Having already proven, at least a few times already last Saturday, that I wasn't, most certainly was not, the smartest man in America, I was in no mood to unload and reload everything in the car. This is not the best prospect, especially if you'd received blunt-object trauma to your right ring finger, just 10 minutes before.

Looking up through the sunroof, though, I saw the boxes bounce up and down a little too much every 10 feet and then lift up ever so slightly. Yikes. This was scary. Cruising down the highway at a paltry 45 m.p.h., Lins and I, both frozen with fear, agreed that it would be best to pull over and repack the car, finger trauma and all.

The 7 foot long Ikea wardrobe boxes strapped to the roof racks with bungee cords and twine were the problem. We hoped that strapping the boxes to the roof thing would work well enough to get us all the way back to Minneapolis -- otherwise we'd have to unload, and reload, with the front passenger seat down to accomidate the length of the boxes. One of us would drive while the other would sit directly behind in the back seat. The boxes were too long to get in the VUE any other way. It was either the rack or the front seat down thing. Had to be one of the 2. Since the rack was scaring the living hell out of us, we decided to eat a half hour and go the not-nearly-as-scary route.

We pulled over at the next exit, looking for a place to park and unload and reload. Just off the exit sat a Medieval Times Restaurant. Yes, that restaurant. Imagine Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick battling it out Star Trek style in the movie The Cable Guy, and you'll know what I'm saying.

The Medieval Times parking lot was massive, so we had plenty of room to pull in and start unloading. The 7 foot boxes had to be the first thing unloaded, then we'd be able to open up the hatch and get everything else out of the car.

At this point, I'm already scared like a mother-you-know-what by the bungee cords. I had a red-ish welt on my left forearm and the aforementioned finger trauma to show for trying to tightly secure the boxes on the roof rack. When you see a bungee cord sliip and fly at you at just below the speed of sound (about 700 miles per hour), it makes you bungee-shy. When the cord wacks you on the finger and later on the forearm, you tend to think twice about even touching these little balls of kinetic-shitstorm-energy-having-bastards.

So I walked over to the front rack and, as delicately as humanly possible liiiiifted the bungee away from the rack and to the top of the box. Then I let go.

I let go.

This, friends, is something I will never ever ever ever ever do again. *splash* *crunch* *sproink*

Shit.

Shit. I just broke the back seat driver's side window on the new car. Shit, shit, shit.

....aaand we still had a 6 hour drive ahead of us. I was not happy. Lindsay was even less happy -- you could say way less happy -- throwing a full-on tantrum, the likes of which haven't been seen since she was a bratty little 6 year old. Only now she knows better words with which to augment the tantrum. She was kicking and punching at the air and yelling and cussing and making up brand new cuss words that are waaay better than the old cuss words. The combinations she was throwing together -- I'm telling you -- were inspiring. I wish I had it on video.

We stood there for about 5 minutes in total disbelief at my idiot-ness. Then we started to slowly clean up broken glass from everything in the car -- and I mean everything in the car. Glass got absolutely everywhere. Insane. Aside from the constant and profuse apologizing, I kept quiet.

A little while later we had everything unloaded. Once everything was laid out on the parking lot asphalt, it looked like 3 carloads worth of crap that we had to repack into one small SUV. To Lindsay, though, it looked like the ultimate puzzle.

She got everything in the car.

The girl is brilliant at spatial organizing. Just brilliant. If she took a spatial organizing IQ test, she'd get about a 253.

We didn't have tape at the time, so we couldn't put in a faux window quite yet. We shut a blanket in the door as a temporary fix, and that sufficed, but only for about a half hour. It sounded like the inside of a helicopter -- or at least what you'd imagine the inside of a helicopter to sound like -- a constant blanket flapping in the wind and beating on the car but really really quickly sort of noise.

A while later we stopped at a gas station, looking for tape, scissors and cardboard. They had masking tape -- yay. They had scissors -- kind of yay. They were tiny little foldable needlepoint kinda scissors that only old ladies use when they sew. No cardboard though, or so I was told.

Not wanting to try and fix the window while all the Illinoisans at the gas station stared and stared and stared at us, we hopped back on the interstate and went to the next rest stop. Using cardboard from one of the 908 different Ikea boxes in the car, the masking tape and the tiniest little scissors on Earth, we taped the cardboard up in the missing window. It was the best fix one could hope for in such a time. It held like a charm the rest of the way home.

Once the window was fixed, the drive home was actually pretty nice. Most of the way, I drove and Lindsay sat behind me. Thanks to the Minneapolis Public Library, we listened to a chunk of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Audio CD. We listened to Harry Potter all the way home and part of the way there, and we still have 4 or 5 more CDs until we finish the book. Good times... Good times.

I wish I'd have been in the photo-taking mood at the Medieval Times, though. Hee. I think I'd have been on the receiving end of some of the hard punches and kicks and brand new bad words, though. So I didn't take any photos there. For my safety's sake. Hee.

Tomorrow: Chicago Vacation, Part 2, What drove us to such madness?

Thanks for stopping by, and sorry for the week without posts... I've got plenty coming up this week.
Eric