Highway 41

I wrote the post below very quickly right after we arrived at the hotel. I guess I needed to capture the events in a very detailed manner as soon as possible. The rest of the trip will be documented in another post to follow.

So we've already had a very exciting start to our trip. To begin, Chance didn't get off work until 7:45, arriving home at 8:15 to discover that he still had stuff in his car that was supposed to have stayed at the office. So we had to go by the office on the way out, except he didn't have the keys so we had to drop the stuff off at Ava's house. We got onto the 405 at 10:30 and had a generally uneventful drive up north. The main disappointment was that it was dark out and that we couldn't see the scenery. We were progressing rather well and were hoping to get in at closer to 2 rather than our original unfortunate prediction of 3:30. Once we got onto the 41, they were doing quite a lot of construction and had the road down to one lane for a large stretch. We had to follow a big truck through there so that was interesting. As we started heading up into the foothills, Chance noticed a sound coming from the car. We turned off the radio and discovered a whining and scratching sound as we drove. This turned into a moaning sound as we slowed down. We pulled off to the side to check but there wasn't enough light. We went to the next intersection ahead where there was a well lit Chevron station. It was now 2:10 and we had to unload the back of the car to get out the jack and the tire iron. Chance took the wheel off and couldn't see what was wrong, but the brake disc made a horrible nails on chalkboard sound as it turned so we knew we had a major problem with our brake. There was just no indication of what was wrong. I called AAA and had to get transferred to their Northern California dispatchers, but they were soon able to send someone out. We waited for about half an hour and discovered some very interesting creatures at the gas station in the middle of nowhere. There were enormous cockroaches that were crawling around at a very fast pace. Chance discovered that they also squealed very loudly when prodded with oars. They checked us out for a bit and then decided to wander off. Then we found a very tiny frog that hopped all across the station. All this time there was a sheriff sitting in his suburban in the Century 21 right across the street. He never got out to help us or to check on us. There were a handful of locals who drove by: a kid with a noisy car who offered to help and then a blue expedition who did some shady driving around the gas station. The sheriff decided to follow the expedition for a bit so we were finally left alone. Soon, a dispatcher from Arizona called and needed further clarification as to where we were. Apparently the driver had to be woken up and said that there wasn't a gas station at the intersection where we were. I had to explain that we were indeed at a gas station. Then a guy in a red pick up truck came by and started talking to us. He had seen us on his drive north and was returning southbound on the road and decided to check out what was wrong. He was a truck mechanic and he jumped out of his truck and felt around the rotor and pulled out a pebble from our dust flap behind the rotor. Then the wheel spun smoothly and everything was wonderful. We ended up arriving at the hotel at 3:30 anyway, which was pretty nice but our bathroom had been assembled by someone who was colorblind. Pinky-beige toilet and shower, greenish beige toilet seat and cover, dark brown tile counter tops, light brown tile floors, and yellow walls. Oh, and we almost hit a dead dog on the road and a raccoon tried to run in front of the car when we were almost there. Ok, sleep.