I’d wanted to blog while we were across the pond, but our server conspired against me and conked out the moment we left the house. (It has separation anxiety issues, apparently.) Anyway, I’ve loads more pictures to show you, but for now I wanted to say hi! More to come, once I’m no longer jet lagged.

We finally found the road that would lead us to the cabin. My transmission was starting to overheat, due to the incredible incline we were making the car scale. And then we started to slide. We regrouped and tried again, to no avail. We were now stuck on the side of a mountain with no way to turn around. The transmission was overheating. It was pitch black. The only option open to us was to get down the mountain backwards. John put the car in reverse and inched down the mountain while I hung my head out the window and gave him directions. Bit by bit, we made our way back to a switchback where we could turn the car to face forward down the mountain. We proceeded a bit further until I smelled the brakes. Oh, good. The transmission was already overheating and we had the heat on full blast to compensate for that. Now the brakes were starting to fail. We pulled off into a flat-ish driveway to give things a minute to cool down. When we started moving again, we’d lost the brakes. We were still several thousand feet up on the side of the mountain with a failing transmission and no brakes. I checked my cell phone, thinking that we might be able to get a tow truck to come save us. No cell service. We sat in that driveway, letting things cool down, and hoping against hope that the brakes would come back. After about 20 minutes, we decided to try getting down the mountain again, using what little brakes had come back, along with the emergency brake. We eeked down the mountain inches at a time, smelling the brakes the entire way.

Somehow, against all odds, we held it together and got back into Cherokee. We had no idea what damage had been done to the car, no way of knowing how we were going to get home. But at that point, it was 3 am. We needed a place to sleep. But all the motel signs we’d seen on our way to the mountain had been clear: no pets. We pulled into the Days Inn and I talked to the night manager. With our hair-raising escape fresh in my mind, I took a deep breath and explained our predicament. I’m sure I looked crazed and I know I started crying. She took pity on us and gave us a cabin up the road– the Days Inn didn’t allow pets and there was too much of a chance we’d be caught, she explained. The cabin she offered us didn’t allow pets either, but she said we could sneak Luke in. We got to the cabin, which smelled and looked like hell, but it had a bed and at that point, that’s all we cared about. We spent the night and drove back the next morning. Miraculously, the car made it to Gainesville. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life, and I don’t know how we made it off that mountain alive.

So, yeah, not the best birthday present. But at least we lived to tell the tale. (And sorry to those who thought my “buns in the oven” reference meant that I was giving John a baby for his birthday.)

John: “There’s a frog in the truck.”

Me: “Wait, what?”
John: “There’s a frog in the truck. He was on the door jamb, I tried to get him out, and he hopped in. So there’s a frog in the truck.”

Friends, I don’t think I need to tell you how I reacted to this information. Let’s just say that the prospect of spending five hours in the cab of a truck, wondering if and when a rogue frog was going to jump on my face wasn’t terribly appealing. Realizing that I couldn’t flat out refuse to get in the car (“Well I’m not going!), I took the path of least resistance and off we went. Five hours later, the frog was nowhere to be seen. I began to think that he’d escaped while John was loading up the suitcase. The rain was starting to fall as we navigated the suburbs of Miami. The streets were shiny and wet. The sky was darkening. The windshield wipers were not so much wiping the windshield as smearing them. Suddenly, John noticed a drop of rain inside the truck, near the rearview mirror. His back window already leaks, so it wasn’t too surprising to hear that the windshield, too, had started to leak. I ran my hands across the seal and felt no wetness. As I withdrew my hand, I saw it: The Frog. He was sitting on the dash, looking back at me, seemingly as surprised to see me as I was to see him. It couldn’t have been a more inopportune time for him to make his grand entrance. Drivers were shooting past us at 90 miles an hour, we weren’t familiar with the area, and the lane markings on the wet roads were becoming increasingly harder to see.

Me: “The frog is on the dash.”
John: “What?!?”
Me: “THE FROG IS ON THE DASH!”

As I reached for a piece of tupperware I’d brought along, no longer filled with scones, tension filled John’s words. He may have used the phrase “so help me God,” I’m not sure. In any case, it was quickly made clear to me that I was not, under any circumstances, to undertake any sort of Frog Relocation Program. The frog and I continued to stare each other down. As we neared the hotel, the frog jumped on our GPS. He sat directly over the speakers, so that (I’m sure) his little butt vibrated as a cheerful voice called out, “Left turn ahead!” We pulled up to the hotel, and discovered that it was valet-parking only. We wouldn’t be able to extract the frog as we’d hoped, because of the throngs of cabs waiting for us to get out of the way. All we could do was turn the keys over to the valet, take our belongings, and head inside.

I still don’t know where that damned frog is.

On the air mattress front, John didn’t sleep well last night (understandably), which for John means that he talked in his sleep a lot. He woke me up at 4 in the morning wondering aloud what was on his face. He kept pointing at his nose and saying, “what’s this??? What’s this???” to which I replied “… … …it’s your nose.” Apparently that wasn’t satisfactory, though, because then he began touching his upper lip furiously and saying, “there’s a bug here! A bug! I CAN FEEL IT!!!” And, really, how can you argue with somnolent logic like that? I hate to admit that I actually looked (smacks forehead), then hissed at him gently encouraged him to go back to sleep.

And now for something completely unrelated: I like Rose and Radish just as much as the next person. But $34 for a single napkin? Isn’t that a bit much? Are they individually handmade by Belgian unicorns or something?