In the afternoon we girded our van and headed out for the Big City. Mom had become fixated on visiting the IKEA store there and decided that she could justify it if she also took the kids to one of the museum institutions near by, specificly the Field Museum and / or the Aquarium. I had to go along as well, primarily to handle large IKEA items.
The trip did not start well. For Christmas, Mom got me an FM transmitter for my iPod so that I could listen to it while in the car or van (oddly, for such a fancy sound system, no external jack input in the van). So naturally I wanted to load up the iPod and take it along. Naturally nothing in the experience went well. The previous computer on which I had installed things had long since been rebuilt so I had to re-install iTunes and get that working, and then try to load up the iPod. After multiple hours of effort which succeeded only in erasing what music had been on the iPod, making us all late to depart, I finally gave up and left it behind.
About half way there, we noticed that the van had suddenly started making a loud flapping sound. We stopped and noticed that one of the rear tires had failed near catastrophically, with a flap an inch wide and 4 inches long in the side. We put on the spare with the big trucks whizzing by — at least it wasn’t dark yet. Mom wasn’t amused when I told here where I keep my passwords “just in case”.
After putting on the spare we limped in to a nearby WalMart for repairs. Naturally they didn’t have the same size tire so we ended buying two new rear tires. Expensive, but we would have had to buy at least one anyway and we weren’t confident of getting back home on the spare. Unfortunately this loss of time meant that we were unable to visit various stores that the kids had wanted to go to (even though they promised to not buy anything, or bug the parents to buy stuff). Still we made it to the hotel and settled in for the night. At which point we discovered that just as on our trip to Florida, we had no clean underwear for Alice (nor clean socks). At least Charles had Sharky and Timmy. But that meant that since Corwin grabbed the fold out couch, Alice and Charles had to share a bed even though Sharky hadn’t had supper. I pointed this out to Alice but she wasn’t worried — she claimed that if she put her head under the covers, Sharky couldn’t find her.
