Describe your most memorable vacation.

Barring anything I’ve done in the last decade, I would try to say my most memorable vacation memories were from my childhood. Unfortunately, looking back that far everything is disjointed in my mind and I can’t pick apart which instance of my yearly family vacations to Washington state have which pieces.

So, I guess I’ll have to stick to the more recent ones that I CAN better recall, and I’ll try to keep them brief because I want to share parts from several different episodes of my adventures back to Colorado.

Also, the prompt just says memorable and not happy.

I drove back for what was supposed to be a quick weekend. One of my best friends from college was having her “golden birthday” (the birthday where your age matches the day number in your date of birth) and she had invited me as well as a few others to be there. Several things happened on that trip. I visited the Micro Center in Denver for the first time, where I bought a couple parts for my first gaming computer. We at dinner at The Melting Pot (a fondue restaurant) and bar hopped a little. Then the following morning I took off for home. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that this all happened in a briefly unseasonably mild February for South Dakota. Started my little adventure with great weather and no snow. Ended it by driving home through a snow storm. What should have been an easy 10ish hour drive ended up being over 14 or 15 hours. Then it was back to work Monday morning because I wasn’t able to take that day off ahead of time.

These next two things happened maybe a year apart, one before the aforementioned birthday trip and the other after, and each time was on what was supposed to be a very quick trip. Leave Saturday, return Sunday.

One trip to Colorado was with my younger brother, and we had the truck and horse trailer because we were taking a horse to a family friend’s place out there. Near the northeast corner of Colorado, but still in Nebraska, the truck overheats a couple miles down the interstate after we had just stopped to refuel. Thankfully that was an easy fix, and we were fortunate that a mutual acquaintance of ours and the family friend happened to see us on the side of the road (he was managing a major cattle outfit in the next city we were coming up on at the border.) He helped us find the problem, a large coolant hose came off the engine block, and then helped us get some water to mix with the remaining coolant that had spewed out. The truck was fine for the rest of the trip after that.

The second of these two particular trips was with my older brother, with the same truck as before. My older brother and I were taking yet another horse to Colorado for this trip, and he agreed to go with me so he could meet up with a friend of his (to collect some things he had left behind when he moved to South Dakota a couple years after the rest of the family.) This time, though, the truck broke down on the way BACK from Colorado, and it happened around the same relative strip of interstate around that truck stop! The truck was running fine for the most part, until we noticed the lights slowly getting dimmer and the truck began to struggle. It was later in the evening, dark outside, and we were basically in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. We called our parents to let them know what happened. They then turned around and were able to get a hold of a tow truck that could come get us. After maybe an hour at most, a really nice tow truck driver showed up to get us. He quickly loaded up our truck on the bed of his, and then connected the horse trailer to his hitch. My brother and I hopped into the cab of his tow truck and off we went backwards along our path to the (now believed to be cursed) truck stop. The tow truck driver surprised us with a super nice gesture. Before he had reached us, he had called ahead to the Motel 6 and was able to reserve us a room! Within about 10 minutes after picking us up we were at the motel, and the truck and trailer on their way to the mechanics in the next small city back (oddly enough, the same city where the acquaintance from the previous story had come from.) We checked into our room, and given the situation, we made our way to the bar attached to the truck stop. We had a couple of drinks and just sat there reviewing that evening’s events, talked with the bartender for about an hour, and then drunkenly made our way back to our room. The hangover the next morning wasn’t great, considering the amount of alcohol in a short period of time, but it was manageable after eating a late breakfast at the truck stop restaurant (I think it was a Grandma Max’s?) So, we ate, and waited. Within a couple hours the driver showed up with the truck and trailer. He explained a bit of what happened. Turned out the alternator had failed. Apparently, there was a car show going on that weekend and so all the other mechanics in town were closed, meaning he couldn’t just get a replacement for us and he needed to do a rebuild on it. Regardless, we were grateful for all he had done on such short notice, and after confirming he had been paid, we shook hands and off we went again. The rest of that trip was, thankfully, uneventful.

Not so great of memories, not really vacations, but definitely memorable.