A vacation from our permanent vacation

So, after 3 years without a visit to the U.S, we are going back for a family wedding. This will give us a couple of weeks to catch up with those that are so dear to us. So much has happened in just 3 short years. We can't believe how fast our grandchildren are growing up, babies are now youngsters, some are even teenagers, some are newly licensed drivers, and the oldest has graduated from college, and will tie the knot later this year.

Family and friends are making plans for get-togethers and asking what we foods we miss most. There really isn't anything we miss that much, but there are a few cravings that would be nice to enjoy for a change. I've compiled a very short list. We have more great foods here than you can imagine, but there are a few things we truly miss, and simply can't get here.

Here is our list:

• Sweet & TENDER Corn on the Cob,
• a really great RUSSET Potato, baked with all the trimmings, 
• a wedge of ICEBERG Lettuce with Blue Cheese crumbles and Diced Tomatoes, 
• a great Caesar Salad with real ROMAINE Lettuce. 

We would also love a chance to go to some of our favorite haunts in Houston for a Santa Fe Chicken Wrap from Hungry's, a great Tex-Mex dinner, and last but not least, a visit to the Lasagna House to share a meal.

Costa Rica has become our home now and we can't imagine ever living in the U.S. again. Here, we don't have to face the daily pressures of life in the big city and all the stress that goes along with it. We've put all that behind us for good. We love the quirkiness that is Costa Rica. Our lives are very complete here. We will always miss family and friends, and this brief vacation from our permanent vacation in paradise, will give us a chance to spend some quality time with our loved ones, reconnecting.

See you all very soon!
Read the whole story...

Sedona and my "Man in the Maze"

On our recent road trip to the Grand Canyon we spent a day in Sedona, Arizona, taking in the amazing rock formations and visiting some of the shops. In one shop, The Humiovi, a "Man in the Maze" pendant caught John's eye. We went in and talked to the shopkeeper about it and found this piece was created by the Native American artist from the Hopi Tribe, Calvin Peterson.

The legend of the "Man in the Maze" helps us understand the meaning of life. The maze depicts experiences and choices we make in our journey through life. It illustrates the search for balance - physical, social, mental and spiritual. In the middle of the maze are found a person's dreams and goals. Legend says when we reach the center, the sun god is there to greet us, bless us and pass us into the next world.

We didn't buy the piece at first. We just continued to stroll on down the street, taking in more of the sights. For some reason, we were pulled back to the pendant in the window. We finally decided we had to buy it and I'm so glad we did. I know this will quickly become one of my favorite pieces of jewelry.
Read the whole story...

Grand Canyon Road Trip - June, 2011

We scheduled a quick road trip to the Grand Canyon to scratch one more item off our bucket list before the move to Costa Rica. We drove out west from Houston and visited a number of places in New Mexico and Arizona. I sure am glad we live in a humid climate now and we are moving to a humid climate next month. We both suffered with sinus and nasal problems the entire trip. We got so tired of hearing, "But, it's a dry heat." I'll tell you what they can do with that "dry heat."

Here'a a slide show of some of the photos we took. (Hint: You can click on the slideshow to enlarge to full screen.)
Read the whole story...

Our Tropical Christmas - 2010

We just spent a wonderful Christmas vacation in Costa Rica where we ate more than our fair share of Christmas Tamales.







The garden is looking fabulous. Mario, our gardener, is doing a wonderful job. All of the trees we planted in May have doubled or tripled in size and the lawn is now well established. We didn't have a Christmas tree this year, but we did manage to string up lights on the casita.




Here is John standing next to our Cashew tree.







Mario has managed to bring this little Mango tree back to life. Jenny planted it about 3 years ago and it had been struggling.










The Almond tree is really starting to grow and should provide good shade on this side of the casita.










Our Valencia Orange has tripled in size and is already producing fruit.

