Expect the Unexpected

 This weekend didn't go as planned. My brother drove from Rapid City to Brookings and was going to pick me up on Friday afternoon. We would drive to Minneapolis, pick up his kids and turn around and come back.

.

He had a few glitches on his end before he even left Rapid but he still made it to my house by 4pm. I grabbed my backpack and we took off. We had been driving about an hour when I noticed Jody playing with the buttons for the windows. Turns out, the power windows weren't working. Which wouldn't have been a big deal........if the air conditioning was working, which it wasn't. Soon the radio randomly shut off, then all the gauges and interior lights went down and stayed down. Jody pulled over onto a gravel road just off of the highway to see if we had tail lights and blinkers. We didn't. He got back in the truck and started to put it in drive when the entire engine quit.

We were somewhere near Tyler, MN in the middle of nowhere. There had been a detour so we weren't even on a well-traveled highway. After looking at lots of things with fuses, wires, etc, Jody told me to call AAA.

They had a bit of a glitch finding us but eventually got there, put the truck up on the flatbed trailer and gave us a ride all the way back to Brookings.

Special thanks to my parents for being wise and thoughtful enough to give me AAA Plus for Christmas. I've utilized it three times already. And because it was AAA Plus and not just regular AAA, they towed us anywhere within a 100 miles, allowing the truck to be towed all the way back to my driveway!

We spent Friday night at my house and then I left at 6am Saturday to go get Jody's kids while he worked on his truck. That was filled with a few glitches too but the short version is that he suspected the alternator and that's what the problem was. He was able to take it out, buy a new one and replace it.

By Saturday evening, he had the pickup put back together and I was back with the kids so we had a cookout. I bought the ingredients and my brother was the chef. He's one of the best cooks I know! He also made a killer pasta salad. And no cookout in our family is complete without watermelon :)