Thursday, July 31, 2008

Everybody Was Kung Foo Fighting

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday that the day started with Finn and Frampton getting attacked by a stray dog. Luckily, the dog was old and apparently didn't have any teeth. But I didn't know that as I was walking to dogs over to the car shop, where Gene was already stationed. Both Frampton and Finn were on leashes, and we were walking in front of a liquor store that is in between our hotel and the car shop. Doesn't Alamosa sound like a lovely place? Oh, and we are staying in what is supposed to be the nicest hotel in town.

Anyway, I digress. I was walking past the liquor store with the dogs when I saw about 15 feet away a very large boxer/bulldog mix that was not on a leash. It approached us despite me telling it "no" repeatedly, and sure enough, a scuffle broke out between my dogs and that dog, which quickly escalated to a full out fight, right there on the side of the road. I kept pulling my dogs forward, and we tried to run away, but the stray kept attacking Finn particularly. It was awful to say the least, and I really thought the dog might kill Finn. I yelled for help, and several cars pulled over and people ran out to help us. One of the people who helped us was a traffic control officer, and she told me to call animal control, which I did. The owner of the liquor store came out and identified the dog as his. He told me that the dog had no teeth, which made sense because when I looked Finn over, he had no puncture wounds despite being repeately bitten. I don't know why the dog didn't have any teeth, but I'm thankful that it didn't. I made a written report with animal control, and will see how that pans out.

You already know about the radiator issues that happened yesterday, so I won't go over it again. But there was one more problem that arose after my last post. We have a repair warranty on the vehicle. Despite making all the arrangements for the shop to be paid directly by the warranty, and the shop agreeing to be paid directly by the warranty, at the end of the day, when the vehicle was ready, the shop owner refused to release the vehicle to us unless we paid him about 1k, directly and immediately. Of course, the warranty place was closed for the day. When I attempted to discuss with him that his employees had already set things up to get paid (and may have already been paid) by the warranty, he got about five inches from my face and began yelling at me in some foreign language. (Gene had already had words with him, so I was trying to handle things. (And I have never seen Gene have words with anyone, so this tells you a little about the owner.)) We ended up paying the guy just to get our car back, left the property and immediately called the police to file a complaint.

The good news is that we finally got out of Alamosa, CO, after being stuck there for four days. We left at approximately 9:30 last night, and we drove as fast as was legally possible and as long as we could prop our eyelids open to get as far away from that awful town as possible. We drove to Montrose, CO, where we stayed the night, and drove all day through Utah to make it to Twin Falls, Idaho. Tomorrow, we hope to make it to Portland, OR. Despite losing four days of our trip to car repairs, we are almost back on track.

I am not going to mention that town in Colorado anymore. Gene and I decided that it is basically a curse word, although we haven't exactly figured out what context in which to use it. I suppose we could tell someone to "GO TO ALAMOSA!" if they had offended us in some way. That might work.

Thanks for all your well wishes. Hope that you are doing well.
(Oh, and thanks SB for the care package, which we have used in its entirety, and thanks Denise for the chocolates, which kept us fed and sane that afternoon we were stuck on the side of the road.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

alamosa...sounds a bit like "omorosa" (trump's little friend), and perhaps it has similar connotations!
glad you are on the road and enjoying it.
-sbpm