This has been a very eventful day and morning. Well, to begin my story; we are all <as in my family> sitting in our living room watching TV, the time reads 9:45 pm, and suddenly my dad gets a call. Not good. Well, it turns out Cal-Trans needed a new water pump to replace the one that had broken down, though they described it as 'exploding'. So they needed a new one. Now. And would you care to hazard a guess where they needed this water pump? For those of you who didn't guess correctly, it was in San Jose, down below San Francisco. Four hours away.
Well, I volunteered to go with my dad to keep him company and awake. I am glad I did, but the story is only beginning.........first we start out going down to his work place and hooking up the new water pump to the hitch on his truck. Then we climb in and off we go, (mind you that it is now 10:00 at night) we are tooling along at a pretty good pace considering we have a 1,000 ib. pump trailing the truck. We're singing to our songs, making annoyed remarks at the stupid drivers on the road, and making up words to a Sugarland song. Finally we get all the way down to San Jose at around fifteen after 1:00 in the morning. So it's back up, turn here, turn there, back up again, and finally we have the new one positioned correctly and we again, back up, and hitch up the busted one. Then my dad walks down to the Cal-Trans workers to see where they needed him to leave from, (the freeway traffic had to be cut off for the time it took to do all this) I am in the truck sitting....sitting.......fidgeting.....squirming........sitting, for thirty minutes I do this, while waiting for dad to come back up to the truck. Well, a little more than thirty minutes later he does, and tells me that the workers can't get the thing to suck in the water. They needed it to do this because of flooding that was a risk to the road.
And so the Cal-Trans guys didn't want us leaving yet until they got it working, so we wait some more. Dad goes back down to see if he can help, but another fifteen or twenty minutes later he comes back and says we can go. But they still haven't got it to work right. And they didn't see a reason to keep us there any longer, so off we go on our four hour drive home. It is now 2:48.
Well, I volunteered to go with my dad to keep him company and awake. I am glad I did, but the story is only beginning.........first we start out going down to his work place and hooking up the new water pump to the hitch on his truck. Then we climb in and off we go, (mind you that it is now 10:00 at night) we are tooling along at a pretty good pace considering we have a 1,000 ib. pump trailing the truck. We're singing to our songs, making annoyed remarks at the stupid drivers on the road, and making up words to a Sugarland song. Finally we get all the way down to San Jose at around fifteen after 1:00 in the morning. So it's back up, turn here, turn there, back up again, and finally we have the new one positioned correctly and we again, back up, and hitch up the busted one. Then my dad walks down to the Cal-Trans workers to see where they needed him to leave from, (the freeway traffic had to be cut off for the time it took to do all this) I am in the truck sitting....sitting.......fidgeting.....squirming........sitting, for thirty minutes I do this, while waiting for dad to come back up to the truck. Well, a little more than thirty minutes later he does, and tells me that the workers can't get the thing to suck in the water. They needed it to do this because of flooding that was a risk to the road.
And so the Cal-Trans guys didn't want us leaving yet until they got it working, so we wait some more. Dad goes back down to see if he can help, but another fifteen or twenty minutes later he comes back and says we can go. But they still haven't got it to work right. And they didn't see a reason to keep us there any longer, so off we go on our four hour drive home. It is now 2:48.We were both rather hungry and needed some coffee, so we stopped off an exit about five minutes away from our previous position. There were two gas stations and two fast food joints, all, of which were closed. Slightly annoyed we leave and get off at another exit, where we find some more gas stations and a McDonalds, these too are closed. Now really annoyed and joking about how it just 'wasn't meant to be' we go to yet another exit where we find....yes, more closed gas stations and fast food joints. So finally, almost steaming and needing a bathroom and a good hot cup o' joe, we make it to another exit, were we find an am-pm, delighted to find it open, (with a bathroom) and four different selections of steaming hot coffee. So getting our coffees( I must say, that was a good cup of joe) we picked up a snack, sweet tarts for him, butterfinger for me.
Now we are finally back on the road after getting gas, for the truck and us. It is now 3:40 am, and we are enjoying ourselves. The roads are almost empty and the city lights are twinkling like a sea of stars, it's quiet and we're sitting comfortably in it. But remember, coffee doesn't last forever, neither does caffeine. So about an hour later dad is dead tired, and still hours to go. It isn't easy for him, since he was up by 6:00 am the day before and hadn't slept since, I am also very tired, so it wasn't a simple task trying to keep him awake and alert. (much to my unhappiness) There really wasn't anything I could do to help, beside starting to sing, and I'm afraid that would have done more damage than good...................
So now it's about 5:23 and we only have about forty-five minutes to go till home sweet home. But dad gets a call saying that they never got the pump to work right, they said they stepped to the left, stepped to the right, turned around and did the hokey poky. But that didn't work either, not sure yet how it all will turn out. And finally, we get home at 6:00. But six is when dad has to go to work, so he had to drop me off at home and go straight to work. I would have had to get up two hours later anyway, so I never went to bed, if I had I would have been a zombie all day. So here I am writing this all down because I though it would make an amusing story. I can hear the house quietly and slowly waking, the birds are beginning to sing, Hannah is rustling under her covers and Ben is shifting. The cats are playing and the sun has begun to rise over the hills.
No comments:
Post a Comment