Tuscon trip, part one

So Cara's sister and her husband moved to Tucson, AZ for the summer for an internship, and we decided to go visit them. We wanted to get out of town for a few days, and neither one of us had ever been to Tucson, so we decided to go visit them. We decided to drive, and see New Mexico along the highway, and have ourselves our first little family road trip. BUT.....just over the New Mexico border last monday, our car started making a horrible metallic sound and the engine started overheating. We stopped in Maxwell, NM (population 40 plus stray dogs, click here to see where it is) to look under the hood. I am car retarded, so mostly I just look under the hood because that's what they do in TV shows when the car acts up, I really have no idea what I'm looking at. Anyway, the lady at the only gas station in town told us to drive up the road for a few more miles to a truck stop. So we did, and waited there for an hour for their mechanic to come. Finally he did, and said that our water pump was shot. Okay, fine.... how long would it take to fix? He tells us he won't be able to do so until the morning. Crap. But, he says he knows of a little motel a few miles further up the road, in Springer, where we can stay the night. Okay, fine. He's nice enough to drive us over there, and guess what? The motel has no vacancy. The only other motel in Springer was, in the mechanic's words, a little shady (based on what the first motel looked like, I would hate to see the shady one) and so he said he would work as fast as he could to replace the pump that afternoon, and we could just wait around in the back room of his shop. Okay, fine. Where is his shop? Oh, back in Maxwell, where we first started. Okay, so he drives us back to the truck stop, we get in our car, and follow him back to Maxwell. By this point, the car is making the worst screeching metal noise ever, and we finally pull into the guy's shop. Wait, were you picturing a mechanic's shop? Instead, picture a dusty field with a mobile home at one end and a rickety, homemade shack at the other. Five or six old rusty cars have set up camp around the shed, and look like they haven't moved in years. And the back room turns out to be a tiny room at the back of the shed, where we proceed to wait for HOURS. The mechanic was sooooo slow. He was working alone, with our car up on a jack in the dust in front of the shack, but he was the only mechanic for 100 miles around. Also, he didn't take credit cards or checks, only cash. Also, there was no ATM in Maxwell, the truck stop, or Springer. So I had to ride with him 40 miles away to Raton, where I bought the new water pump, and got money from an ATM. Apparently, no one in northern New Mexico has internet access either, because I couldn't look up the balance in our account anywhere and ended up overdrafting, costing us more money in fees. Anyway... we pulled into Maxwell the first time around 9:30 in the morning, and we didn't pull out of Maxwell in the fixed car until 7 pm that night. To avoid having such a long blog entry, this one will be posted in episodes, because there is more to this story. In the meantime, here we are in the musty back room of the shed. Stay tuned.....