Travel Adventures

The family at our going away party.

Our travel adventures began as we were leaving my parents house to drive to the airport on Thursday morning. About 15 minutes into the trip, we hit a deer! Luckily it only dented the hood and cracked the front grill, so we were able to keep going right away. There were four nice skid marks on the road though.

It was about 10:45 when we arrived at the cities and we decided we should get some lunch, so we stopped at a restaurant along the Interstate. As I got out of the van and realized I didn’t have my wallet! Panic Strikes! We began to frantically look in our backpacks and all over the car, and I’m trying to remember the last time I saw it. All I could see was my wallet on the table at our going away dinner. Niki started to call the restaurant to see if I left it there and Dad called Grandpa so he could check at my parent's house for the wallet. Then I remember I should check the shorts I wore last night as I probably just took them off and threw them on the ground and Melanie probably just packed them in the suitcase…Sure enough, it was there!

We finished breakfast and arrived at the airport around noon. We said our good byes to Mom, Dad and Niki…This was really tough for me, but with Skype and email the world is a smaller place…

We then went to check in and get our boarding passes and we found out that our luggage was over weight by a few pounds, so we open up our suitcases and do some quick re-arranging. In the process of zipping everything back up, the zipper on our smaller suitcase decided to malfunction. So now we are holding up the line and our suitcase will not close properly. Melanie whips out the sewing needle and thread all ready to perform surgery on the luggage, but the airport lady gave us some duct tape. So we duct tape the crap out of the luggage and hope it stays closed. We wish our luggage a good trip and head to the security check point.

Duct Tape Surgery!!

So we board the plane and we have an empty seat next to us…sweet! Right in front of us was a small boy who keep standing in his seat and blocking our view of the TV…not sweet! The flight was pretty uneventful except for some crazy turbulence about 5 hours into the flight. The entire plane screamed…how exciting. I just sat there thinking that with our luck, the plane is going to go down. Why did I think that, well, let me review the last two weeks. The truck broke down in St. Paul, it took 10 days and cost over $1000 to repair. At the same time Melanie’s sway bar busted, cost us another $350. I also borrowed Dad’s Goldwing and proceeded to break the plastic wind deflector. Melanie’s computer hard drive died, we hit a deer, almost lost my wallet and broke our luggage.

Anyway, the rest of the trip went fine and it is now 9:30 am Saturday morning here in Bangkok. Hopefully the next few years go more smoothly.