One of Those Days!!......

Ever have one of those days where you wish you hadn’t gotten out of bed?

Well, we sure have! It was a Wednesday and we found a local farmer’s market that had craft spaces available. It was mid week...only $25...less than 20 miles away....with short hours. Sounds like it’d be worth a shot, right??

WRONG!!

We got up that morning, hooked up our cargo trailer and were ready to hit the parkway. After a few minutes of driving, a driver started blowing his horn as he passed. Must have thought he knew us. Thinking nothing more of it, we continued, only to have more horns blown at us. Something must be wrong. Do we have a flat? We turned down the radio and listened and heard nothing. The dashboard gauges were all where they should be and yet more cars were zooming past us with their horns blaring. Hmmm. We wondered what they were trying to tell us. Maybe we should stop and make sure all is okay with the trailer. We pulled over and I went around to the back of the trailer. Lo and behold, I forgot to close the trailer door before we left. Hanging upside down, and out the back of the trailer, was our canopy. Apparently, it had been dragging along the road most of the time because the metal legs were worn down and jagged. It must’ve been sparking too because the canopy top had big holes burned into it and was still smoking! Once we put the canopy back into the trailer, we did a quick survey and realized that some things were missing–at least two boxes of crafts and a solar radio. We wouldn’t know if anything else was missing until we got to the show and could do an inventory.

But in the meantime, we decided to turn around at the first toll. Since we were only about 10 miles into our trip, we decided we’d go back home, and retrace our steps picking up whatever merchandise we came across. We rode around our neighborhood, finding nothing. That’s good, we thought. Maybe we didn’t lose too much. On the parkway, we paid close attention trying to find whatever we could. We weren’t having any luck and thought that it was strange to not find any of it. By the time we got back to the toll (you know, the one where we initially turned around) we saw the reason we didn’t find any of our belongings. Right in front of us was a parkway truck–one of the trucks that pick up trash along the road. Here, we were just a couple of minutes too late to claim our things. Well, that was that.

When we finally arrived at the farmer’s market, we were more than a hour late. We paid $25 for a space, took the end spot and started to set up. We paid attention to what we had with us and determined that indeed we hadn’t lost any more than the two boxes of crafts and our radio. Unfortunately we were left with a damaged canopy. For all the hassle, we had a horrible show. We made a total of $24! When we finally left the farmer’s market, we were disgusted and just wanted to go home.

On the way home, things didn’t go any better. Although, we did remember to close the trailer before we left! (I don’t think we’ll make that mistake for a while.) We were back on the parkway and needed to stop for gas. We went into a rest area, but the line of cars was long. There was an exit just a tenth of a mile further, so we decided to get off the parkway for the gas. Our truck uses more gas when pulling the trailer and we misjudged. We hadn’t even gotten out of the left hand lane on the parkway when it happened. We ran out of gas!! We both thought, You have to be kidding me, right? Neither the rest area nor the gas station ahead sold gas cans. Now, what we were going to do? Since we weren’t far from home and had family in the area, I got on the cell phone and called to have somebody bring us enough gas to get us to the gas station.

While sitting there waiting for our gas to arrive, we kept talking about how we couldn’t wait to get home. We both had plans of just going back to bed, ignoring the phone and just forgetting the whole day. We couldn’t imagine how things could get any worse.

Then, we smelled the skunk!!