Holy roadtrip

WOW.  I bought a car originally so I could drive around Canada and the States, and well...that's being done.   But I don't have a car anymore.

Left Ottawa Tuesday morning with Karine and DD, so we could get ourselves to Austin, Texas in time for http://chaosintejas.com/ on Thursday.  The drive down was gonna be soooooo awesome, here was the plan:

Tuesday: hit the road at 5am, so we could get to Nashville, TN by 9pm or so.  Go out to some crazy cowboy bars,  and stay at a fancy Nashville hotel that I'd booked ages ago.

Wednesday: hit the road around lunch, and get to Memphis mid-day so we could go to Sun Records, Beale Street, etc.  Stay somewhere random Wednesday night after partying on Beale St, then head to Austin the next morning.  Get to Texas around dinner Thursday.

SO.  That was the plan.  Here's what really happened:

Tuesday: hit the road just after 5, closer to about 5:30.  Crossed the border with no issue, so we were happily sailing down the I-81S when we put our hotel name in Nashville into the GPS.  It gave us an arrival time of about 7:30pm, so we were sooooo excited as this meant we'd have an entire evening to go out.

This was right about the time I heard DD's voice in the backseat say 'DEER!'.  Then a large deer appeared right in front of my car, and I slightly swerved to the right and RIGHT into the second deer.  THUMP.  It hit the hood and flew across both lanes of the highway and landed on the left shoulder, and I slowed my car and pulled onto the right.  My first thought was OMG THE DEER, not even thinking of my car, until I heard Karine say, 'Danielle..YOUR CAR'.  I realized that smoke was billowing out of front, and the hood was crumpled.  Got out, grill cracked in half, something leaking out, sunken it.  I have never been so happy to have CAA.  We got lucky to be honest, me were all fine, and the deer didn't hit the windshield.  I was also really happy to be able to say I was not speeding, was not texting, was not doing anything other than driving as I should have been, watching the road, when it happened.  It wasn't my fault at all, if I'd been texting and not looking at the road when it happened I would have felt like the biggest asshole, and biggest idiot.

Thank FUCK I'd upgraded to CAA plus, I originally just had the one with 5km in towing, but now I have the one with 100km so we were safe.  UNFORTUNATELY, the lady at AAA was an idiot, and had the tow truck driver tow us back to Ogdensburg, rather than Waterford.  Ogdensburg was 45 minutes back...and they have no car rental agency.  So by the time we were given the go-ahead by my insurance company, I then had to pay $50 to take a cab to Potsdam to rent a car.  This garbage took us about 3 hours out of our way, if they'd towed us to Waterford we would have saved that three hours and also been closer. UGH.  Really annoying.  All in all the whole ordeal delayed us about ten hours, so rather than get to Nashville in time to go out and do something, we got there at 6am and crashed until the front desk called to kick us out at 1pm.

Now...remember we left Ottawa at 5am.  And Nashville is an hour behind, so it was almost 7am when we got there.  We'd been up and driving almost 26 hours.  We are driving machines!

We wandered around downtown Nashville for an hour or two, just enough time to be sad we didn't have more time there, then headed to Memphis.  Which we got to...at7pm...right when everything closes.  YEAH.  So we ate some chicken and waffles (delicious!!!!!) and hit the road again.  Drove as much as we could, and around 2am we pulled into a cheap motel in Prescott, Arkansas.

YEAH.  Now I know why I don't stay in cheap motels.  Karine and DD passed out right away, I laid there reading emails for a while (including one from my auto guy, telling me the repairs would be $4900, and they were still waiting for the insurance guy to go inspect.  But since the estimate was so much more than my car even cost, he was expecting it to be declared a total loss.  YEAH).  When I finally tried to sleep, I couldn't stop scratching my arm and foot...and finally realized how long I'd been scratching for and looked at my foot.  BITES.  Definitely not bedbugs, Karine and I had inspected the bed first and nothing, and the bites don't resemble bedbug bites.  I'm thinking some reaction to the sheets, because I then got up and slept in the car and as soon as I got out of the bed the bites stopped itching.

So.  That was our trip here.  No time for the fun things planned, BUT, now that we have a bit more time to get back, we've decided to just do those things then.  When we leave Austin on Monday we're going to drive to New Orleans for a night, then Tuesday we'll drive back to Nashville.  This means we'll be back in Ottawa MEGA late on Wednesday night, and I'll have to get back to Ogsdensburg Thursday or Friday to get some stuff out of my car.  I have a rear hub assembly in the back that Tim was going to put on before we left, thank fuck he didn't have time to do it because now I can return it and get $150 back.

Shitty because this trip was supposed to be really cheap, but I'm looking at my insurance deductible, we had to pay insurance on the rental so the extra drivers would be covered, etc etc.  But it's just money...this trip is still pretty amazing.  I can't even begin to describe how incredible this fest is and it's only the second night right now.  We were up til 5am, ending the night watching bands play on a bridge filled with hundreds of punks.  Amazing.