We were headed to Point Reyes national seashore, about an hour and half north of us. We planned on playing with the dogs on the beach, looking for driftwood, and picking up some local seafood on the way home. Then the water pump blew. “What was that?” Trey asked, in response to the loud noise that sounded like it came from our truck. “It’s us, we’re smoking”, I said back to him after a few seconds of looking and listening. Then we took the next off-ramp, pulled over and lifted the hood to let the smoke pour out.
To other people it would probably be annoying to have to pull over and call AAA for a tow, but to us it’s actually somewhat stimulating. One thing I learned while working in the biology lab at Scripps, was not to get annoyed when an experiment didn’t produce the results I was looking for the first time. Undeniably, an analysis wouldn’t go as planned – I’d measure something wrong, or there’d be some variable in the software I was using that I wasn’t aware of and it would screw with the results of an analysis. However, it didn’t mean it was a complete waste of time. It meant I learned something, got another piece of an intricate biological puzzle, and figured out how to better analyze the data I had for the next analysis. Trey is similar. He’s an engineer so naturally he likes solving puzzles and fixing things. This truck is our experiment, a big ol’ steel puzzle we’ve lovingly named “Lola”, much like NASA would name it’s rover or spaceships. The dogs are always happy to come along on adventures. They’ve been through everything with us, so they don’t really freak out about anything (as is noted in the photo of the truck being reeled up onto the tow truck with him smiling in the passenger’s seat).
So, I could have turned the camera off and put it back in my bag, scrapped the trip and posted photos of something happier, but I chose not to. Everything has a story, some times it’s just not the one you set out to tell. It’s easy to make life look amazing with filters and hashtags like #bestdayever, but in reality, it takes more guts to show what every day life really looks like. And I’d rather be candid about it all.