Move over Griswalds!

It wasn't Wally World we were visiting, and my great aunt Edna didn't die, but my family vacation mirrored nearly every other tragedy in National Lampoon's Vacation.

Beforehand, I gave myself a budget of $1000 for the trip, inclusive of everything from lodging, food, attractions, and intangibles.

We should have known fate was telling us not to go when a few days before departure, I used a free tire rotation gift certificate and the mechanic ended up putting on a new tire, aligning the front end, and replacing the brakes and rotors. To add insult to injury, the bill came out $150 more than he had promised me on the phone. So before starting out, we were already $450 in the hole.

My wife Angela mentioned that God was trying to tell us not to go on vacation. I disagreed and got my way. I should have listened to her.

The drive up to the Black Hills of South Dakota was pleasant enough. We left my parents' house in Western Kansas at 5:00 in the morning, enjoyed a sack lunch at Chimney Rock in the panhandle of Nebraska, and took in a viewing of a sinkhole littered with mammoth skeletons in Hot Springs before rolling into Hill City, South Dakota just before evening. The temperature was a cool sixty-five degrees and my family basked in the fading light of the sun setting behind the pine-littered ridge to the west as I casted a fly at some hungry trout in the little creek behind our cabin. It was bliss. The next morning my wife's words took on a prophetic tone.

We drove to Rapid City, population 76,000, to go to Wal Mart (it was thirty-eight degrees that morning and all I had brought was shorts and tee shirts!) One sweatshirt later, I drove towards a fly shop to pick up some flies, a book on fly fishing the Black Hills, and some information from the local experts. On the way I saw the temperature gage on the car's control panel rise to nearly 200 degrees, so I made an about-face, ran back to Wal Mart, and bought some more antifreeze. When I popped open the hood I saw that the car didn't need any antifreeze. This is where I started to panic.

We drove to the nearest garage, a Jiffy Lube, and the grease monkeys there went above and beyond to try to find a mechanic who could get me in immediately. This hospitality was something that everyone from the Black Hills seems to possess. I am totally convinced that they are the nicest people on earth, but I am getting off topic.

A man from a Ford garage next door just happened in on the conversation and told me that he would look at the car for me. I handed him the key and my wife, the kids, and I spent the morning at a park. When he finally called me around lunch time, he told me that not only did my thermostat need replaced (what I was hoping for) but also that the water pump was bad. I quickly added the math in my head and guessed around $200-$250.

He quoted me $600!

We spent lunch and all afternoon at a Chevy dealership looking for a new car and being assisted by a salesman named-and I am not making this up- Jerry Maguire. It took every fiber of my body not to ask him to "Show me the money!" To make things even tougher, all the cars in the lot had been transferred to the civic center downtown. We would run downtown, look at a car, run back up to the dealership, get quoted a ridiculous price, run back to the civic center and start the whole process over again, the whole time keeping an eye on the heat gage and praying for green lights. By five o'clock that afternoon, it became apparent that we were not going to be able to purchase a new car because the financial people at the dealership had gone home for the night and we were still $3000 apart on price. I can't even describe how frustrated we were. We had wasted a whole day of vacation and we were no nearer to having the situation resolved, so we did the only logical thing we could do; we went to church. It was the best thing we did that day.

Afterwards we drove back up to Hill City, probably around a 1000 foot climb, and made a phone call to a mechanic from Rapid City named Mark that the guys at the Jiffy Lube had suggested. This is what we should have done in the first place.

Mark quoted us $200 for parts and labor and that next day back in Rapid City, while he replaced the parts, his secretary gave us an auto tour of Rapid City before dropping us off at the mall to hang out for a few hours. As I said before, the people of the Black Hills are the nicest people on earth, outside of the unethical mechanic that quoted us $600.

That afternoon, we received our fixed car plus a new air filter that Mark threw in, and in the euphoria of finally being able to start our vacation, we decided that this glorious moment was the right time to visit Mount Rushmore. For those of you who haven't been to Mount Rushmore, you travel uphill from Rapid City to Keystone, then travel drastically uphill for a few more miles, taxing your engine the whole way. We might as well have been driving up Mount Everest. When we finally parked beneath the presidents, the temperature on our car's heat gage read 220 degrees! Aaauuuugggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

That next morning we mulled over our options. We talked about just leaving and trying to get our money back on the final few nights of the cabin. We could write down the phone number of a mechanic in every town on the way back home. I spoke with my dad for advice and he asked if we had our radiator blown out with an air hose. I told him we hadn't. Not wanting to go back to Rapid City for a third day in a row, I opted to wait until late morning to get it into the only shop in Hill City. Ten minutes with the air hose and the man blew out massive quantities of wheat chaff, bugs, and dirt. That afternoon was the first time since we had been there where we felt at-ease. We were able to salvage one and one-half days of our vacation, during which time my boys and I were able to tour Custer State Park, catch a few trout and take home a few memories.

We survived the trip, getting home in one piece with our dignity and well over our budget. I think back to family vacations when I was a kid and I recall car troubles being part of the equation. Apparently things haven't changed. It's a tradition maybe my kids will be able to break when they become fathers with starry-eyed dreams of the great American vacation. Feel free to comment on any National Lampoon Vacation incidents that you have had. I would love to hear your stories!