We attended many holiday parties and dinners and made lots of new friends this trip. Our neighbor Max threw a party for his employees and clients. We met a couple, close to our age, and had such a good time with them, we arranged to met for lunch a few days later. We went to the Machu Picchu restaurant in San Jose. The food there is outstanding and you should try to go there if you get the chance.

One evening Mario and Dinia invited us over for homemade Chicharrones. Mario and Dinia are really great folks. They embody everything we love about the Ticos. The friendship they have extended to us is just wonderful. They provided us with transportation to and from airport. Shortly after they dropped us off at our casita, they came over with a huge basket of fresh fruit and a week later they showed up with more. They went out of their way to help us with a number of things we needed to get fixed around the casita. We are so grateful to count them among our friends.

We celebrated Maritza's and my birthday one evening with her, Vinicio and the rest of her family. It was great to see all of our extended family. Like all kids, their grandkids are growing up just too fast.
One of the best parties we went to was hosted by our friend, Eliercer, near Grecia. This is CR at its best! He and his church members put on a Christmas Fiesta for the area poor. Well over 100 kids, babies to pre-teens, waited for hours to get into the Fiesta. Once inside, they were entertained with games, a clown, "dreamsicles" hot dogs with slaw & all the dressings, ice cream, soda, piñatas full of candy. Finally, each child received a nice toy present and a bag filled with apples and grapes.

After the kids party we had "Olla de Carne" for lunch with Eliercer and his family. Then we went to see friends in Alajuela for afternoon coffee and more food.






We spent Christmas Eve with my Tico "son" and his family where we enjoyed a roasted pork leg with all the traditional trimmings. We watched the little ones pass out presents to everyone to open and then it was time to tuck them in bed so they could wait for the Niño Jesus to arrive with their "special" presents.







We had a wonderful time and we were so sad to see our vacation come to an end. We were in the midst of packing on Christmas Day for our trip home on the 26th, when Eliercer and his family surprised us. They showed up in the late afternoon with Christmas Tamales. We brewed some coffee in the chorreador and I made up a platter of cheeses and crackers. We sat outside on the casita's porch to enjoy the impromptu fest with good friends in perfect weather. ¡Pura Vida!
Read the whole story...

IT LIVES!! (in the tall grass)

I’m not really very fond of bugs. Apart from Fluffy, my pet tarantula, I wouldn’t miss the entire class of critters that bite, sting or chew up the wooden shelves in my garage.

I do enjoy the Spanish word for them: bichos [beach’ ohs]. It just pops off the lips like an English homophone that is usually combined with a tone of venom and the words, “son of a …” Saying their name in Spanish, with the correct tone of voice, helps me get through the day. “Damn bichos!”

See?

Then again, the little nasties sometimes get to pay me back for not showing them “the love.”

On our way back to Atenas from two wonderful days in the Valley of the Quetzals, we were seized with our obsession to look for tiny boxes of hidden trinkets, worth less than a penny, using millions of dollars of Global Positioning System technology, aka, geocashing.

“Oh, look! There’s a cache showing on my GPS, right down there in that little valley! Turn down this road!” said my co-pilot.

“Aarrrrrgh!” sez I.

After 15 minutes of dropping like a rock, down into this verdant valley, my co-pilot again said, “Turn here.”

“That’s a cow path.”

“No it isn’t. There was some gravel there once and there are a few rocks here and there right now,” she retorted. Then she set the hook. “Besides, do you want to log a Did Not Find on the website?” We turned up the cow path road.

Forty-five minutes of bone-jarring single-track later, following her GPS needle, we came to a bridge over the beautiful crashing cataract of the Rio Blanco de Copey. Boy what I would have given for an ultra-light fishing rig and some trout bait.
But we were after a different quarry now – the elusive Tupperware box full of trinkets.

The online hints said that the box was hidden in a “cave near the bridge” and the GPS’s kept dragging us towards a big ol’ rock about 20 feet off the road, sitting in meter-high grass. Having planned ahead, I was wearing shorts, crocs with no socks and no Deet. Ah, but it will just take a second.

