Day 1

When I woke up Thursday morning, I practically jumped out of bed. It's the vacation energy. It made me feel like I could pull a bus off a pinned child or something. After Mitch and I had our requisite fight about when to pack (morning of is my vote. Then you can see everything all laid out and pack it at once. Duh.), we loaded up the car and headed down to Dallas.

Being the expert planners we are, we left in plenty of time to get into Dallas around 3pm to avoid the traffic which makes Stillwater's gameday traffic look like a complete nonissue. Everything was going great. Vacation day 1, perfect.

Until I was driving 80 in the fast lane of Southbound I-35 when my engine temperature light started flashing and beeping and basically alerting me to "Pull over now or you'll all die...DIE!" I pulled over and noticed that my engine was running nearly 300 degrees. Say what? Mitch and I managed to let the car cool down and drive on an access road for about 5 miles before we realized that we needed some serious help. Luckily, we were in Sanger, TX. Yeah, I'd never heard of it either.

Thank God for modern technology. I used my blackberry to look up mechanics in Sanger. After a couple guys that said they couldn't possibly see me before tomorrow, I called Marvin. Marvin is a Godsend. Although he told me he "didn't work on Volkswagens if he could avoid it" and that he "had his hands pretty full," Marvin immediately looked at the car and changed the engine's thermostat. It doesn't even bother me that it didn't work! He was so nice! We had to leave my car there for ole Marvin to change the water pump and belts, so Kelli had to drive up from Carrollton to grab us. All our planning went out the window when we hit Denton around 5:10pm. Oh fudge....except I didn't say fudge. (Name that movie! Wait, who are we kidding, no one is still reading this ridiculously long post!)

When we were blessedly about 10 minutes from Kelli's house, I got another phone call from my mom. "I think Scooter is pregnant. She's lactating." A few things went through my head, like "WHAAAAAT, I had an ultrasound done on her and they said she wasn't pregnant, I'm in Dallas and I have NO way to get back because my car is in freaking Sanger, and of course WHAAAAAT?" Luckily, my dad took Scooter to the vet and it turns out it's just a false pregnancy. (Side note, did you even know those existed? I sure as heck didn't.)

Day 1 was very exciting. And Day 2 began with a wrong number phone call at 6:30am, so I'm excited to see what New Orleans has to throw at us. I just keep reminding myself, this is eventually going to be a funny story I tell my kids....right?