That was low point and it could have very, very easily been much worse as my wife missed the guardrail by not much more than 20 feet. As it was, her outside wheels slipped off the newly laid asphalt lip and dropped about four inches which yanked the car to the left, she over-compensated to the right and the back end of the car whipped around spinning her into a gigantic cloud of dust. She was luckily unhurt and the car is mostly fine, just a tweaked rim, lots of dust everywhere and an ache for a front end alignment.
I was out with the boys at the time so we were able to get to where my wife and the car were pretty quickly. The spare was flat so we had to take another trip to get that filled up.
And much of the rest of Saturday was spent heading down to the nearest Pick and Pull to try and get an inexpensive replacement wheel. Unsuccessful locally. Semi-successful on Sunday afternoon. But our Sunday morning was rather eventful as well.
I do have some issues. One, the course for the six year olds was ridiculously too short. I mean, really, really, really fucking ridiculously too short. A single 25 yard lap of the pool, a .2 mile bike and a, get this, .05 mile run (that's a half of a tenth of a friggin' mile). The course for the 7-8 year olds was swim 50 yards, bike .6 mile, run .6 miles! Two, the 6 year olds were the very last race of the day and their course was totally different from the other courses run by the bigger kids but the organizers didn't bother to remove the original signage and we got seriously turned around and I got seriously pissed off. How much effort does it take to put a sign down on the ground so it isn't, you know, signalling where to go? Third, my younger son finished his "race" in under 6 minutes. And it cost us $40 plus a one day USA Triathlon membership for $10 more. Fifty bucks for 6 minutes of action is, to be blunt, a fucking ripoff.
As an aside, I've taken to calling my kids by their numbers which they think is hilarious.
Don't get me wrong, the organizers did a ton right and had a huge turnout and lots of happy kids, tired parents and worn out staff. But they also did several things wrong and it was priced pretty high for what we ended up getting for it. Four plus hours of being there for a total of just under 25 minutes of total racing for $100 in total fees was a good learning experience but I'm not sure we'd do it again. Certainly not if Sully was going to run the puny 6 year old course again, but he'll be 7 so he'll do the bigger course while Grady moves into the 9 year old course. We'll see.
After the races were all done and we had gotten back home and the boys had gotten their special ice cream treats from Yogurtland (new one just opened in town!), I drove up to San Jose to go another pick and pull to hopefully get lucky there. The guy at the ticket window shot down my hopes when he told me all the cars they got had their wheels removed before being mounted in the lot. But I went and looked anyway and got lucky! I found the right sized wheel and got out of there for $10 with it. It is at the shop now getting swapped over to the good tire and then, hopefully, the Jetta will be back on the road again.
Long enough for us to sell it and replace it with a truck.
