Watch Out For That...

A lot of you know where this post is going because you've already heard or seen it. Others of you might be able to guess just by the sign above. Here is the tale:

So the day after we had Sunday dinner at Charlie's house, I joined Jeri for a quick little trip to Utah. She was going to attend an open house to become a Sky West flight attendant in Salt Lake. I decided to tag along because I wanted to see my brother John's brand new little girl. Well, Jeri's car started having some problems, and the AC didn't work well, so I said we could take Jackie's car. I didn't really want to put the miles on my car but could not care less about racking up miles on Jackie's car. Well, her car had been having a few problems and we didn't want to risk driving it that far with that August heat so reluctantly I said we could use my car.

We got up early Monday morning because I wanted to make it to Highland to have dinner with my family. I drove for the first few hours and switched when we had to fill up in La Grande, OR. Jeri took over from there and I went to sleep in the passenger seat. About an hour later, I woke up to a shrill of, "oh my gosh!!!" and a big thud. I looked in the rear view mirror real quick and I saw little plastic and metal pieces showering I-84. My initial thought was a motorcycle, until I realized those pieces flying around were coming from my car. "I hit a deer!!"

And there is proof that we hit a deer in the picture above. Now I actually never saw the deer. I was sleeping and then right after we hit it the highway made a big bend to the right so by the time we slowed down and got off the highway, I couldn't see it.

A nice, old, man of the country pulled in behind us to see if we were okay. He checked the fluid leaking from under my car and determined it wasn't the radiator fluid so it might be alright to drive. He practically made Jeri get back in to drive the car because if she didn't, she would never feel comfortable driving on the highway again. He said it didn't have to be for very much, but that she needed to get back in and drive. We listened and I think it helped both Jeri and myself.

We drove to the next town of Pendleton, right on the border with Idaho, and took it into an auto body shop. The guy there determined that it should be fine, since we had just driven about 50 miles without any problems. He didn't look under the hood though because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to close it again. We decided to push on.

I got out and took these pictures at a gas station in Idaho. The people filling up next to us took one look at our car and started smiling. "Must have hit a deer!" Yes, you are very observant. "That definitely one ups our incident on the road last night. We hit a racoon, you can kind of tell right here." Gross. He asked where we were going and we told him Salt Lake. "Oh crazy, that's actually where we hit the racoon. What do you want to do in Salt Lake though, it's a pretty weird town."

I had to go to the shop and grab my softball cleats and this is what my car looked like...


Well, we made it out to Utah and didn't have any problems other than the fact that my washer fluid was all gone, thanks to the leak. The good news is that Jeri got the job so hopefully with her benefits we won't have to make that drive often and we can fly instead. Seeing little babies always puts things into perspective.


I sent these to Jackie on my phone just to make her jealous.

I took advantage of the 40 hours or so we had in Highland. I got to go swimming with John and his kids.

My mom loves roller coasters and slides. We were lucky kids to have a mom that would get us out of school so we could go to the theme parks. Now her grandkids are lucky as well.