Day 16 - Lulu's Turn To Have A Bad Day

Miles Driven: about 90

According to the weather forecast, there was only supposed to be a 10% chance of rain last night. Well, I guess 10% was enough. It rained quite a bit actually. Luckily I had put up the rain fly just in case, so we were able to rest inside the tent and enjoy the sound of the rain. But in the morning, the tent was completely soaked.

We planned to camp again tonight somewhere near Savannah, Georgia, but I didn't want to risk packing up the tent wet just in case we didn't, so we left it up and hoped it would dry out in time.

While we were waiting, the girls went to check out the jumping pillow and were sad to see yet another empty pool (we haven't seen a pool with water in it since Wyoming). They tried the jumping pillow for a while, but then found these little pedal cars that were pretty cool so they rode those around a bit. Later they tried to grab what they thought might be a skink, but it outwitted them and escaped.

As the day went on (and we waited for the tent to dry), they became increasingly unhappy with the heat. They were so hot and wanted to swim so badly. Suddenly, C had an idea. She figured out that a cold shower would be just like swimming in a pool, so they went into the showers and played in the water there. They got completely soaked, but had a blast playing in there. Finally the tent was dry so they changed their clothes and we hit the road.

We needed to stop at the grocery store and stock up, so we did that right away. We stopped again about 5 minutes later to grab some lunch and then again about 5 minutes after that to hit a post office to mail my mom's Mother's Day card (Happy Mother's Day, Mom!) We made a little headway after that, and Lulu passed a major milestone, too!

I missed it by 16 miles, but close enough! Hard to believe I only hit 150k just before Christmas last year.

About an hour later, we stopped in Columbia, South Carolina to grab a cup of coffee and check out a Little Free Library in the area. Surprisingly, there haven't been any near our route since Washington, DC, so I figured I'd take advantage of this one. It was in an adorable little neighborhood that was full of singing birds and beautiful trees. They didn't have very many kids' books in the library, so even though we didn't take any, we did add a few.

 

And then, we had a problem. A and I got back in the car after taking pictures of some birds in the trees and although the car would start up just fine, it would die immediately. If I kept my foot on the gas, and drove two-footed (never letting the idle drop below 900), I could drive it just fine, but that's no way to travel 400 miles. This was not good.

 

I called Mike to see if he had any ideas and although we tried as much as we could think of, nothing helped. We even tried taking it to a gas station and filling up with 93 octane and running it for several minutes to cycle out the gas, but I still had the same problem. Bummer.

 

Unfortunately at this point it was around 6pm and all the auto shops in the area were closed. We were in a more 'historic' type neighborhood and certainly not a downtown-type area, so we were going to have to be creative. It's difficult to figure out a route in an unfamiliar neghborhood, knowing you can't stop the car or it will die. I did see an Exxon station with good reviews on the map, and I only had to drive through a small residential area to reach it. I sort of rolled through the stop signs and luckily I didn't encounter any pedestrians on the way. I parked in the parking lot of the closed shop, and now I needed to deal with the next part of the problem. Where in the world were we going to spend the night and how would we get there?

 

There were no bus stations around anywhere, and although a couple of hotels were close by, they had horrible reviews (one had a 1.8 out of 5. I've never seen anything that low before!) I found a nicer hotel a few miles away and called a local taxi company. We grabbed only a few things that we could easily carry and fit in the cab's trunk, which was just the basics with a change of clothes for each of us, and then we abandoned Lulu in the parking lot with all the rest of our stuff.

 

The hotel was clean and the guy at the front desk was really nice. Our room had a funny little nook on the windowsill that C claimed for the night.

 

 

The guy at the front desk recommended that we eat dinner at Waffle House, as it was his favorite, and told us to be sure to eat the hash browns there. We needed to do a little laundry to wash the wet clothes from this morning, and finally around 9pm we headed over to Waffle House to eat. The waffles were so incredibly good we ate them with nothing on them. C and K both like the grits here, but A and I are not so fond of them. We all liked the hashbrowns and the ham was pretty good, too. Several people ordered seconds before we were ready to go.

 

On the walk to dinner, we encountered some strange sort of creature. We couldn't see them, but we could still hear them a block and a half away near the Waffle House. We widn't know if they were frogs or bugs, but they were LOUD! See if you can tell what they are. They kind of gave us the creeps.

 

Strange Night Creatures

 

We settled in for the night watching the movie Enchanted, and I tried not to stress about what might be wrong with the car and how long we would be stuck here. Michael's plane was landing tomorrow night and we really needed to get to Orlando. I was hoping desparately that it would be a simple fix, but my biggest concern at this point was that it might be something smog-related, in which case they may not have the parts out here in South Carolina and would need to order them. On the flip side, I was really thankful that our car had died in a good neighborhood in the middle of a big town. This could have been so much worse.