Cali, the finale

It was bound to happen. In all the time we've been married; heck, even before that with all my road trips to AZ from college, I never had any problems with the car. Ever. Always smooth sailing. So, it had to happen eventually.
We got a flat tire. On our way back, in Cedar City. Frankly, it was the luckiest situation we could have hoped for. If you've ever taken the drive from St. George to Pleasant Grove, you will know that after Cedar City is a whole lot of nothing. If the tire would've blown 60 miles after Cedar, we wouldn't have had cell reception, etc., and it would've been a nightmare. We were right smack dab in the middle of a city. We got so lucky.

As it was, we called our insurance roadside assistance, thank you all-state, and thank you Cassie for getting the 'gold' protection plan, they said they'd be 1/2 hour, and we started at getting the spare tire on. A) I didn't even know we had a spare tire. I just assumed we did, and I had Brandon look it up in the manual. We did, and we had a jack. B) Brandon is not a handyman. We would have figured it out eventually, but it would have taken a while. It took about 20 minutes, we were getting there, but luckily "Dave" showed up and helped us with our spare.

Nice guy. Seriously. He helped us get it on, then told us that right off the exit we were at was a station that might be able to help us with our tire. It was 6:20pm. Everyone closes at 6pm. BUT, this one guy right off this exit usually stays until 7 just in case. SO LUCKY. We followed him there on the spare, probably less than a mile, he talked to the guy, (they must be friends or something), and he left. Dave, you're the best.

The guy at the tire place said our tire was beyond repair, but that he probably had a used one we could have. He found one, put it on, charged us $39 for the tire, and we were on our way again. The whole ordeal took about an hour.

I was counting our lucky stars the whole time. It could've been so much worse. The girls were good, it wasn't hot, it had just stopped raining, etc. So lucky.

The girls stayed occupied with a really nice stray cat at the tire place. They were loving it.

Good thing we started out so early on the way back. The tire was just worn. That's why it blew. I take such stinking good care of our cars. A few months ago when I got the snow tires off and the regular tires on, the guy said we would need to get new ones, but that they would probably last til November when our registration is up. So, I wasn't even paying attention to our tires and just knew we'd get new ones in November.

My bad. Now I'm going in to get them all checked and switched out if needed. Anyway, long story short, we got a WHOLE lot of help on this one. The church is true, people. :)