It took about 10 minutes. You have to locate the cache, get it out of the cave, open it, look through the trinkets to see if there is one you want to take, leave one of our trinkets behind and sign the log book. Through all of that time, I never felt the little monsters striking into my flesh and injecting their venom.

Pat says they’re called no-see-ums. I think in the Midwest we called them chiggers. Either way, the domestic variety is a poor excuse for their genus, considering the strength of whatever the hell it is those horrid Costa Rican cousins leave behind in your skin. The Costa Rican branch of the chigger species are the Black Mambas of chigger-dom.

Our glee at logging another cache find was soon supplanted with a need to scratch. Our legs had been attacked and we both had numerous little red “pimples” raising up and itching. It’s overwhelming. And, I’ve learned my lesson: no matter how hot and steamy it is in the jungle [hoon’ glay] thou shalt always bathe in Deet and wear long pants.

Today is 4 days later and the only way to ignore the itching is to get my mind off of it by writing dreck like this for you to suffer through. See? I like to share.

Read the whole story...

Is it Christmas yet?

Apparently it is … here in Costa Rica. The Ticos take Christmas decorations very seriously. Every place you look, the decorations are up. Most of them have been up for a week or more. There doesn’t seem to be any of the competitive, “my lights are better than your lights,” here. Everyone just decorates. Some of the decorating is amazing.

During one of our geocaching forays deep into the mountains – where rain forest jungle edges up against forsaken little fincas (farms) -- we saw pockets of grinding poverty where the houses are just slapped together shanties. Many of them are fully constructed of rusty corrugated steel roofing, probably appropriated from unguarded construction sites or reclaimed from the roofs of ancient abandoned barns. But, amid their poverty, their hovels are decorated for Christmas. At least there is a cut-out of the Jolly Old Elf’s visage nailed to the front door. The “rich” peons [pay-owns’] have electricity and if they have electricity they’ve somehow managed to come up with a string of Christmas lights or two, gaily twinkling away, day and night.

In the towns we traveled through, Friday, December 04 is a crazy day of frenzied celebration and city-wide carnival. For, this is the day of the alginaldo [ahl-gee-nahl’-dough]. This is when every person in the country is paid (on the same day) the equivalent of 1 month’s salary, for Christmas bonus, by law. Imagine the craziness in the States if every employed person suddenly had that much cash in hand. Well, it’s crazy like that here, too. On top of the alginaldo, this was the last week of the school year for most of the children. Add that to every city staging a big fiesta / bazaar / carnival / party (usually centered at the town square and the Catholic Church, which is always situated on one side of the town square.) It was so nuts that the main street of the capital, San Jose, was blocked by a sea of surging humanity, already spending and partying, in the middle of the afternoon. We didn’t hang around to find out where that party was going … cripes … we have a flight to catch in two days.

And then … there are our neighbors, bless their hearts.

Imagine, one of them actually has a house that looks to be smaller than ours (if that’s possible). Clearly there is no room inside for a Christmas tree. Sooooooo, the fully decorated and lighted tree is proudly sitting out on their miniscule front porch, half blocking the front door.

But the prize goes to our “almost-neighbor” up the street. Their house isn’t close to being finished yet. This week it was just a framed-in structure with a roof. Yesterday, they started putting up the sheets of blue Styrofoam insulation on the front wall. On the second floor, dead center on the front façade, there will be a huge picture window – some day. Right now, it is just a hole in the framing, surrounded with blue sheathing. Guess what is hoisted up in that opening, blazing away with the latest LED tree lights? Oh, yeah … they might not live there but by god they’re going to decorate.

Fun country.
Read the whole story...

