Family Trip #1: The Honeymoon, 1989

Since the time we got married, Scott and I have taken many trips together with some trips more eventful than others. Our honeymoon was definitely on the more eventful side.

After our wedding in April, 1989, our honeymoon was an exercise in patience and long-suffering with numerous car problems AND a break-in.

Scott and I got married on a Thursday in late April in Provo, Utah, with a reception that night at my aunt's house which was up above the Provo Temple. It was a really happy day. 

We stayed that night at the Excelsior Hotel in Provo. On Friday morning, we started our trip and stayed that night in Baker, Oregon, at the cheapest place we could find. Our financial situation could best be described as tight with not a lot of room in the budget for emergencies.

The next day, we drove to Tacoma, Washington, in the 1980 Toyota Corolla we had bought from a friend about a week before. We needed to be at an open house that night which Scott's mother was hosting for us. Along the way, we noticed the car overheating. We decided to stop for a little while to let the car cool down and added some water to the radiator, hoping it was nothing serious but really, we were pretty clueless about cars.

Scott's mother hosted the open house in the clubhouse for her condo association.

Saturday night was the open house and afterwards, we started driving to go back to Utah. Unfortunately the car started overheating before we even got out of town, so we stopped at a Motel 6 on the outskirts. We didn't know that it was not a great section of town and we very naively left a lot of stuff in the car including some presents and my purse. In the middle of the night, we got a knock on the door and the manager told us that someone had broken into our locked car by breaking one of the windows. This was unhappy news. They had taken my purse along with a lot of the presents, including a homemade quilt made for me and temple clothes. We ended up leaving the motel and driving to Scott's mother's house to stay the rest of the night and recover.

The one and only picture from the honeymoon, taken from the window of my sister-in-law's upstairs apartment.

My purse was found by someone along the side of a road and returned to me, minus the cash we had been given at the open house. Monday morning, we took the car to a place to get the broken window fixed and the radiator flushed, hoping that would fix the overheating problem. But it didn't. We headed back to Provo but had to replace the water pump along the way in some small town. 

Back in Utah Valley, we packed up the presents we got for our wedding and then started driving to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where we would be working for the summer. Halfway between Price and Green River (smack in the middle of the San Rafael Swell--ironically, Scott's current favorite place), the car AGAIN overheated and we discovered there was no fluid at all in our cooling system. People stopped to try and help us but they couldn't do much. This was in the days before cell phones, so they offered to call a tow truck for us but we were dreading the thought of paying a tow truck to haul us 30 or 40 miles. So we said no. A crew of construction workers stopped and gave us the small amount of water left in their water jug.

Just imagine a little yellow car sitting on the side of that road with a young couple wondering what they were going to do next.

We started driving down the hill and got to the Price River (which is more like a creek). When the car overheated again, we got out a small cooler we had gotten as a wedding present and went down to the river and filled it up with dirty river water. 

We dumped it into our radiator and drove until the car overheated again, then we filled it up again. Scott would turn the car off going down the hills and then turn it back on when we slowed down too much. It was quite a journey. We limped into Green River and found a garage. The guy there found a $2 leaking radiator hose to be the cause of our woes (aargh!) but said we also had a warped head gasket from all the overheating--a $500 repair. Unfortunately they didn't have the part needed to fix it. Green River is a small town in the middle of nowhere--and it would take a few days to get it on the train! 

In desperation, we called my family in Orem and asked them to pick up the part for us and drive it down. Very kindly, my father said he would do it. That evening, my dad and brother drove down with the part (and got a speeding ticket in the process!) saving us a few days of waiting. That night we stayed in the Robbers Roost Motel, across the street from the mechanic, hoping it would be our only night there.

The next day we hung around while the mechanic replaced the hose and the head gasket. When he finished, it was about 5pm and we tried to pay the bill. Scott tried to use his Discover card to pay for it, except that the Excelsior had blocked out too much on the card so this repair charge put us over our credit limit which was something like $750. After spending quite a bit of time on the phone with the credit card company, we were finally able to make the payment and head out of town.

The road from Los Alamos which is at 7300 feet elevation

As we drove along in the dark, the fuse for our dash lights went out so we couldn't tell how fast we were going. We were driving on this very windy 2-lane road that we had never driven before, out in the middle of nowhere, and it seemed VERY dark.  Around 1am, we arrived in Los Alamos at the little studio apartment we had rented. 

Thankfully, the rest of the summer went MUCH better than the honeymoon. It was actually very fun. We both had full-time jobs and made some money so we were slightly more solvent. The ward was very welcoming and we were called to be the Young Adult leaders and had some good activities. I played in a string quartet organized by a guy in the ward. We were even able to make several quick trips back to Utah to see friends and family and the car held up fine. We did have one moment in the middle of the summer in Los Alamos when the car started overheating, but thanks to our previous experience Scott found the problem by himself--another leaky radiator hose that Scott could replace. 

In front of our apartment building in Los Alamos