Tagged With: Van

Hot Dog Bun People

Hot Dog Bun People

Hot Dog Bun People

OK, this is a little obscure. On the way to the beach back on July 30, while waiting in traffic on I95 south of Woodbridge, Virginia, we noticed an SUV with two bins and two coolers on the back. In one bin were games and in the other were lots of hot dog buns and a couple (clear) containers of Fruit Loops. They were going faster than we were so naturally we lost track of them.

About 220 miles further along on our trip, we stopped, as we always do, for barbecue at Parkers in Wilson, North Carolina. I dropped mom off and went to park in the only shady spot in the parking lot and guess who was right next to us? The Hot Dog Bun People. I even took a picture showing the back of their car.

Fast forward to today, seven days later. We’re driving west on I-40 out of Wilmington, North Carolina. We are about a hundred miles from Parkers, heading back home. The girls are quiet in the back seat, zoning out, when all of a sudden Dorothy had some sort of seizure. I actually saw the van about the time she did but the rest of the car had no idea what was going on. She was pointing out the window and babbling incoherently in a loud (very) voice.

As you can see from the picture (which matches the picture from last Saturday exactly except one cooler and one bin are gone) we had just been overtaken by… The Hot Dog Bun People.

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That Can’t Be Right

Flat Tire

Flat Tire

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I met some friends from work at Uncle Julio’s for happy hour. It hadn’t been a particularly happy day and I decided I would benefit from socializing as opposed to coming home and reading or more likely dwelling on my frustrations. Shortly after everyone got there my phone rang. It was Cathy saying she had a flat tire. She ended up taking an Uber to where she was going and I picked her up from there a little later.

We went to work together today and I attached a pump to the flat tire to see if it would hold air at all. Almost immediately I notice the head of a screw in the treads and figured it wasn’t worth the effort. It wasn’t going to hold air. Around lunchtime I went over to her building and put on the spare. I would normally joke that the tire was only flat on the bottom but as you can see, it held its shape pretty well. This was taken with the tire in the back of the van. I was happy to find that the spare had air.

Just one of those things.

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Van Go

1997 Dodge Grand Caravan

1997 Dodge Grand Caravan

I cleaned out the old Dodge Grand Caravan today and took off the license plates, which I plan to return to the Motor Vehicle Administration on Monday. Before I did that, I took one final load of trash to the dump (well, the transfer station, actually). I had a few things of my own in the back but I drove over to Iris and Seth’s house and got the rest of the rubbish that we found under the stairs and loaded that up. That load included recyclables—paper/cardboard, rigid plastic, and metal—along with all the trash. The van has been a really good utility vehicle.

272,000 Miles

272,000 Miles

As I was driving home I notice that I was approaching an even thousand on the odometer so I drove just a little extra to get it to 272,000 just before I backed into the driveway. We bought it from our mechanic in March, 2006 after he bought it from some mutual friends of ours replaced the transmission. I’d say we got our $5,000 worth out of the van (not to say we haven’t spent that much again on repairs over the years). This is the highest mileage of any car I’ve ever owned. The Chrysler Town & Country that died in Chicago last summer was just a little short.

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