little lady, big apple: Colorado to New York

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend!

Mine was great, minus a few bumps in the road...

We started our journey by meeting in JFK on Friday for a dinner-date before sitting in two middle seats amongst a boisterous crew of travelers. After landing in Denver, we picked up the car that we were driving back and headed a little west to Silverthorne to stay in a B&B.

If you own a B&B, here's some advice: don't name two of your rooms "The Paris Room" & "The French Room". Delirious travelers (us) may get confused by their obvious similarity and accidentally mosey into the wrong bedroom... (!)

We spent the majority of Saturday exploring Colorado: an early morning walk, brunch in Frisco, real estate browsing, outlet shopping, and lots & lots of exploring and pointing and look-at-thats. Saturday & Sunday were filled with driving, our road trip playlist, and dealing with getting pulled over 1.7 miles from our hotel exit... Oh, and we stopped by a fun little zoo, too!

While I was behind the wheel for the first time in years on Sunday, though, something unfortunate happened. Our passenger rear tire blew, scaring the bejesus out of us. I was thankfully able to safely pull off to the shoulder and we stood there in tall grass on the side of the road until AAA came to the rescue. A helpful man put on our donut spare and we crept up the road to a hotel.

We quickly realized 4 things: we needed a new tire to proceed more than the recommended 70 miles on the donut, it was now after 6pm on a Sunday, the next day was a holiday, and we were stranded in a town called Mexico, Missouri.

......

After calling every nearby auto shop with zero success, we threw in the towel and went to an amazing Mexican dinner. When you can't beat em, join 'em! We woke up at 6:30 the next morning to start our tire search again and discovered that the particular tire we needed was, not surprisingly, incredibly rare. The places that were open said it would take about 3 to 5 days to order the kind we needed... Just as we were about to throw our hands in the air and surrender to being featured on the news as the duo permanently stuck in faux Mexico, we looked online at Missouri's Craigslist and found a guy who happened to be selling the exact tire we needed. Not recognizing the name of the town, we called anyway. He was two hours away from us, but said he was actually leaving in an hour to come our direction to pick up a German Shepherd puppy. Elated, we hung up and quickly grabbed our bags and slowly scaled the winding roads in our injured car to Walmart.

An hour passed and I felt the need to text Mr. Craigslist man. Glad I did considering he had completely forgotten about our conversation and had left the tire at home. (!!!) Thankfully, I caught him only 20 minutes after he left and he went back to get it. When we arrived at Walmart, they told us it would be a 4-5 hour wait for them to fit the old rim with the new tire...after a few failed attempts, they finally gave into our best pathetic faces and put us first in line! The only problem was that we were still waiting on our tire and we hadn't heard any updates on whether he had completely forgotten about us all over again. Just as we were about to give up on the whole operation, Craigslist man pulled up with an adorable puppy...AND our new tire. We couldn't have been more relieved! We took the newly fixed car through the car wash, attempting to wash our bad luck away and reset the journey. We even stayed with my family in Ohio Monday night, which was an unexpected treat. (thanks, guys!!)

So yes, we made it back last night all in one piece...with a newfound appreciation for tires and a pocketful of memories!

Here are some sights from our journey: