On Friday, July 20th, my family embarked on our annual Hilton Head vacation. We left mid-day. I spent the morning running around frantically packing for myself and my two little boys, who are one and four. Then I made a stop at the nail salon because my toes needed some real TLC.

I got home around noon and the loading of the car began. I fed the baby while Logan, my husband, squeezed as much as he could into the back of my mom crossover SUV with two car seats in the back.

When it was almost time to go, Logan snapped Henry into his car seat, I loaded up Baby Simon, and we were on our way.

Logan stopped at the local Dunkin’ Donuts for a cup of coffee before we embarked on the first stretch of road – the good ol’ Natcher Parkway.

It was then that we noticed none of the buttons on my dash were working. We couldn’t change the radio station or turn the volume down. We couldn’t even turn the radio off. I thought no biggie, change the radio station and volume on the steering wheel.

Well that didn’t work either.

I told my husband this had happened once before and all I had to do was turn the car off, sit for thirty seconds, turn it back on and all would be working.

We probably turned the car on and off about 8 times while criss-crossing the back roads of Owensboro. The dash was not working.

This wasn’t a huge deal. But once we got out of range of our local radio station, we would be listening to fuzz for about 11 hours at moderate volume.

This queued our four year old to ask multiple times if we were lost, going the right way, and if we knew what we were doing.

I wanted to respond that no, Mommy and Daddy had zero fucking clue what they were doing but I kept it to a, “Of course we know where we are going silly. We’re going to the beach!”

Then I realized the USB port I was using to charge my phone and give directions was also not working. I was at approximately 4%. Shit. I don’t keep an atlas in the car. And I for sure would give some awful directions if I used a map. We would end up in Canada.

So I did what any smart woman with car problems would do. I googled the shit out of it. Turns out that this is a large issue with any 2013 Equinox LT. The battery needed to be disconnected then reconnected.

Because my husband refused to turn around and had just started down the Natcher Parkway, I had to make a quick decision. I called my go-to car guy – Gary Kirk. He is the GM at Don Moore Automotive in Hartford and we used to work together. He also makes some great homemade salsa. Hit him up.

I’m sure when his phone rang and he saw it was me, he groaned, but luckily he answered and told me to come on in. I told Logan to take the Beaver Dam exit so we could get this taken care of.

Gary, Joseph and Rev Jeff, the tech, were extremely nice and helpful and told me to pull over to one side so they could check this out. Knowing it might take a while, I told Logan to get the kids out of the car and take them inside the air conditioning.

Logan got out of the car, opened the back door to get Henry out of his car seat, and asked where Henry’s shoes were.

My first reply was, I don’t know, you put him in the car. We looked everywhere. Then we realized that we had left for vacation for over a week without putting a pair of shoes on our four year old. #MomFail

Good thing that I had packed Henry’s new Spiderman rain boots in the back. Because if you need anything at the beach, it’s a pair of Spiderman rain boots.

About 15 minutes later, the car was back up and working. Logan’s parents were stopping by our house before they left a little later to grab Henry’s shoes. And we were only approximately twenty miles into our trip.

So thank you Gary, Joseph, Rev Jeff, Google and Joy and Jerry Johnson. You saved our vacation. Luckily it was smooth sailing from there on out and we could all enjoy the Halsey/Taylor Swift playlist I put together for our trip.

Until Next Time,

Jamie