Having acquired season passes to Six Flags in March, Tom and I went to Magic Mountain for an insane 4th of July. Original plan: watch Lilly all day July 3rd for Renee’s surgery. That fell through the morning of. The new plan: leave for SoCal right after Tom’s morning class. Season passes, free parking, $20 at Safeway for sandwiches, water and fruit–the essentials. The only thing left was hotel and gas. Cheap yet gratifying! Great plan, right? Yeah, until “Rusty”, our ’92 Toyota Camry, blew out his cylinders on the Grapevine. Rusty was dying, and we needed to get there, quick! With fingers crossed and faithful prayers, Rusty choked and gagged all the way to Six Flags–45 minutes later to the park’s gate. Next in line, smoke began billowing from under the hood, and like a horse ran to its end, Rusty pooped out right when it was our turn to go thru. To keep the car rolling, Tom through it in neutral and manhandled the less-than-powered-steering vehicle all the way to the parking spot about a mile away. I showed the pass to the gate man and run after Tom and Rusty. Halfway through and I couldn’t see them anymore. Rusty had picked up some speed and Tom used it to his advantage. A few minutes later I found Rusty perfectly parked. Our loyal car brought us to SixFlags. Incredible! It was time to hit up the rides! The lines were very short so we were able to get on about 9 rides. Three hours later and we had to face Rusty again. To our surprise it started. But boy was it shaking! Every time we slowed down or stopped at a red light Rusty was shaking and making noises like never before. But our little fighter brought us all the way to our hotel. Exactly 5.5 miles and it died right in the middle of the parking lot. We couldn’t have asked for more! We still needed to find a parking spot though. Close to us there was a car pulling out and BAM he hit Rusty on the left taillight. It was a “gentle” hit. At this point it had all become very comical to us. What else could happen to poor old Rusty. I got on the steering and Tom was pushing the car. It was effortful. Some random guy saw us and joined Tom with the pushing. In no time we had rusty in a spot. We spent the rest of the night making sandwiches and researching on our phones for a new car. We saved pictures and specs of our top 4 cars on my phone with the Hyundai Elantra and Sonata at number one. Almost 4:00 AM and we were still up, laughing an making jokes about Rusty. 4th of July morning. We quickly got ready and left the hotel. The car started and it took us at the Valencia auto mall, 2 miles away. Our first stop was at the Honda dealership. The 2013 Honda Civic appealed to us. It had a rear view camera! Wow! Tom test drove it for a couple of miles. We spent the next 2 hours sitting and waiting for the salesman and their financial guy coming back and forth telling us how we don’t have enough credit and that little that we have isn’t that good and how we’d have to pay $600 per month… It wasn’t a good experience but at least it was informative in some ways. We left with a feeling that they didn’t really want to help us. Next stop Hyundai! We were really excited for this one. We had gotten tired of how slow things went at Honda so Tom quickly says to the South Korean salesman “we need to buy a car today and we want to test drive one right now” It was funny how that threw of the guy since he didn’t get to say hardly anything but quickly went to get the keys. The Elantra was beautiful. But when we saw the Sonata we loved the spaciousness. We quickly got in it and Tom started driving it around. Metallica was playing on the background. We started talking and a few minutes later we both admitted to each other that the car already felt like it was ours! Absolutely loved it! We dealt with the financing people and they found us a good deal but we had to put down $10,000. Called the bank to allow us to do the transaction, figured out how to do that with the dealership, sold Rusty to them for $200, signed about 30 different papers and finally 2 hours later we got the keys! We were out of there and went straight to Six Flags for the rest of the night. We got to go on many roller coasters multiple times. It was terrific! We ended the night by chasing small local firework “shows” in Valencia. 4th of July 2013 will be remembered as an adventure and also as the most expensive trip we’ve taken.
The Adventures of Tom and Alba 