Those are my famous last words from Saturday. When Jim and I got up in the morning we talked about going somewhere to "do something" for the day. We talked about MT Rainier or the beach and let Mike decide if Long Beach sounded like a good idea. He agreed to Long Beach so we loaded up Lucy and some fishing poles and headed off down the road. Half way there we heard a weird sound coming from the front tire, so we pulled over to check it out. Jim thought it might be the power steering and that it wouldnt be a problem to get to the beach and back home safely.We got to Long Beach around noon and stopped for lunch at the Crab Pot where Mike and Jim ate a pound of fresh crab. I had grilled cheese, I just hate seafood! Then we headed up into town to do all the normal tourist stuff we do in Long Beach, the candy store, the arcade, Scoopers, all the fun stuff. BUT.... on the way up town the car started to make a really bad noise from the front tire. It was so bad we went to the auto parts store and tried to take off the tire to see what was wrong. We ended up at an "old school" tire store where an interesting character helped up get the tire off and told us that the wheel bearing was shot. I don't know much about cars but the look on Jim's face said it all- we were in big trouble. The guy couldn't fix it but his friend down the road might be able to so we limped the truck 3 miles down the road to get the bad news. Because it was a holiday weekend he wouldn't be able to get the part until Tuesday or Wednesday. So that meant we either needed to find a place to stay in town ( no way that was going to happen on a holiday weekend, although a nice lady at the thrift store offered to let us use her tent and sleep in her back yard! LOL!) or get someone to come pick us up. So I ended up calling my sister who immediately said she would come to get us, no hesitation. The only problem was how we were all going to fit into her two seater pickup. So that meant she had to go to our house first to get my car and then head to get us. Just so you get how horrible this whole situation was, it's a 2 1/2 hour drive, each way if there are no delays. Once she was on the way we headed down to a lake with Jim's fishing poles to kill some time. And we did, 2 full hours. Then I called my sister to see where she was and she was stopping for gas, and then took a wrong turn and was still over 1 1/2 hours away. We walked back into town and found one restaurant to eat at so we tied Lucy outside and went on in. It was Mexican and it was empty, at dinner time. Kind of a scary thing but the food ended up being good and cheap too, we all ate for $16. So after about another hour, Melissa and Ashleigh made it and picked us up on the street corner. We hadn't even seen the ocean all day so we drove to the beach approach and I hopped out to take a few pictures and everyone else used the bathroom. Finally we were on the road, oh it's like 9:00 pm by now, just so you know. And then to put the icing on the cake Jim got pulled over about 30 minutes outside Long Beach. We were all so exhausted that all we could do is laugh and we even asked the policeman if we could take his picture to mark the event. He was hilarious and totally agreed, he even asked what kind of picture we wanted!! We finally got home at midnight, poor Melissa had to leave from our house to go right home and change for work. I'm sure she was exhausted. I can't say enough how grateful I am that she came to get us, I don't know what we would have done without her. So, to make along story short, I will never again utter those famous last words "let's do something today"......you never know what you might end up doing....
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