Geocaching: Costa Rica style

For those of you who we haven’t bored to tears with tales of our geocaching hobby, here’s a quick description:

Thousands of participants register at www.geocaching.com and become Geocachers. Geocache people take little containers, filled with everything from trinkets, coins and other tchotchkes, if the container is large, or just a little slip of paper to write your name and the date upon if the container is small. Then the Geocacher takes that container out in the world and hides it. (S)he takes a GPS reading on the exact hiding spot and then publishes those coordinates on the geocaching.com website. Other Goecachers then run out and try to be the first to find a new cache – or, in the case of us slower folk, just finding the durn things, period. Once found, you proudly log your find at the website. There are about 900,000 caches currently hiding, around the world. It’s addictive.

Costa Rica is a new geocaching experience, however.

In the States, thousands of caches are simply plastic 35mm film canisters, stuffed with a log sheet and shoved under the base-shroud of a shopping mall parking lot light. A little boring at times.

It seems that’s not how they do things here in Costa Rica.

Our first shot at a Costa Rican cache was supposed to be one of the most famous ones in the world. This baby is stashed in Manuel Antonio National Park, out along a jungle trail, allegedly far from the maddening crowd. We’d never been to the park, but, hey … no biggie. We’re semi-professionals.

“Where’s my back pack?”
“You left it at the house.”
“How can I carry water and “stuff”?”
“Here’s a cosmetics tote. Put some in there.”

So, we put on our protective long pants, shirts, hats and best hiking boots, grabbed two liters of water, bought our tickets into the park and headed out.

Kind of a disappointment right at the start. The “trail in the jungle” is as wide as most Costa Rican roads; and, it’s flat and nicely graded with fine gravel. On top of that, there were several large tour groups being noisily led to their great adventure by paid guides.

None of that for us! We’re world-famous wilderness explorers!

We got ahead of or behind most of the chattering Germans & Canadians & Americans and finally got to a place where the road-like trail looked like a real trail. Just dirt, roots, bugs, plants and you.

After a short time on the trail, we were sure that none of the tours seemed to be following us. Then, we came up to a very decayed, barely readable Park sign, showing the layout of the trail (a loop) and where the main attractions were along that trail, all marked and numbered. We studied the sign but couldn’t make much out due to severe jungle rot and weathering. Another tour couple came up and headed to the right side of the loop.

“We’re going left,” I declared.

Off we went into the deep rainforest jungle. No fears. The brave Pirate Juan was fully armed with 15 knives (surprised?) and, heck, the whole loop was only 2.5 kilometers. Piece of cake. Pat is in great shape, having been riding her bike 5 to 10 miles a day; and, I’m, well, “Arrrrrgh!”

Climb climb climb climb climb. Damn! Don’t these people know about the proper angle of construction for a trail, or about trail switchbacks? Climb climb. Wow, a body really works up a sweat out here in the jungle, but with 100% humidity, there isn’t much cooling-by-evaporation going on.

Fortunately, I’m wearing one of my best “Coolmax® Moisture Transport™ tee shirts which mechanically pulls the perspiration from your skin and moves it to one of your outer clothing layers, thereby keeping your skin dry and cool.” Unfortunately, my outer clothing layer was some crappy cotton button-down shirt that I grabbed out of the closet. Guess how fast Coolmax can saturate a cotton shirt?

Climb climb. Whoops. We’re over the top of that canyon and now we have to drop down to its bottom.

Drop drop drop drop drop. Huge steps down – the kind where your boot heel is almost touching your butt by the time your other toe touches the next lower trail surface.
Drop drop. Whoops. Down in the bottom. Gotta climb up the other side. Gee, didn’t these people ever hear about how to construct steps so that a normal person can negotiate them?

Climb climb climb. Whoops. Drop drop drop. Whoops. Climb climb climb.

Climb till you can’t breathe. Drop until your knees hurt. Climb. Drop. Climb. Drop.

Damn! Gimme some water. Gimme a GPS reading. Where the hell are we? Whataya mean the jungle canopy won’t let a satellite signal through? They told us that durn Garmin thingy would get a reading inside the Bat Cave even while The Joker jams the signals outside.

