Well for those who don't know yet, the van decided to break down in Missoula on the 5th day of the vacation. It lost power and pretty much came to a halt on our way back to the hotel. We were able to go super slow, keeping it in first gear and make it back to the hotel. By the way, for anyone who might think people in Montana would be friendlier than our Seattle drivers I can tell you it isn't true. Many of the people behind us took time to roll down their windows and cuss and scream at us as they passed us. Apparently they thought we were going 15 mph just to make their day harder. That evening, the 16th, we had it towed to the closest Ford dealership because it is a 2011 and was still under warranty. This is where everything started to go bad.
First thing Monday morning we called Ford and they confirmed that it was the transmission and told us that they wouldn't be able to start work on it for a week. They had no sympathy for the fact we were traveling with 6 children and that we had a cabin and hotel pre-paid at Yellowstone and Cody. We called two other Fords within a couple hours of Missoula and one was just as booked and the other didn't work on transmissions. Because it was warranty work it had to be done at Ford so we were stuck. We took a day to talk about it and do some math. The best price we could secure for a rental van for that we could all fit in was $550 a week and $105 a day after that. But it was going to cost more than that for hotel rooms for 8 people. Since our lodging was already covered if we could just get to Yellowstone we rented the van and transferred all of our luggage into the new van, which strangely enough was exactly the same as our van.
We would have been ready the next morning to head down to the cabin except that we ended up in urgent care due to the heavy forest fire smoke. One of us needed some emergency meds for asthma so the others went and did shopping for food for the cabin. Then we all met back up and headed to Yellowstone.
Whew, that was behind us, nothing else could go wrong now right....?
Ralph said, maybe the Montanans thought you were one of them since you had such a large family. Maybe if you had only one or two they would have known you were outsiders and would have stopped to help:)
ReplyDeleteLanita, we did see a lot of larger families there. One day we were behind a 15 passenger van that had a bumper sticker that said. "Public School? What about socialization?" Love it!
ReplyDeletethat is AWESOME. We went past a car rental lot yesterday, they had six 15 passenger vans to rent.
ReplyDelete