...and now, a God story. Our car breaks down on the Montana highway, chugging along like a wet sponge. Luckily we aren't completely in the middle of nowhere, and we manage to get it as far as a small town (Clinton MT) with a lonely gas station/food mart. It's 100 degrees and both of our cel phones are dead, so I borrow the cashier's phone and call a random towing place in the Yellow Pages. It's also Sunday, so no place is open. I get a cast member from Deliverance on the phone who "just happens to be there" and can't help me, but he suggests I call Red's Towing. He doesn't have their number and tells me it should be in the phone book. It is not in the phone book officially, but somebody has written their number there IN PEN (!) so I call them. I explain that we have a car full of stuff and a 2-year-old...at first the girl answering doesn't think she can help us, until after putting me on hold she tells me one of their drivers is coming out anyway. While we wait, I try driving the car around the building a few times and it does run, just a little choppy. The towing guy arrives and agrees to follow us into Missoula (which is only about 9 miles away) in case we break down again. He leads us to what he calls 'the best place in town' for auto repair named Crawford's, and there is a nice affordable hotel down the street. Since no place is open, we check into the hotel for the night (and order Pizza Hut for dinner...the one meal that didn't count towards our no-chain rule) and try to relax before we find out the verdict first thing in the morning. At this point, we don't know if we'll be staying a whole extra day or just a few hours, or how much we'll be paying to get our car healthy.
Next morning it turns out all we need is a new fuel filter for under $100 and we are on our way. And out of all the auto places we could have been led to, it turns out the shop owner Ken Crawford has this image painted on his store window...
Again, this didn't occur randomly and we were guided back onto the road by angels and the power of prayer. We were blessed.
So taking it easy the rest of the way, we decided to just make it as far as Spokane and continue as planned the next day, only adding an extra half-day of driving to the whole journey. This circumstance allowed us to stop at both places in Spokane we were considering for food stuffs...
...and Wonderland USA Family Fun Center, where I knew they had a Rock-afire Explosion installed so I really wanted to check it out, since I hadn't seen one in the flesh since 1984. Unfortunately, the songs played fine and the lights worked, but the characters didn't. I asked the "manager" and the teen girls behind the pizza counter if they ever saw them move...they said some of the songs make them move and some of them don't. It's obvious they had no idea what these characters were supposed to be like, or what the nostalgic history behind them was. With the song selector buttons we tried many times, but each time the characters didn't move a muscle, frozen in dead poses. It was like seeing a beloved childhood memory (which I wanted to share with my own child) crumble and die. My grandparents used to take me to see these characters at Showbiz Pizza Place when I was 9-years-old, and with them now being gone, I took it rather personally. Oh well, I know there are working shows out there...it's too bad this one in Spokane couldn't be treated with more respect.
But after one more classic American romp of nostalgia at the XXX Root Beer Drive-Inn outside Seattle, it was home again home again, and an absolutely fantastic holiday. There is so much more to share, but that's another story which shall be told another time.
