I'm home.

You didn't know I was gone, did you?

Sam won a truck on auction, and we decided to fly out Monday night to pick it up. This, we decided at about 2:00, with the flight leaving at 5:45. So we busted hump, cleaning house, arranging sitters, packing, banking, re-scheduling. Made the flight, landed in Texas at 7:45.

We stayed overnight in a hotel, rented a super-compact car, and drove out to the auction site.

We got the paperwork, and they sent us out to the yard. This auction site buys cars from insurance companies that have been theft-recovered, wrecked, flooded or otherwise damaged. They try to be specific about the "injuries" sustained to the vehicle, but I guess it is always a little bit of a crap-shoot.

Our truck was a theft recovery that was supposed to be drivable. So, we show up at the lot, hand the man our paperwork, and he says "where is your tow-truck."
Ugh. All of a sudden it hits me. We are idiots. The magnitude of our adventure hits us both. We flew to Texas to drive home a vehicle, to Utah, 1100 miles away, and we have no idea what is wrong with it.

It is as if we fed $3000.00 into a vending machine with no buttons, and hope for the best.

We told the gate man it was supposed to be drivable. He nodded at us (good luck, my naive friends) and told us the fork lift would bring the truck to us. Fork lift?

Oh yes, a big fork lift. Scooped up the truck, and literally dumped it in the crunchy gravel at our feet. Then, like the morning fog, he was gone. Everyone was gone. It was me and Sam, and our rental skate and our new truck.

She had no windows on the passenger or drivers side, just some opaque plastic and some thick tape. There was no radio, in fact, there wasn't much of a dashboard. The tail-lights were questionable. But the gauges worked, we think.

Tentatively Sam got in, and as luck would have it, she started....there was hope.

I followed Sam back to the rental car place. About half-way there, he punched his fists through the plastic taping up the windows. That was when he first noticed how bad that truck smelled. I think a whole family, nay, a HERD of tom cats had nested inside the truck. It smelled so strong of cat urine. Sam dubbed her "Cat-Piss."

We really had some guardian angels looking out for us. The rental car agency shared the same building with an auto body shop. I got a recommendation for glass replacement. And the glass boy happened to be coming to the shop for another repair anyway, and loaded our windows on the truck. He came, and took the keys, and Cat-Piss, and took her around to the bay to install the windows. He had been gone for about 45 minutes, when I realized that our truck was gone. We were sitting in an auto body shop, in Texas. Stranded. For all we knew, they painted it a different color, and drove it across the border to sell in Mexico!
"Sam, go check!!!!" <----me panicking!

He went out to look, and lo and behold, they were done! CP had working windows!

Nothing was stopping us now. I sprayed CP out with some industrial deodorizer I found in the auto body bathroom. (It didn't help much.) And off we went. First stop: Gas Station. Sam checks all the fluids. (good-check) Airs up the tires. (good-check) and fills 'er up. Problem. The nozzle is in the hole, but the gas is streaming on the cement. The fuel line had been cut.

Off to the auto parts place, where Sam splices the fuel line. We also bought some Little Tree air fresheners.

CP turns out to be a great vehicle! She runs like a champ! In spite of the little glitches, and the smell, we consider ourselves pretty lucky about the whole deal.

Now, the exciting part.

You know I have the new scrapbook studio. And crucial to my organizing of the joint is an IKEA Expedit shelf unit. Do we have an IKEA by me? No. The closest one is in Arizona. However....as fate would have it, AZ is on the way home from TX. Sort-of. So I Map-Quested our route, and included a stop in Tempe.

And I got it. I HAVE THE EXPEDIT! We loaded it in the back of CP, tarped it over, drove through the blizzards of Flagstaff, the rains of Page, and the canyons of southern Utah.

It is a thing of beauty and worth the nose-bleeds of breathing vanilla-roma cat-urine for 15 hours.