White Trash

(I know, it's been awhile. Please forgive me)

I would never EVER consider myself as being anything resembling "white trash", but this past July 4th weekend, I definitely fell into that category. :(

Anthony, Jess, and I took a trip to Mesa, Arizona to attend a wedding and spend the 4th on the Navajo reservation. We left on Wednesday morning and drove the entire 12 hours in one day and it wasn't actually as long and miserable as I thought it would be. The thing I wasn't expecting, 118+ degree heat for more than 20 hours of the day! I couldn't believe how HOT it was and much less believe that I actually lived in heat like that for 18 years of my life. It's the kind of dry heat that still lingers even after the sun goes down. At 11pm it was over 100. Yuck. Luckily the house I stayed in was well air-conditioned and very comfortable (thank goodness!). Moving on.... Thursday morning was the sealing at the Mesa Temple and since I am not yet endowed, Anthony and I spent the morning browsing through the best store on the planet earth : IKEA. This was a wonderful way to spend our morning because IKEA is pretty much a theme park, but we had to drive about 45 minutes from where we were staying to the next city over: Tempe. It was really easy to find (luckily) because it was right off the highway, and we arrived there just as it opened at 10am. We really didn't have anywhere else to be until 4pm so guess how long we stayed? 4 hours! :) We looked through every display, sat in dozens of sofas and chairs, and even tested the comfort level of each mattress. (sigh) Heaven. We finished our little vacation with a veggie wrap and almond tart in the food court, and decided that we should probably go back into the real world. So we braved the heat once again and headed back to Casa Grande, where the luncheon and reception were being held.

We were both pretty tired from all that walking, so we drove in silence for about 10 minutes until something in my car started vibrating very irritatingly (if that's a word). Wanting to reestablish tranquility, Anthony started searching for the culprit and eventually discovered it was the enormous pile of change in the ashtray. I had completely forgotten that it even existed, so he counted the change (for fun) and said I had over $5. Sweet. So after counting the booty, he placed the ashtray back in the slot, in hopes that it would no longer vibrate. But during the 2 minutes that it took him to count all that change, the vibrating had gotten worse. And then, my steering wheel started shaking and my car was having trouble staying at 75 mph. Obviously, I was getting a little nervous so I got in the right lane and slowed down to about 60 (the speed limit was 75). Anthony was about to call and ask his mechanic uncle for advice, when my car exploded.

Well... it didn't actually explode, but the entire tread of my tire did come off and the sound of my fender being ripped apart pretty much sounded like an explosion. As I pulled over on the side of the highway, I seriously thought my tire was gone, my hubcap was destroyed, and the whole front left side of my car was completely gone. Luckily, the tire was still in tact (missing it's tread) but the left fender was pretty much annihilated. Luckily, a nice latino guy came 5 minutes after we pulled over and helped us with the tire and cut off my pathetic excuse for a fender. I didn't really think of taking pictures right after the incident (I was busy crying from fright and future repair payments) but this was the finished product after I got a new tire.


Ouch. So this is the part where the white trash comes in. This happened Thursday afternoon... We weren't going back to Provo until Sunday morning. Yeah... We were white trash all over Arizona. Just lovely. It actually didn't give us much trouble. Anthony's uncle was able to fix the blinkers while we were at the reservation (notice the lack of orange blinker next to the headlight in the photo) and we just had to tape the computer wires running to the dashboard up and away from the tire. It ran fine and sometimes I even forgot it was missing a fender. But considerate people like the policeman running checks over the Hoover Dam at 11pm commented, "Hey. You don't have a left fender." Moral of the story: don't neglect replacing your poor car tires. One day, they might take their revenge.