Cruisin' -- Part 2 -- Monday's adventure

Monday morning we woke up at 4am and left home at 5:30am to drive down to Long Beach.  It was a very quick uneventful drive, and we got down to southern California by 12:30.  We had to make a couple of pit stops at that point to pick up a prescription for me and to get my parents some swimsuits.  We got to Kaiser, and while I was waiting at the pharmacy, my husband was waiting in the car, listening to some music.  When I got back to the car, we discovered that the car won't start.


We drove 350 miles without incident, just to have the battery die on us right before the last 15 miles.


We got the car jump started, and after some quick thinking, we decided that it would be best to buy and install a new battery before we leave the car in the parking lot for five days.  We dropped off my mom at Del Amo to hunt down a couple of swimsuits, and then drove around looking for any auto parts store.  Not too far away we found one, close to a furniture store.  I took the kids into the furniture store to play on the couches and mattresses, and let my husband and my dad figure out the whole car battery thing.  After about an hour we came back out to the car, to find out that Dad and my husband had had a mini-adventure while we were killing time in the furniture store.  My husband had bought a battery and a monkey wrench to get the nut off the long bolt that was holding the battery into place, and went to work on the car.  The monkey wrench didn't work well, so he went back in and got a socket wrench.  Everything went swimmingly until they tried to secure the new battery into the car.  Somehow, the long bolt fell out of its place.  Fell.  Deep into the engine.  Too deep to try to reach in with the fingers, too deep to try to reach in with the wrench.  So they decided to try to shake the bolt out of the car.  By speeding over the speed bumps in the parking lot.   Stinkin' Honda Odyssey had too smooth a ride to shake anything on those speedbumps.  So he now went back into the store to turn in the dead battery, and came back out with a telescoping magnet.  It was a great idea in theory: extend the magnet to its full length, reach down and grab the bolt, and pull it up.  Unfortunately the entire car is magnetic.  The stupid magnet kept sticking to everything on the way down to the bolt.


And that's about when I came out of the furniture store, girls in tow.


I took a look at the situation, got a pretty good story from my husband, and decided to try my hand at fishing out this bolt.  So I took the telescoping magnet, extended it, flipped it UPSIDE-DOWN so I'm holding the magnetized end and the handle is deep inside under the hood, and knocked the bolt down to a hole in the underside of the car.  Then I went under the car and grabbed the bolt with the magnet, and handed it to my husband, who I'm sure was standing there dumbfounded.


Yeah, I felt pretty good about myself.  I fixed the car.  In front of my husband and my dad.


Well, after that, they got the bolt and nut back on, and we picked up my mom from swimsuit shopping, and got to the ship around 2:30pm.

Thankfully the rest of the day was a whole lot less eventful.