South Padre Island

We left on June 9th, with me, Heather, Matt, Chris, Nicole and Kaitlyn in our 'trusty' old Ford Expedition. Our plan was to stay at a nice hotel with a pool that we'd booked at Lubbock in Texas, about halfway through our journey there, for 2 nights. Unfortunately our 'trusty' Ford Expedition had other plans, wanting to retire at 186K miles, whereupon it spat out a spark plug and stripped out the thread in the engine block about 170 miles before we reached Lubbock.

​

We called AAA, asking for a tow to the nearest garage, but everywhere was closing for the night and a tow truck could only carry 2 of us, the other 4 were apparently going to have to get a taxi. To make matters worse, the nearest taxi company was 50 miles away in Amarillo and wanted to charge us an arm and a leg to come out to where we were, which was basically the middle of nowhere (that's not quite how Heather phrased it, but let's not go there - LOL).

​

Long story short, we canceled our hotel booking for that night, and I very carefully drove the Expedition 6 miles to the nearest town, Dumas (YOU decide how to pronounce it, but you can probably guess what we went with), followed by a tow truck driver just in case we blew up en route. Our 5.4 liter V8 engine had demoted itself to V7, misfiring so loudly that even Harley Davidson passersby covered their ears, and the smell of petrol was enough to knock out half of Texas.

​

We stayed at a Comfort Inn in Dumas, where they took pity on us and gave us a great discount on two rooms for the night to get us in from the smell of horse manure that only a Texas town with such a name could possibly have. As luck would have it, we were right next door to the Ford dealership, and I noticed an Expedition similar to ours in the sales lot, winking at me knowingly. The next morning we assessed our situation and after haggling and begging we had to choose between spending $400 to "hopefully" get our Expedition back up and running, or $3,125 to switch to the one for sale, which had 40K fewer miles and none of the many issues that we had on our old one.

​

We decided to trade, and soon we were back on our way, this time in a tan colored Expedition that didn't sound like a tractor about to explode. That evening, we arrived at our hotel in Lubbock and laughed at the craziness of the past couple of days.

​

We drove through forest fires (I'm not kidding!) and dozens of towns, taking bathroom breaks at each one it seemed) until we finally made it to South Padre, whereupon we all dumped our stuff at the condo we were renting and raced to the ocean to see what it was like (despite it being almost midnight). Totally beautiful, and the sand is like walking on warm talcum powder!

​

We were only there for 4 days, but we had a lot of fun. We mainly hung out on the beach or in the pool, but on Nicole's "Golden" birthday (14 on 14th), we began the day by watching the sunrise, on the beach with a bottle of champagne and apple turnovers.  We then visited a turtle hospital where they rescue sea turtles and bring them back to health.  After that we went to the top of a lighthouse, and took a sunset boat trip to watch the dolphins in the ocean. Needless to say, we took a lot of photos that day.

​

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we decided to cancel the hotel booking in Lubbock so that we could spend more time at the beach.  We then drove back the entire way without a stop. Yep, totally mad idea! We figured there were four of us in the car that could take turns driving and navigating, so why not?! I think the entire drive took about 22 hours and several energy drinks!

​

Our trip may have been more eventful than we'd originally planned (as always for us!), but it all just added to the fun I think, and the photos of everyone laughing and smiling go to prove it.