounded like I had run over something in the road. Only there was no thump to indicate that I had actually run over something. At first, I ignored it thinking that I was hearing things. Or, that maybe Ty had made a noise from the backseat. Then, I heard it again. My son's father (who was also on the trip with us--long story--I might tell you later) heard it too. I looked at him. He looked at me. I said "What the. . . .?" He was silent. Instead, he thought for a moment (literally, just a second) and then nearly jumped into my lap in order to peer down at the instrument panel on the dashboard. Half a second later he screams "PULL OVER RIGHT NOW!" and then quietly adds "safely". Uh. . .yeah, sure. I'll get right on that.

I swiftly pulled across three lanes of the interstate and immediately came to a stop. I had no idea what was going on but when I got out of my car, this is what I found:

In case you're wondering, that's a flat tire. A VEERRRRY flat tire. Oh freaks. It's 10:30 at night, I'm literally halfway between Virginia and North Carolina and the freakin tire is gushing air like a lovesick middle schooler gushes about her first kiss. This was the first time (oh yes, there were more) that I literally looked heavenward and thanked God that my son's father was with us on this trip. At the very least, he knows how to change a tire. And that's just what he got to doing.

While he changed the tire, I jumped around trying to stay warm (it is November, afterall!), trying to calm down (the adrenaline rush was quite the problem), and trying to keep a man company who would have rather just been left alone to finish changing a tire that he never wanted to change in the first place.

This is what a six year old looks like when he wakes up from a traveling nap and the car is on the side of the road and nobody else but you and the dogs are in it. Needless to say, we weren't aware he was awake until we heard his disoriented cries for us. Poor little guy! Once I explained to him what was going on, he was fine. Actually, he just wanted to listen to music on my phone.

And this is what a naughty pit bull looks like when he jumps over two rows of seats to get a better view from the passengers seat. Naughty Pete!

Once we got the tire changed and the spare put on, I learned a valuable lesson: It is very important to make sure that you have a spare tire which is properly inflated at all times. My spare was seriously low on air so once we got it on the car, we ended up having to drive about 15 miles before we could find a gas station that was open AND had air that we could put in the tire. Apparently, people in rural North Carolina don't need air that often. It was tough to find! We got back on the road (with BD situated at the wheel--I refused to drive after that experience) and eventually made it to the beach house a couple of hours later than we had intended. I only wish that's where the problems ended. Oh no. . .we got a surprise when we got to the beach house, but that's for a later post.

The next day, we had to take the car to a tire place so that we could get the original tire fixed and get the spare put back in it's spare-y place. Of course, we couldn't find a place that was in a decent location and we didn't anticipate the fix taking so long. It was over lunch time, so we had to find somewhere to eat that was within walking distance of the tire place. Ha! That was an entirely laughable event. The only establishments within walking distance were a laundromat, a children's consignment store and a gas station. Guess where we ended up eating?