Life Update: Florida was a bust?
Maybe our love of all things Florida clouded our judgment? Maybe we were just overly hopeful? Maybe we truly are losing our minds planning for this trip? Whatever it was that possessed us to drive to Fort Walton Beach, Florida on the promise of the perfect, magical, rainbow unicorn of a towing vehicle simultaneously wore us down and helped us tremendously. We ran ourselves into the ground. We pushed ourselves and our kids so hard during the last week. Too hard.
We left out Friday night. Drove all night, taking turns and trying to nap when we could. We arrived on Saturday morning tired but hopeful that we had made the right choice. This trip just felt right in a way that none of them had. It was like something was pushing us along, telling us we had to go. It made no sense. The dealership was changing the brakes when we arrived. We went to the back and there she was. No rust. No dents. Huge tires…like too huge. Turns out that it was lifted a lot more than we were expecting. I don’t think the car lot tried to misrepresent it. I think it was just another moment in our series of unfortunate events.
We went to breakfast while they finished the brakes and detailed the vehicle. We were hoping we were wrong and the lift just made it look bigger than it was. We came back and it was indeed huge but otherwise perfect. Michael started making phone calls to see how difficult and expensive it would be to remove the lift. When we test drove it, it started shaking around 55. Apparently, this is common with lifted vehicles or at least that’s what I was told. I know nothing about this. In fact, before we started this wild adventure, I knew next to nothing about cars. Now, I can spout things off that actually make sense and occasionally get me some weird looks. Only about the SUV that we are trying so hard to find though. I’m still clueless outside of this select specialty.
The mechanic friend at home got back to us after being sent all the information and photos. He said it could possibly be removed but depending on how they did it, it could be very expensive and could have compromised its towing capacity. It turned out that the way they did it while correct did impact the towing ability. The whole reason we drove all that way was to buy a towing vehicle. It was a nice car but it was somebody else’s perfect car.
We tried to make the best of a bad situation. We checked into a decent hotel and spent the evening sleeping/relaxing. I went to bed at 6:30 pm and didn’t wake up until 6 am the next morning. I was obviously worn out. Before going to sleep, I looked at two more Suburbans online. I sent two messages out into the great void that is the internet. I have called about everyone until this point but figured what the heck. One of them called me back immediately. The car in question was on a car lot in Colorado. I apologized because I didn’t realize it was that far away. I was looking within 200 miles of Cincinnati because the idea of driving to Florida or anywhere far away again was too much. She said, “No problem but I happened to have pictures under it that I was already sending your way.” I told her that was fine but honestly, it was just too far away.
The pictures dinged as I hung up the phone and climbed into bed too exhausted to care. Michael spent the evening and part of the night looking at every Suburban 2500 the internet presented him with. He was still riding the emotions too high to go to bed until late. I woke before anybody else. I laid in that comfortable, perfectly warm bed peacefully aware that our travel plans seemed to be crumbling around us. We had seen 8 SUVs and something was very wrong with all of them. I spent the next hour or so thinking and praying. Is God trying to tell me something? Should we reconsider a Class A or C? Should we reconsider the whole trip?
We seriously considered leaving Florida and driving straight to another vehicle in North Carolina. We stopped at the store and I went in with the girls. Michael stayed in the car. When I came back out, he said I don’t have a good feeling about this. We decided to go home and regroup. This is when I got on my phone and remembered that somebody sent me pictures the night before. We were still parked so I showed them to my husband. We agreed that they looked decent but Colorado was too far away and the price was a little high.
We chatted the whole way home and agreed that we still want to do this. It would be easier to give up but we would always regret it. We talked about so many things that we don’t always have time to discuss. I’ll give you a little insight into our lives…We are busy people. Michael works Monday-Saturday. He does things around the house in the evenings and on Sunday. I normally work on the weekends. I homeschool our kids and keep our household running during the week. All of the travel planning is in addition to all these things. We’re tired most of the time. I’m off work right now because of an injury and my husband took time off for us to deal with this towing vehicle situation. It was so nice for us to talk for a long time. We talked about our trip, our kids, how homeschooling is going, blogging, the possibility of vlogging in the future, our goals, and most importantly right now, whether we want to keep looking for a Suburban 2500 with an 8.1L. After some discussion, we agreed that we would keep looking for a couple more weeks and if we didn’t find something we would look at other options.
The reason for the trip was definitely a bust but having time to talk about everything was worth it. I wish we could have spent that same time together at home but I know we wouldn’t have if we weren’t on that trip. I’m trying to see the bright side of everything.
Trip Countdown: 327 days to go!
Happy Travels!