Ever sweated so much that your SHOES soaked through? Ever sweated so much that your wallet was so soaked through that the leather softened and your credit cards permanently debossed your name into the leather wherever they touched? Sheeeeit!

Guess how fast we both went through our liter of water, sweating that much? Think we were to the geocache yet?

Nah.

We must have looked so bad to other people we encountered (all going the other way, coming from the right side of the loop) that we convinced several of them to turn around without any explanation.

This went on for 3 hours.

Know what happens when you run out of sweat? That was just about when we reached the approximate cache site and we drank the last swallows of water. I stopped sweating. Very very bad symptom.

Pat was not quite as bad off as me (remember, she cheats by riding her bicycle back at Houston.) While I meandered around in my heat stroke daze, she tried her best to decipher the hiding place clues and get a reading through the jungle canopy on her GPS. No luck. We decided to bail.

About a (flat) hundred yards down the other side of the loop we ran into one of the tour couples.

“Is it flat this direction or is it all up and down?”
“Uh, its flat and the beach is just over there.”
“Beach?”


Another hundred flat yards of staggering and we came out into the shade behind one of the legendary Manuel Antonio beaches. Sun worshipers were frolicking in the surf. Tourists were playing with the monkeys. Fat old Germans were kicked back on their beach chairs, swilling water and eating bratwurst sandwiches (or whatever fat Germans eat.) I’d say, FUCK right here, but this is a family blog.

I plopped down on a beach bench and sloshed sweat from my saturated clothes all over the place. I think I looked pretty wonderful to the tourists. Pat must have looked pretty concerned that her “famous Pirate” was about to croak on some Park bench in the middle of the Garden of Eden for want of a drink of water. Anyhow, she was so convincing to some passers-by that they popped out a full liter of their water and gave it to me. I downed it like a fraternity kid downing a beer.

Thirty minutes later, I could walk. I got over to the cold fresh water showers (?!?) and drenched my head. I was ready to go again – as long as “again” didn’t involve any climbing.

A great first geocache in Costa Rica.

Read the whole story...

7/14/08: I Was Right All Along

I just knew that our old truck, Suzie Isuzu and I would get crosswise sooner than later.

O.K. Yeah, I’m spoiled. I’ve driven new cars for decades. After I’ve driven them awhile, they start to break, and I go get a new one. So, shoot me.

Regardless, there didn’t seem to be any sense in getting a new or near-new car for Costa Rica, driving it for a couple of weeks, then parking it in the garage for months, until our next trip to CR. Logically, we bought a 1994 ol’ beater. Dependable enough, but not breaking the bank. And NO PAYMENTS.

But then I started driving her and my love affair with Suzie started to sour:

• She burns oil.
• The rear doors are sticky and won’t always unlatch, without a jiggling and banging session. (And if somebody KEEPS slamming her seatbelt buckle in the door, they’re really hard to open.)
• The outside spare tire rack rattles and squeaks.
• THERE ARE NO CUP HOLDERS. ZERO! NADA. NONE!
• The driver’s window sometimes won’t go all the way up, leaving a tiny crack that whistles air and dribbles rain.
• Radio? There’s a radio?
• The front windshield washer doesn’t work.
• She stalls a lot when she’s cold.
• She burns a lot of that $6.00 per gallon gas.
• The hatch window lift gas struts are worn out. They won’t lift all the way by themselves and they leak down, slowly letting the window close on your noggin while you’re loading groceries.
• She smells like an old truck that has been used to haul everything except (maybe) dead bodies.

Waaah.

Then I remembered, “No whiners allowed in CR.” So I sucked it up and we started to get along.

Things were going pretty well one Monday, considering that I’d received 2nd degree burns across the top of my left leg that morning.

That afternoon, Pat, Jenny and I had driven to Alajuela to see our friends, Maritza and Venicio.

Time kind of slipped away during our visit and before you know it we were saying our goodbyes in the dusk. A short stop at a roadside restaurant put us out on the road home even later -- well into the darkness.

