The Amsbury family 2009 Vacation: the departure saga

Ring… Ring…Ring…
I hit David in the gut, “Answer the phone!” I yelled.

Holy Crap! It was our friend Crystal calling and waking us up because she was expecting our dog over half an hour earlier. Thankfully she and her family were going to watch our dog Charlie for us while we were going to be in Florida. (And, thanks to Carrie and her family for watching our cats!)

David set the alarm to wake us at 7pm instead of AM. Oh well… so we’re gonna be a little late on our vacation start. We had waited all year looking forward to some family time away from the daily grind.... We were all full of excitement....What else could go wrong? We had everything ready to go and in the car..... The car just got back from the mechanic with the “OK” to go on a long trip..... After all, we just spent about $3000 on 2 sets of new brakes, rotors, ignition, water pump, fuel pump, radiator, and more…. the car SHOULD work! And who cares that we had to roll down our driver side window to open our car door from the outside. It ran and that is all we cared about…. So we were set! All bases checked!

Florida here we come!

We headed out to West Virginia first. We were about an hour behind schedule, so we expected to see my dad about lunch time. (He lives near Charleston, WV.) The 5 hour drive was not bad. The car ran smoothly. And traffic and weather was in our favor. The kids were literally attached to their DSes and Leapsters. All is well.

This is Justice stuffing his face with hard boiled eggs.

When we got to Dad’s, he had pizza waiting for us. YUM! I am in a major pizza faze right now with my pregnancy cravings. The question now was, How much can I eat? Next he had gifts waiting for us.  My boys got "new to them" snow hats. David got a jacket to match my dad's. The girls got stuffed animals. And I got skinned animals. That is right fur. It is a mixture of 2 colors of fox, mink, and baby sheep. 
We visited for a while, but wanted to get on the road for our vacation. So off we went…..

Hillarious! I was rolling with laughter looking at these nerds. But... I still love them.

But, about 10 minutes from my dad’s house while driving the highway out of town our car just stopped working – completely. David coasted to the shoulder of the highway. And, we sat. Amazingly, we were still in my dad’s town so we could call him to come get us.

He arrived in about 20 to 30 minutes because he was busy at the Tea shop he owned with his wife Sarah. He took the kids and me. But David stayed with the car to wait for the tow truck. David finally got to my Dad’s home about an hour later. (This is my view from the inside of the dead car.)

Now… what to do? It was Saturday night after Christmas. Our car was dead. We were stuck in podunk WV, where the accents are so thick that our untrained ears needed translators to translate the words we could not understand.
We couldn't go home. We couldn't go to Florida. We had no idea if the car could even be salvaged.
No mechanic was at work. We just needed to wait until Monday for the mechanic shop to open to know for sure what was going on…. But, we had a pretty good idea that either the engine seized (meaning we needed a brand new engine costing $3000 to $4000), or we needed new sensors -whatever those are.

The kids patiently waited for Mom and Dad to fix everything....
Our vacation very likely might not going to happen at this point. Regardless, we were definitely pushed back 3 days. The words just escaped us.