"Into each life some rain must fall
But too much is falling in mine..."
But too much is falling in mine..."
-"Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" by Ella Fitzgerald
From Bad to Worst: We thought that having trouble finding a hotel would be the worst part of our trip, but we definitely were too optimistic. We started out Thursday by freaking out when we couldn't find the paperwork for the truck. My Dad couldn't remember where he had put it and we searched the entire truck looking for it. The spooky part was that I looked in the driver's side door and even put my hand in there, and didn't find it. But as I was climbing down out of the truck, I looked down and there it was! We lost about 30 minutes doing that but finally got onto the road. We stopped for gas and tried to fill the tank up but for some reason it only topped it up to a little over 3/4 of a tank. We weren't worried since we knew we could get gas later (but this was another omen). We made it about 300 miles down the road when we started hitting some water and traffic. The hurricane/tropical storm had done serious damage in Louisiana and Mississippi so we were trying to listen to the radio to see if the roads were open. We finally pulled off for gas and found a Love's station - it was packed but they had diesel areas in the back and waved us back there...only for us to find out that they were closed because they had lost power so it took us 15 minutes to maneuver the truck out of there. We went to the next exit...and the next...and the next...and the next before we finally found a gas station that was open - we had less than a 1/4 tank of gas! (Special thanks to Target in Covington for having a generator and being open - we didn't get gas at that exit but they had a bathroom!).
We hit the road again and all seemed fine, we filled up one more time, drove through a bit of rain and had just decided to switch drivers when my dad said that something was wrong with the truck. He had the accelerator all the way to the floor but the truck wouldn't go faster than 40 miles an hour and if we went up hill it automatically started losing speed. We pulled off at the rest area for a break and then I hopped in to drive only to find out what my dad meant. We stopped 2 miles up the road and called Penske. They sent a local company (out of Mobile) who luckily showed up in 30 minutes. He immediately gave us the bad news that they wanted the truck at the shop in Mobile. I asked him what that meant and he said that they wanted to try to fix it because the only other two alternatives were to get another truck out of Pensacola and off-load all of my stuff into that one (what?!?!?!), or they could tow the truck all the way to Miami!?!?!? None of the options made sense to me but we didn't have any choice - they wouldn't do anything until they had the truck into the shop. So they called a tow truck and off-loaded my car (we couldn't ride in the truck while it was in tow and they only had seating for 1 more in the tow truck. Long story short (too late!) we spent nearly three hours in Mobile and they were able to fix the truck, but we were now 4 hours behind schedule and knew that if we stopped in Tallahassee we wouldn't make it to Miami by my Friday deadline. So the only decision we could make was to push on through the night non-stop. I took the first leg, dad took the next, and so on. Needless to say, it was the looooooonnnngg day from hell!
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