Today we drove home to Seattle - wrapping our summer road trip. A few trip stats:
- Drove over 6000 miles in 38 days
- Visited 4 Canadian provinces and 12 US states
- Stayed in 19 hotels, two family cabins, and one friend's house
When we first packed the car, Marla burst out laughing - not believing there was any possible way the luggage was gonna fit:
But Dave found a way to fit everything in like a jigsaw puzzle. So almost every day of the trip Dave packed everything into the car with precision (same exact way every time as this was a puzzle with only one solution) while the rest of us just watched as "helping" wouldn't have been helpful.
The car performed quite well, though at one point the door handle on the rear door where Melissa was sitting stopped working and Dave had to let her in and out of the car as though the child lock was engaged (yeah, stop laughing). Melissa tried to schedule with Lexus in San Francisco to have it repaired, alas, they managed to annoy her by not returning her calls. Meanwhile, in Canada, we had gotten get one big chip in the windshield from a rock, which Melissa then had filled the same day. Alas the fix only lasted a couple of weeks before the windshield cracked in Bakersfield CA. First place we could have it fixed was San Francisco. So while we were waiting for the repair, the light dawns on Dave that Safelight is well practiced at pulling off door panels as they do it all the time to repair side windows. He offers to pay them to remove the interior door panel so that he can examine the door lock (pulling the door panel requires a specialized tool). They did it for free. And when Dave looked at the door lock - low and behold a small plastic alignment tab had gotten busted off inside the door and worked its way into the door lock. He pulled the stray part out and voila! The door lock then worked just fine. Dave reassembled the door and all is now well. And it cost us zero. Gotta love that.