Mishap Maven encounters wrathful car gods

It's 8am and Alex is driving my car for the first leg of our trip to California. We are following his dad up to their cabin in Big Bear to spend a day before heading to L.A. for a few days. (We wanted to cram as much as possible into our four-day work weekend, especially since it’s right between our two birthdays). I’m dozing off to prep for my turn to drive when what sounds like a rock hits the car. We can’t see any affects to the driving, we though it must have just knocked into the side of the car and continued on it’s ricocheted journey. About ten minutes later, we’re hurriedly pulling to the side of the road. That rock had kicked up under my tire well and ripped a nice hole through the side of the car. The disruption weakened the well structure so that the casing fell forward onto my tire and stripped it. We spent the next half hour changing my impossibly difficult tire only to replace it with a really low spare. I drove back to Primm (about a twenty minute drive going 55 with my hazard lights on) to fill the spare tire with Alex in tow. After seeing us off safely, Alex’s Dad headed up to Big Bear. We got back to Vegas, took the car to a few disgruntled shops and settled on Midas. Alex went home to prep his car for the new venture to take place tonight. He doesn’t have air-conditioning, so we want to hold out to see how my car fares. Now, $900 later with a tune-up and three new tires we’ll be ready to try that fateful trip again in my car around 9:00 tonight.

As far as I can tell, this accident is further retribution from the car gods. After gashing the side of my car on a handicap assist rail, they didn’t look kindly upon me. I lost my passenger side mirror to a road construction barrel, but I thought they were being kind by allowing me to salvage the arm that holds the mirror. That empty cavity held the hope that I could one day repair the mirror. Well, a few days ago, they finally took the whole shebang when I backed out of my covered parking spot and ripped off the casing for the mirror. I had assumed that the mirror had been a worthy sacrifice to the car gods, but I was woefully mistaken. I hope that finally taking the time to fix up the car will prove my dedication to safe driving and be sent up as a worthy offering.

Then again, today’s accident may have been the cause of the road-side rock gods in which case, I better watch my chassis.