Other May 19th's: First Installment

This one is dedicated to Cousin Brent!

1998: Leading up to May 19, 1998, I had just graduated from the U of A with my Bachelor's degree on May 16th and had a party celebrating my graduation and my cousin Larkin's 13th birthday at Grandma Elrey's house. That afternoon, I kidnapped Cousin Brent and we headed down to San Carlos, Mexico with the McRae kids to stay at their condo. Here are some of my favorite journal excerpts from that trip:

"At 3pm, Brent and I headed over to meet Maren at the townhouse. We picked up Ric and Shawndi and headed down to Tubac to get Matt and Wyatt. Ric and Maren took Ric's truck, so I got to drive the Suburban--I love it! On the way out of Tucson, Brent and I stopped at Circle K to experience our first Laughable Disaster of the trip All the cash I had was 2- $100 from graduation, so I sent Brent into the K to get me a Diet Coke and bottled water. He came back and we drank it up, only to discover onehour later that Brent had been shortchanged by $83! EIGHTY-THREE BUCKS, people! All I could do is laugh, although it sucked to lose that much money." (To Brent's amazing credit, he felt so bad, he wrote me a check for $83 when it really wasn't his fault).

"I woke at 11:00am on Sunday and went out to the beach with Brent, where we sat on little beach chairs and read our scriptures and wrote in our journals or to missionaries [Sam] adn enjoye the breath-taking view...San Carlos and the mountains to the right, the sand bar and the little island to the left. The water was the softest shade of sea green and the sand was almost white, but upon closer examination was mulit-colored like Suddenyl Salad seasoning. Matt & Wyatt came out about an hour later and we built sandcastles and talked....later [that night] we decided to have a fireside on the beach." (We did have the fireside, remember, Brent? Matt built the fire and everyone shared a thought and Ric--who wasn't baptized yet--felt the spirit, and was baptized 5 months later. That was awesome).

So that brings us to the wee ours of May 19, 1998, as we were driving home from Mexico:

"We drove home pretty uneventfully until we got to Nogales and all of the gas stations were closed. Matt decided we could make it to Green Valley, so we hauled up there and 6km from the exit, teh Suburban began to shudder. Matt put on the hazard lights and soon a sherriff pulled us over and offered to escort us to a gas station. So Super Matt got us within 50 yards of a gas station and he and Brent had to puch us across the street to the pumps where the car died. Another narrowly averted Laughable Disaster! When we finally got to the townhouse, Matt was locked out, so he looked for the spare key in Maren's car and accidentally left her dome light on when he locked it and still no house keys. finally he jiggled the sliding glass door and we got in and crashed. I was thinking Matt might be a lucky charm because all our challenges just turned out to be funny."