Best Vacation Ever

Melissa and I went to my cousins wedding in San Diego and the Las Vegas last weekend, and it was awesome. On thursday night (we left friday at 5:00AM) we discovered that my official wedding shirt we'd just purchased still had the RFID tag on it. I have a drill, but that's a big tool for a delicate job. Anyway - it took a while, but it came off after much stressing out by Melissa.

Friday morning when we left it was raining, and it kept raining and kept coming down harder as we headed down 101. Somewhere north of San Luis Obispo we stopped at a rest area, Melissa started driving and the car started shaking hard whenever we'd try to accelerate. In the middle of nowhere we tried a few times to get going, but it was really bad so I called the mechanics who had done my engine work back in January and they tried to help me troubleshoot the problem. We couldn't find anything but a loose wire on an air intake valve, so we tightened that and tried to get going again. The car was better, but still shaking.

We made it as far as Santa Maria when the car made a sound like something fell out, we got off the freeway with just as the car died. It started again and got us two hundred feet into an Office Depot parking lot. They let us use their internet there and we tracked down a mechanic who would work on BMWs, he was two miles away, which took about fifteen minutes with the slow and dying car that sounded like a lawnmower.

The good folks at Rizzoli's Auto Repair had a look at the car even though they were supposed to be going to lunch and determined within fifteen minutes that none of the spark plugs from back in January had been properly tightened, one had come loose, shattered the coil, stripped out its socket, and was making the noise that made the car sound like a lawnmower. We started stressing out about rental cars and local hotels and stuff because we had to get to the wedding, but within four hours they'd tracked down the parts they needed and fixed it, one of the guys even drove thirty miles to Santa Barbara and back to get the last piece they needed.

We were only four or five hours off schedule so we kept on down the coast, driving through Point Mugu, Malibu and Ventura, so it turns out that not all of Los Angeles is horrible - just 90% of it. We stayed in downtown San Diego, had lunch in La Jolla the next day and went to my cousins wedding at the Prado in Balboa park. This post has gone on long enough I think, I'll let Melissa fill you all in on the wedding and Las Vegas.