The Worst Fourth

I definitely wasn't expecting anything grand out of my Fourth of July this year.

Last year I worked all day, got a flat tire, set off a few fireworks with Alexa, packed for my upcoming drive to Florida/flight to Nicaragua, then set off fireworks in Luis's backyard with a bunch of his friends. We crashed early because we had to leave for Florida in the morning (I promise to explain my love for Nicaragua on a later post, because it will be a loooooong post)

This year, it was a little more.... exciting, for lack of a better word.

Once again, I worked, but only half the day. Then I headed on to Kennesaw to shower and get ready for a, hopefully, fun Fourth. I felt terribly sick and we had zero plans, but I demand to be fabulous anyways.

Then I went over to Luis's house, and guess what? I got another flat tire!!! I seriously hope that this isn't about to become some perversely tragic Fourth of July tradition for me, because I simply can't deal with that every year.

Lucky me, I was probably less than two miles away from Luis's when it gave out. So I just pretended to ignore the extremely bouncy drive to his parking lot. Finally, I got there and he stepped out to look at the car. Oh, did I mention that it was raining??? Last year too.

Check out this flat

How does that even happen??? I didn't hit anything or run over anything. I was just driving (at a safe speed too) and boom, all of a sudden the bumpy, uh-oh-I-think-I-have-a-flat driving started.

Anyways, the story gets better. Luis goes and tries to change the tire himself (because he's a man and for some stupid reason, men refuse to call professionals to fix things when needed, regardless of the pretty dime I pay my insurance company for unlimited roadside assistance) and he spends probably over an hour playing with the lug nuts and different tools.

Finally, Rodrigo and Jessica show up. Jessica and I leave the boys to their play mechanic games to work on an essay, and eventually, after another hour of playtime, they come back in defeat. Apparently, one of the lug nuts is 'stripped' (whatever that means) and normal tools can't get it out. So FINALLY, the boys let me call Geico to get this thing sorted out.

I explain to the insurance lady exactly what the issue with the bolt is and everything. The man she sends had no idea that the bolt was stripped before coming and he didn't have the tool for it. He leaves, being of no help other than to tell me to curse out my insurance lady (but she's so sweet I could never. Plus, call center people are only human! They make mistakes too!). I call Geico back and explain to the lady again everything that happened. This time she calls the companies around and asks about my specific problem. None of the companies do what I need. Great.

At this point my only option is to get a tow to a tire shop to fix my poor baby Lulu. The only problem? It's past 10 PM on a holiday. So I just get a reference number and leave it to deal with later. We finished the paper then went to Waffle House (because nothing is more patriotic in the South than Waffle House at midnight). It was too rainy to enjoy fireworks, so we settled for just listening to the loud bangs outside.

Yesterday morning I left for work with Luis's car. After work I come back and we tow the car to the tire shop, wait for a good 45 minutes in the lobby, and pay 9 bucks to find out that the bolt wasn't stripped at all, it was just differently shaped. Great.

So now I'm driving around on a spare until I have time to go to a used tire shop, because I have two more tires that look like they're about to give out too so I might as well replace them all.

Yay for car troubles, which I apparently have way too many of.

Adventures In Tennessee

I went whitewater rafting yesterday!!!

It was soooo intense!

A while back I found a Groupon for a white water rafting trip for four on the Ocoee river, and naturally, it ended up being me, Luis, Jessica, and Rodrigo. Whenever Luis and I do double dates, it's always those two who we go with.

We woke up bright and early to start our trip up to Tennessee at 6am, but we didn't end up leaving until well after 6, due to the fact that we somehow lost my car keys. (Lulu gets the best mileage out of all our cars, so we decided to drive her up... I didn't do any driving though. Rodrigo drove up there and Luis drove back.) It was actually kind of a disaster of a morning. Usually I'm super organized and extra prepared when it comes to these things, but I just failed yesterday (I'm blaming it on the fact that I worked over 50 hours last week). I brought 3 pairs of shorts for me for the weekend, but didn't bring a single top, so I borrowed one of Jessica's shirts. I also forgot to send everyone the packing list from the website, and ended up sending it at 5 30 am the day of. 

We finally got out on the road, had breakfast at a McDonald's out in northern Georgia, and made it to our destination by 9 30. Turns out, I also forgot to print out the Groupon that we had bought! Luckily, the lady gave me an email address that I could e-mail the voucher to so she could print it for me. Whew. That would have been bad.

We finally got suited up in our life jackets and helmets

Then we grabbed our paddles and went out on our great adventure!

It was about a 3 and a half hour trip. We had two of the rafting company's staff on our raft and we went through many many rapids, ranging from class 2 to class 4. It was pretty intense! There was a part of the river that didn't have any rapids, so we jumped out of the raft and swam for a while. The water was FREEZING! I swear we all looked purple after we got back into the raft.

After the rafting trip was over, we ate at Zaxby's. They all ate hot and insane wings while I sat there nibbling on my Nibblerz. I will never understand how people can stand to eat such spicy things, but they do it and they enjoy it. Go figure.

Then we decided to get to know a Tennessean mall. We ended up finding a shoe store with an amazing sale, and I bought the cutest pair of heels ever. They are officially my new favorite pair!

The mall trip lasted a short while. The boys weren't having fun following us around into stores, and we didn't have money to spend anyways. So finally came the next crazy part. We didn't want to end the day quite yet, and we had driven so far to come to Tennessee! We needed to do at least one more thing before heading home. (One more failure to plan on my part. I had intended to find something else for us to do in Tennessee to occupy the whole day, but never got around to it)

We ended up going to a fireworks store and buying lots of goodies. What else is there to do in Tennessee other than things that are illegal in Georgia right? So we went to this huge fireworks store and browsed all the wonderful selections and ended up buying a good amount of fireworks.

We had to wait until night time to properly enjoy them, but when the time came, we had the time of our lives!

That is me setting off a roman candle, and Luis aiming the thing so I wouldn't hit any trees or hurt myself. Jessica always takes the best pictures of me and Luis. Some of my favorite shots of me and him were taken by her.

And here's a video of one of the atomic bomb things going off. We had six of those.

We also had some that whizzed away when we lit them, sparklers that also shot off, some things that sounded like gun shots, firecrackers, and more. It was a lot of fun.

We wrapped up the night by sitting on Luis's couch watching Fast and Furious. Well, they watched it while I lied down on Luis's lap reading my book (Yes, it was that good!). 

When everyone went home, it took me all of a minute to fall asleep after my head hit the pillow. It was an extremely long day, but totally worth the exhaustion I felt at the end.