Vacation part 1: On the Road Again

So on Sunday the 12th we drove to Portland, Oregon to begin our vacation. All was well until about 200 miles away when I realized I left the trash sitting in our apartment waiting to be taken out and it was too late to go back(nasty!). I thought "Well, at least that is the only thing! It could have been worse." Then it got worse...On the freeway in Oregon along the river, right before we were about to exit to get gas, we heard a huge loud noise and our car began to rock as our tire had just blown out. Oh my word! (as a side note, later we discovered that when the tire blew, it broke out the entire wheel well and broke the gas cap also. We have to hold up the gas pipe to put gas in now...awesome)

I did not even know where the spare tire was in this van, and neither Wes nor I was sure how to get it out from under the car (after he showed me where it was). So, we emptied the back (which was quite a significant amount of stuff) onto the side of the road, and tried to figure it out. There was some instructions with the little jack in the van, but they called for a tool that was not with the pack. At that point, Wes said "Beckee, get me the owner's manual" Obviously he had forgotten that we bought the van used and that it did not have the owner's manual. Nice.

So I went back and looked again in the little pocket that had the jack and found a hidden bag of tools with further instruction on how to get the tire out and stuff. So, then, because I am brilliant and curious went to look more closely at the blown out tire and couldn't help but touch it. Never touch a blown out tire remnant-they are sharp! I got a thin piece of metal in my finger , which I pulled out and held a wet wipe over while it bled, as Wes changed the tire. Of course it happened to be the tire that was closest to traffic, so I was worried about Wes getting hit the whole time.

Well, Wes pretty easily got the spare tire on the car and the blown out one under the car, replaced all the stuff in the back, and off we went to try to find a place to get a new tire. Let me just tell you, a lot of things are closed on Sundays in Utah, but it is nothing like Oregon where we were. Every town was like a ghost town, with every shop, even like national tire store chains closed for Sunday. So we realized we were going to have to finish the drive slowly and carefully into Portland on the spare.

A couple hours later we arrived in Portland where we were staying on this island that used to be an amusement park. After checking into the hotel, we took the kids for a walk around the island (well, a few miles anyway), after which we fed the kids and all went to bed. Ah...bed...