Price, Utah.....The Two Day Nightmare

What's a story without a nightmare eh? How could we think this roadtrip would go 100% smoothly?!?! Oh no.....not the Carneys! There HAD to be a MASSIVE spanner/wrench in the works didn't there!?!?

The drive from Aspen, Colorado to what was supposed to be Salt Lake City, Utah - was absolutely beautiful. In fact, we all agreed, of all the scenery we were privileged to encounter, Utah had to be the most consistently beautiful state we drove across. We had a nice lunch on the ride, we admired the views, we laughed, we listened to good music......all until about 2 hours west of Salt Lake City when the nightmare struck.

Quentin was driving and I will never forget the look he gave me when the car just simply died. He didn't say anything and I knew something was up but seriously, I couldn't tell the engine had stopped - it was just that look of "oh crap" on his face. I was hoping he was kidding when he said that the car had died. Anyone that's known me for a length of time knows that I haven't had the best of luck with cars, so I was dreading something like this happening. But, what I was mostly concerned about was that we were literally on a highway in the middle of nowhere. No towns close by, surrounded by freezing, snowy conditions, nearly dark...and NO cell phone reception. We could not have picked a worse place along the entire roadtrip to break down.

We rolled the car to the bottom of a hill and pulled it over onto the teeny tiny shoulder. The left hand side of the car was pretty much on the line. This was a single lane each way highway. Two trucks passing in either direction was nail-biting moments for us. I swear we were nearly hit at least once. Having no cell phone service meant we had to literally stand in the middle of the highway flailing our arms like a drowning monkey. We thought trucks would be the only option as they would have a CB radio that would work. When two drove straight past us, we thought we'd better flag a car down or we'll freeze! The first car we waved at stopped. They were an awesome couple that proved to be our guardian angels as they not only had cell phone coverage, but they stayed with us until the AAA tow-truck came and collected us. I think all in all, we were probably out there for close to 1-1/2 hours. The couple had heat in their car......sweet!

To cut this long story short - the car was fried. Essentially, the damage that was done is the same as if the timing belt broke. Anyone that knows Audi engines knows that kills the engine. After two days of "what do I do" and not wanting to make the decision.....the car was turned over to the wreckers......not happy....Especially because I got the timing belt done when I bought it. I'm not going to go on about the people who did the original job but I will say - when you pay for a 100K mile job on your car, you don't expect it to run for about 15K. Man....I'm fuming just writing this.

Anyway - this has turned into the longest blog entry yet. Probably because this was the most drama on this roadtrip. I really have to try hard not to let this one event stain the whole trip. One thing I can say though, is that stopping in a tiny town in the middle of America for two days was not on the agenda. Instead, we had chosen main city centers, tourist spots, 'fun' things etc. This little unexpected event forced us to see the 'real' America. The people we met in Price, Utah were quite possibly the nicest we encountered on this entire trip. Everyone we met, tried to go the extra mile to help us out. People like Christy actually drove us all the way to Salt Lake City to catch a train to San Francisco.

So.....without planning it, our roadtrip took us to the heart of middle America and the great people that live there. Thank you the people of Price.

The video attached to this post is the longest one yet. We had A LOT of waiting around while Joe the mechanic figured out what was wrong with the car and how much it would cost to fix it - all when he had the xmas/new years rush/hours going on. NOT a good time to break down. The video shows what we did to keep entertained in and around our motel. It ends with us waiting in the Salt Lake City airport as the train station didn't open until 10pm.....we had nowhere to go.....so we sat in the airport for hours and cabbed it back to the train station for our 11:30pm 17 hour train ride to San Francisco. The sites we saw and the experience of being on that train in our own room is the next topic for the blog.....it was actually a really cool journey.