THUNK! Clang-ity-clang-cling-dinkle-dinkle-dinkle.

“What was that? Did you see anything in the road? We hit something,” I said to co-pilot, Pat.

“Didn’t see a thing, but yeah, I think we must have hit something,” she responded.

We drove for about 10 more minutes, putting us well up into the mountains, on the winding stretch with no shoulder and no pull-offs.

PHWUMP PHWUMP PHWUMP. I knew the sound and feel of a flat tire.

Absolutely no place to pull off. No way to stop on these blind curves … in the dark … with the pavement wet from the evening rains. Cripes.

Then a couple of those Pura Vida drivers started flashing their lights and honking their horns because: a)., I had a flat and was driving on it (duh); and, b)., I’d slowed down to below the speed of sound on these curves because, I brilliantly reasoned, a flat tire probably doesn’t get as much traction on wet pavement curves as does a fully functioning tire.

Tensions went up inside the cockpit as the girls tersely informed me that I shouldn’t be driving on a flat tire and that I needed to … well … uh … do something! Okey dokey.

It was probably at least a half mile before there was even the hint of a semi-flat spot along the shoulder of the road. I started in towards one and then saw that it was probably soft mud. Bailing back out onto the road irritated yet another Tico and earned me his ire, manifest by a little ol’ blast on his horn.

Thankfully somebody lives somewhere back in them thar hills as a driveway entrance suddenly loomed in the headlights. Driveway = flat (ish) and driveway probably = gravel. I pulled right in.

We’re parked at the top of a hill, at the end of a blind curve, about a foot off the road’s pavement. I hit the 4-way flashers. Yee-hah, they work. Score 1 for the home team!

O.K., we might as well get on with it. I knew the location of the jack due to an accidental discovery of its little hiding cubby while poking around inside one afternoon. That much we had going for us. And, oh yeah, we knew where the spare tire was … right there on the back hatch, always in the way. Two things going for us!

In very short order, the jack was out of its storage, and yippee, the lug wrench was in there too. Three things to the plus column!

You just know there are going to be some inhabitants of the minus column, don’t you. Bingo. You’re right.

First, pop that spare tire/wheel off the carrier on the back hatch. Slip the lug wrench onto the first bolt … skreeeek … it squeals loose and backs out; do the second one … ooof! … tighter but out it came … the third one should be easy because it’s on the bottom and I can put all 300 pounds down onto it. Nope.

By the time I was finished jumping up and down (painfully) on the lug wrench, the head of the bolt was starting to round off and there hadn’t been so much as a little “click” of promise out of the stubborn fastener. A couple of times I just let my arms drop to my sides, figuring that the game was over. That 3rd bolt was not coming out.

We momentarily discussed locking up the mess, calling a taxi and getting a wrecker to take care of the problem in the morning. That didn’t sound fun. One last go at it. The hell with how my leg was feeling, lean into the bolt head with everything I’ve got and then kind of fall down against the lug wrench. It squeaked a little! Re-purchase the bite on the bolt head … and pound down on it once again and it turned. That pig was completely cross-threaded – who knows how many years ago – and was probably hammered home with an impact wrench. It ground out of its hole by hand, but not willingly.

Pat started to cram the jack under the side of the car. But I knew that there must be some exact spot for this jack to go and that just anywhere wouldn’t work. What I didn’t know was that the inscrutable engineers at Isuzu had thought long and hard about how to set up their jack/vehicle “exact spot” in a location most likely to cause pain, anguish and suffering for any stupid old gringo loony enough to get a flat tire in the dark and then park over sloshy-wet mud/gravel. Oh, yeah. Let me.

I found the old owner’s manual in the glove box (amazing!) and dug into the “Changing A Tire” page. Oh, lord. The jack must be positioned directly under the rear axle, immediately next to the inside of the leaf spring bracket. In other words, WAAAAY the hell up under the stinking car.

