by Sheryl Mcginnis

Created on: January 20, 2009

The two most important items to take with you on a car trip - a spare tire and a good sense of humor.

For those of you who like to travel by car and are diligent in making a list of every conceivable accoutrement you need to bring on your trip, please heed my words on the importance of that spare tire...and the sense of humor.

We all know the importance of having a spare tire but all too often we forget to include that on our list of things to take with us, or we forget to make sure it's fully inflated. I promise to dance naked in Target with my cats if I ever forget the spare tire again!

Ignoring my feeling of impending doom, my husband and I, our two sons, our two friends Kathy and Steve and their BIG German Shepherd set out on a dark and stormy night (no joke) in our big Ambassador station wagon, hauling a trailer with an amount of luggage that any rock star and his entourage would envy.

I had had bad feelings about the trip all day: call it a premonition or just an irrational fear, but whatever it was, I just plain did not want to leave on the trip that night. We were leaving after work from North Carolina, to meet up with two of our other friends, John and Rita and their toddler son in Ichetucknee, Florida, the next morning for a long weekend of camping and tubing the Ichetucknee River.

En route, during a particularly nasty thunder storm, with howling winds and strong bursts of rain pelting our windshield so badly that it was almost impossible to see the road ahead, we got a flat tire! On our trailer. To our dismay we discovered that we'd forgotten to bring along a spare tire for the trailer. Oh we had a spare tire for the car of course. We're not totally stupid - but darn close to it.

We had no choice but to pile all the luggage into the car and abandon the trailer on the side of I-95. Thus we ventured forth on our journey of several hundred miles, soaking wet, four adults, two small children and one very BIG dog. Canned sardines had more room than us.

We finally arrived at our destination the next morning and met up with our 2 friends, looking forward to putting the spare tire fiasco behind us and enjoying the beautiful Florida scenery while tubing down the Ichetucknee river. The mental imagery was what kept us going during that miserable stormy night. Oh what dreamers we were.

"Sorry," the park attendant informed us, "the river is full with over 3,000 people and that's the maximum amount of people allowed on the river at one time." What? This can't be so, not

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