"Did That Metal Part Fall Off Our Car?"

This weekend we enjoyed a nice vacation in western PA visiting family. The Chicago Baun's were also in town so we had 5 cousins under age 8 playing together and running around in the perfect weather. Saturday's high was 70 degrees with a lovely breeze and no humidity. It felt like heaven compared to the heat, drought and humidity of Washington. Not to mention the lush green grass and flowers everywhere you looked. It was shocking to realize that this is what our yard should look like this time of year, but didn't.

Other than keeping Henry from climbing through the neighbor's fence or running into the road at the end of the driveway or destroying rooms in the house that he shouldn't be playing it, it was quite a relaxing time. We also tested out Henry's new PeaPod Travel Tent that we bought after our miserable sleeping experiences in hotels on our last vacation. It works great. :) Saturday evening we enjoyed a BBQ chicken dinner including corn on the cob grown by a farmer down the road from where Matt grew up. Nothing like eating corn and tomatoes from a farm you drive past!

We took a short outing to a nearby park that has a duck pond. Grammum and the kids love to feed the ducks, and the ducks love to get fed! The nearby swing set and "sliding board" (as everyone in the family but me calls it) were also a big hit. Literally. Poor Henry was so excited he ran smack into Brett's head while he was swinging. It was one of those slow-motion moments where the second Henry ran away from me I could see the disaster about to strike but wasn't fast enough to avert it. Fortunately the tears didn't last long and there was no blood. Just a big bump on Henry's cheek and a sore spot on Brett's head. Before heading back we also stopped at a State Park up the road where the kids tried their hand at pumping an old-fashioned fountain.

Oh, so back to the title of this post. On our drive up Friday morning we stopped at the outlet stores in Hagerstown to pick up a couple of things. As we tried to leave the parking lot, there was a ginormous motorcyling event that was causing traffic to back up. All we could see were hundreds (literally) of bikers being led across our line of traffic while we sat there for what felt like 10 minutes. We realized a few things pretty quickly.

1) The guys directing traffic were motorcycle people and could care less how long the back-up of cars in the parking lot got.

2) Getting impatient and pulling out of line to go in the other lane of traffic after rolling down the window and yelling "Hey Buddy, what's going on here!" didn't accomplish much except learning that the road ahead that we wanted to turn on was indeed jammed with hundreds more bikers plus a firetruck.

3) The only way to escape the chaos was to either wait patiently or find our own way out.

Since it's obvious we weren't in a very patient mood (I'm blaming it on pregnancy hormones) we decided to find our own way out. After losing our spot in line, we circled back around and eyed up the grassy area between the parking lot and gas station. The 40 feet of dry grass looked smooth enough to get our trusty minivan across, we'd just have to be careful going over the curb on the other side. We thought about it for 20-30 seconds before I eased the car across and slowed down to go over the curb. Scrape! went the front end of the underside. Wham! went the back end of the car as the bumper came over the concrete.

We weren't quite sure if we'd damaged the car so we pulled over in the parking lot and looked back. There was a thin piece of metal something laying there, but another car (a real SUV mind you) had followed our lead and ran over whatever metal part it was. By this time our frenzied escape was seeming pretty foolish and all sorts of worst case scenarios of what I'd just done to the car were running through my head. Matt jumped out and checked under the car to see if anything was missing. (Not that you could really tell?!?) In the heat of the moment and the fact that a couple of police motorcycles had arrived in the parking lot we'd just left, Matt declared, "We're fine, let's go! We'll get it on the way back if we really need it!"

With that we sped off and moments later were zooming along I-70, feeling victorious that we'd outsmarted those annoying bikers. Until we hit some traffic and slowed down to a near stop. I was feeling pretty sheepish at this point. Good thing we'd saved all that time in the parking lot just to wade through more traffic not 5 minutes later! At least the car seems to have survived our impetuous maneuver without any lasting damage.