Friday, August 18, 2006

The Long Trip Home (For Andrea)

Well we finally got married. It was a beautiful ceremony and from what I've heard everyone that attended liked it too. Lisa and I stayed in Ohio for three weeks which was great but a little too short for me. I'll start from the ending and work my way backwards. Our trip from Ohio back to Arkansas was a comedy of errors. I had to be at work on Tuesday Aug 15th. We left Sunday morning because we wanted to hit Abraham Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky and spend a nice relaxing trip. Normally it's a 12 hour drive. We stopped in Elizabethtown Kentucky (which Lisa was interested in seeing) to get gas when a woman pointed out that my coolant was literally pouring out on to the ground. As luck would have it a hotel shared the parking lot with the gas station so we ordered a tow truck and got a room. We had my truck and Lisa's with us so we weren't stuck in the room anyway. We found out that Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace National Historic Site was just ten miles down the road so we drove there for the reminder of the afternoon and had dinner at a nice mexican restaurant. We tried to look at it as an adventure.

We got the truck fixed Monday morning (our original travel day) and headed toward Memphis. We were going to get to Conway later than we wanted but nothing too bad. By the end of the day with about three hours to go, the right tire on my trailer popped. We rushed seven miles back to the last town, got a new tire and took off. Hot and sweaty (my air conditioning isn't working) we got fifty miles down the road and the left tire popped. This time it was too late to get the tire fixed. We were sitting along the side of I-40 in east Memphis in the dark. After another tow truck charge to deliver the trailer to the nearest hotel it was time for bed. The next morning we got the tire fixed, shifted some weight from the trailer to Lisa's truck and headed to Conway.

It was a stressful trip but it was made bearable by Lisa's good nature and just her presence.