Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Went to Salinas, drive home went horrible awry.

Sorry for my lack of posts. I've been pretty busy working on my project and I was out of town visiting my lovely family.

So firstly I'll tell you about my trip to Salinas. It was great. I got to see my family for a whole 3 days including my cousin Jordynnes new baby, Areylia.

Thats one fresh baby pulled right from the baby maker.

Me holding a 3 week old slightly less fresh baby.

Justine and I had a great time hanging out and catching up with family and friends. We had a pizza party graduation for my cousin Jordynne that was awesome and fun. I'm glad that my friends Caitie and Lexi could make it! :) The girls and I got to go check out the new Goodwill and Savers. At Savers we found some real winners of awesomely crappy romance novels featuring some sort of were-people. So far I'm reading Bengal's Heart and its pretty fantastic. I think I might review it here on my blog when I'm finished. 

Now, on to the epically horrible drive home. My car has been having some brake issues. Basically it sometimes doesn't stop when you push the brake. You have to pump it and then its fine. Its not as scary as it sound and it happens only in close traffic where you're using the brake a lot and even then its less than 50% of the time. So I groomed my aunts dog when I was in Salinas in exchange for her to get my car looked at by her mechanic.(If that doesn't sound like a fair trade, you've never groomed my aunts dog. She awful.) So a couple hours and $60 charge later the dude says he can't find anything wrong with it and I just take it home. 

Sunday morning I get up at 6am and we're on the road by 7:30am. Everything is going fine and we're just 2 hours from home when I seem to hit a rock or something and my car starts making a sound like something is stuck on the tire. So we pull off the road and get out to take a look under the car. We see nothing under the car or on the wheel. Justine calls her mechanic friend and he says we might have hit something bad enough to brake the bands in the tire and make an air bubble in the wheel. This is bad news as if that is the case the tire could explode and we would be driving not only without our left front tire but with no brakes or steering. Oh and also it could take out the front left light and a whole bunch of other bad stuff that would probably end in us flying down the road in a fishtailing fiery ball of death.
Not cool guys!
So, naturally, we're pretty freaked out and shitty luck has landed us in a town of closed mechanic shops and no walmart, autozone, pepboys or any other chain type mechanic place. Seriously Santa Barbara wtf? The closest thing we can find is an Autozone 14 miles away. Is it safe to drive the car that far you ask? Why no! Of course not! Do we have any other choice? No. 
So off we go!
At 20 mph.
In a 45 mph zone.
SO as to not appear to just be a dick driving so slow we put our hazard lights on and proceed to take a nice 45 min 14 mile drive. We're almost to the Autozone and a biker pulls up along side our car and says "Do you know you have your hazard lights on?" 

To which Justine replies " Well we have a hazard."

He bids us good luck and we drive on to the Autozone. After that I just lost my shit for a second and started laughing slightly hysterically and turned to Justine and said "Justine, did you know we have our hazard lights on?" It had been a stressful day people.
  
We had already been calling people and figuring shit out for 2 hours so by the time we reach the auto zone we are 2 hours and 45 mins behind schedule. The people there were very helpful and got our car looked at quickly. after about 40 mins he comes in and says that its not our tire. Apparently, one of the bolts for our calipers wasn't put on tightly enough and it fell off. So we were driving with our left front brake hanging off.

Thanks a lot Salinas mechanic! You almost killed us! That is shoddy work at best! 
I will be sending him the paper work from Autozone and getting my money back from him! It was one of the worst times of my life and he owes me for it! 

After all that we did make it home by about 5pm. Pretty long day. I'm glad to be home but it could have gone a lot smoother.

Here are some pictures of the lovely orchid my mom bought me at the farmers market to calm me down after telling that horrible story.



No comments:

Post a Comment