First of all, Merry Christmas dear bloggers. I hope that your day is wonderful. We're only ten minutes into the blessed holiday and so far things are looking good.
I'm sitting on the couch in my Grandma's living room in pitch darkness. My sister is asleep on an air mattress below me, and the Christmas tree (small and fake as it is) sits somewhere ahead of me on a table. I can almost make out the silhouette of the thing against the pink outside the window.
Suddenly I am struck with an urge to put out milk and cookies for Santa. This task, besides being childish, would prove near impossible due to the lack of light and of cookies. Still, I hope Santa understands that despite the lack of refreshment, the nineteen-year-old sleeping on the couch has been quite good this year and deserves due reward. And her sister should get a little something too, I suppose.
I guess that you're wondering about the title of this post. It's a reference to the National Lampoons in honor of the very Griswold-y time we had actually getting to Grandma's house.
For starters, our van began overheating while we were driving on the freeway, about two hours from Grandma's. Luckily, there was an exit nearby, and we were able to just barely pull into the parking lot of a gas station/McDonald's before the van completely died. Dad went inside to buy some coolant, but upon pouring it in he discovered that there was a part missing, and that the coolant was just leaking back out.
Luckily (again) there was a mechanic on duty, and he walked out to look at the van. He promptly determined that something was wrong with the casket (don't ask me what that is, but it sounds like gasket, which I found funny), and that the problem would take days to fix. He offered to loan us a van (bless him), and went to get it from his garage and to put a dealer liscense plate on it. Technically, you aren't supposed to let people just borrow vehicles like that, but he told us that if we got pulled over for some reason, we should just say that we're taking the van 'for a test drive.'
When he came back with the 'rental' van, we piled all of our stuff into it. We had a lot of stuff, too. Two duffel bags each plus four laundry baskets of gifts, four pairs of snow boots, two backpacks, and two pairs of snowshoes. Dad joked that all we were missing was Grandma in the trunk (another Lampoon reference, sorry).
Finally we were on our way, leaving our van and the small town of Marathon, Wisconsin behind. I know this ordeal sounds like just some dumb car trouble, and maybe it was, but how lucky that our van began breaking down so close to an exit, and that that exit led to a gas station with a mechanic willing to lend us a van so we could finish our trip? Not to be cheesy, but around Christmastime especially, I think this qualifies as a minor miracle.
I should be off to bed now. Or off to couch, if you prefer.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
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