So people say that bad luck comes in groups of three. This is not true, because we have found recently that bad luck actually comes in groups of 2-1/2, or so it was with our family vacation earlier this month.
Everything started out great. I rode the train in to work, and Kari sent the twins off with Grandma and Grandpa for the trip to San Diego. We would be taking our Camry in order to save some money on gas. We weren't even planning on going for several reasons, but the foamy, blueish grey temptation of ocean water was too great in the end. So Kari picked me up after work and we started the drive down with Evie and Kimberly in the Camry. We knew that we would be getting to our hotel in Las Vegas at around 1 am, which is fine because the party would just be starting in LV around that time. We soon got invited to a totally different party when we hit a doozy of a traffic jam about 70 miles away from Las Vegas. Five motorcyclists went down on the freeway about two miles ahead of where we ended up stopping. The stoppage didn't mobilize for 4 hours. We hit the jam at 11:30 pm, we passed the wreck at 3:30 am, and we got to our hotel at 4:30 am.
At this point we had racked up 1-1/2 bad luck points, and the traffic jam was only the 1/2. I say it was a 1/2 because it was actually good for our car that we stopped. Earlier that same day Kari had taken the car to Jiffy Lube in Kaysville for the scheduled oil change, and they had messed up something that had caused us to lose essentially all of the oil in our engine. When we stopped at the traffic jam we immediately noticed billows of white smoke glowing in the headlights of the car behind us. So we were then able to start fixing the problem. The problem ended up being that the filter was never tightened, they only started the threads but never tightened it. This shouldn't be too hard considering that oil filters only have to be hand-tight. My father- and brother-in-law drove out to see if we were okay in the middle of the desert, which was very nice, and it did help us a lot to have them there for support. A nice semi-truck driver also donated some oil to help us get back to LV without causing further damage to our engine. I know the oil had to be really low, because we added a little over 4 quarts of oil to the engine. The crappy Jiffy Lube service racked up 1 bad luck point all by itself.
So with 1-1/2 bad luck points we made it in to Oceanside on Saturday. We had a great night and another great day on Sunday, it was really nice. On Monday all of us were really anxious to start playing in the ocean. As soon as we had eaten breakfast and covered everyone with sunblock we headed out to play. The kids spent a couple hours playing in the sand and we gradually went deeper and deeper in to the water. In an attempt to give Ethan a taste of the bigger waves, I picked him up and we went out to some water that was a little over knee-deep on me. Ethan took a couple turns of me plopping him down in the water, which came up almost to his chest, and then scooping him up right before the white-water came crashing over him. When he had had enough we started to head back to the beach. I had taken a couple steps in when I felt a wickedly, nasty pain shoot through my right foot. I immediately thought I had stepped on glass. But the pain kept on growing as I stammered through the little waves, still holding Ethan, so that scenario didn't make sense. I couldn't think clearly enough to figure out what had happened, I do remember slapping the side of my foot because at one point in time I honestly thought that I had some sort of crustacean exercising a death-grip on my foot. I made it to sand pretty quickly, and my in-laws and I started to try and figure out what had happened. My foot now had a steady stream of blood running out of a little puncture wound that was surrounded by an swollen lump of muscle and skin, and the pain in my foot was quickly becoming worse. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but for a bunch of non-ocean-animal-associated people it didn't take us very long to figure out that I had likely stepped on a Stingray. We looked up first aid for Stingray stings and everyone was extremely helpful in attending to my aid. We even managed to flag down the Lifeguards and they came in to take a look at my foot. They confirmed that it was a Stingray sting. They even said that stingray stings are a fairly common (even daily) occurrence along the beaches of San Diego county.
The sting did a number on my foot, it became a pretty cool little sign of my outward strength and machismo. But really the truth of it is that I nearly broke down into sobs several times, and it was only my family member's quick help that kept me from embarrassing myself and my man-dignity.
Rack up one final point for the Stingray encounter, and there you have the 2-1/2 bad luck points. We had fulfilled some sort of bad-luck karma at this point, and the rest of the vacation was awesome.
Oh, and there will be another post which includes more than just gross pictures of my foot.