Great. I’m dressed in cut-off jeans – cut off so that my bandaged leg didn’t have the pain of anything pressing against the burns – a brand new shirt and Crocs. Pura Vida. No whining.

Under the truck you go, boy. Not that hard. Just skud the jack through the mud and feel around in the dark (I had brilliantly taken our flashlight out of the truck the day before and forgotten to put it back.) The jack nested right up under the axle tube. The jack actuator wheel turned easily as the jack rose up and made contact. The actuator wheel stopped turning. That thing was going no further without a serious handle.

“Anybody see a jack handle?” No answer.

Dragged my bod up off the mud pan and started through every nook and cranny of that *&%$ truck. Nothing. Yikes.

Oooo. Oooo. The owner’s manual.

Remember those inscrutable Isuzu engineers that designed the lift point for the jack in an impossible place? Well, the same guys were on the team to find a place to put the jack handle. Without the owner’s manual, nobody would ever find it. Ever.

Here’s the trick. The rear seat and seat back fold down to give extra load space. While folding the seat forward, the very underside of the seat becomes visible. It is completely covered with the same carpet/fabric as are the floors. That (I guess) is supposed to be a clue. “Why would anybody upholster the underside of the seat?” you’re supposed to ask yourself. As you may have guessed, with a clever array of Velcro closures, the underside upholstery peels away. And, there, amid the springs and foam rubber, are little clips holding the two long jack handle pieces.

Oh, uh, but they are just straight bars. No handle off to one side so that you can crank the durn things.

Owner’s manual is no help on this one.

Search, search, search. The girls looked everywhere while I lay on my back underneath Suzie trying as best I could to turn the jack’s wheel with no crank.

“Are you SURE that there isn’t a handle under the seat somewhere?”

Jenny is standing near my feet, holding the lug wrench. “What does this little slot do?” She asked, examining the lug wrench handle.

Sure enough, punched through the middle of the lug wrench handle was a little slot that I guess we were supposed to simply know was the exact size of the flats machined on the end of the jack handle. What a leap of logic.

O.K., now I bet you’re thinking that all I had to do was to just slide that handle in place and spin the jack up.

Nah. Isuzu has engineers.

Some little geek in god-knows-where, Japan, designed this jack’s gearing so that the jack handle, which is already too long to rotate a reasonable arc beneath the truck, can’t possibly exert enough force to lift the truck smoothly, given the normal strength of a regular person. You get to lay on your back, way under the truck, let out a karate shout, while simultaneously pushing with all your might on the jack handle. It moves a quarter turn and then clangs into the truck’s undercarriage. (If you pull on the handle, you just lift yourself up out of the mud.) Re-set the handle for another push and repeat.

So with way more effort than I EVER expected to put forth while on vacation, I grunted and groaned the damn truck up a good two inches.

I was resetting the wrench/handle when I perceived the truck moving. I shouted something to the girls and did a twisting roll out from under the truck as it slid in the mud and fell off the jack.

Hey, this is getting fun. Now the gauze on my legs is fully saturated with mud – it feels really good – and we get to start all over again.

The girls went on a rock hunt and somehow came back with several stones big enough to wedge under the tires, ensuring that Suzie wouldn’t take any more unplanned strolls.

I went back at it and finally got the beast up high enough to remove the flat.

But not high enough get the new tire onto the lug studs.

Crank; clang. Crank; clang. Crank; clang. And then the engineers struck one final time. Ya see … they didn’t want to waste all of that money designing and building those fine jacks with ¼” of extra, useless lift capability … so they didn’t. The ol’ jack ran out of travel and quit with, oh, maybe 1/16 of an inch of clearance under the spare as it finally slid onto the studs.

But it went on and the girls took over the final installation and tightening of the lug nuts. And the jack cranked right down, with ease, so long as the weight of a whole damn truck was pressing it down.

Within 15 minutes we were home, covered in mud and grit (all 3 of us). Those on-demand water heaters proved to be up to the task because we all wanted and took some really long showers.

I love this car.

Read the whole story...