Little Miss Sunshine

I went back to Boston to meet DrT’s parents on Saturday. Her brother was in town from LA for a wedding, so it was a good time to go meet her family. The plan was to hit the road for Boston early, do some “New Englandy” things for a few hours, eat lunch, and return to CT in time for DrT to get her first Michigan football viewing experience by watching the game with me, FlyingV, and RytheRed. Unfortunately, the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.

The “New Englandy” plan was to drive to Crane’s Beach on the north shore and enjoy an October day on the beach and see the pretty fall colors on the way. Since there were six of us in the car, we took the old family minivan that was purchased in 1992, even though her family had purchased three new cars over the past four years. The point of the trip was to spend time together, and taking one car, no matter how old it was, was the ideal choice. The car was struggling a little bit on the drive, but we attributed it to age. Unfortunately, as we were ready to leave the beach, we learned that the car had been leaking transmission fluid. We were stranded at Crane’s Beach! DrT’s brother was serving as the justice of the peace for his friend’s wedding he was attending this weekend. Thankfully, the wedding was on Sunday, but he needed to be back by 4PM for the rehearsal dinner. Obviously, getting back to CT for the Michigan game was not nearly as important.

At one point we started pushing the car to try and get it into gear. We all felt we were enjoying a real life recreation of the movie Little Miss Sunshine since we would have probably had to rush into the car if it started moving. Thankfully, we gave up on this plan since it didn’t work out.

While we waited patiently for AAA to arrive, we enjoyed wonderful kindness of the New England folks. One family agreed to drive us into Ipswich so that we could buy transmission fluid. However, we later decided to continue waiting for AAA since whatever we put into the van would leak out anyway. Another nice woman was going back to Belmont, which is not far from where we were heading (Brookline). She agreed to drive four of us back to DrT’s mom’s house, which was extremely generous and unexpected. DrT’s brother was able to make the rehearsal dinner on time. We didn’t get back to the house until around 4PM, so it was definitely too late to give DrT a true Michigan football viewing experience. Besides, I would have felt bad rushing out of there since we never really were able to relax and spend time with her parents since they were dealing with the car issues. We watched the Michigan game together at her mom’s house while flipping over to the Tigers game frequently so that I could enjoy the Tigers win and DrT could enjoy the Yankees loss.

Given that the attempt to meet DrT’s parents and enjoy a lovely fall day together had sort of fallen apart because of car drama, we went out for a nice dinner with DrT’s mom after the game. Since everything worked out in the end, I thought the whole ordeal was a funny story, especially since it was my first time meeting DrT’s parents.