vacation disasters

My sister tagged me for a vacation disaster story. You can read hers here. Lauri, I can't top yours, but we did come home from a vacation to a mess.

We had driven home from Idaho one summer after a visit of several days. I would guess we were gone from the house about a week. Our road trip home was through the night. We used to do that quite often when the kids were little and they would sleep a good portion of the long 15 hour drive. This time we were more exhausted than normal. And more exhausted than was really safe to be driving. We were having to trade off driving every 45 minutes between Dave and I to get home from northern AZ. Even when we were an hour or so away from Phoenix I realized we should stop and sleep a few minutes, but it seemed silly to stop when we were so close to home so we continued on and arrived at our house at about 6 a.m. In that sleepy and exhausted state, we walked in the house to the most putrid smell I have ever experienced. Apparently, our freezer had come unplugged as we were leaving and everything defrosted and all the juices from the meat that rotted through the week pooled at the bottom of the freezer, oozed out the door, under the freezer itself and all over the pantry floor. We were gagging with the smell.

So how exactly do you clean that up? and how do you dispose of that nastiness? The dumpsters weren't going to be picked up for another 5 days, so that wasn't an option. I finally called the city and explained the situation and asked for a suggestion, hoping I could talk them into picking up our dumpster that day. They finally decided to call the dead animal pick up department. If we would bag the meat and put it by the curb, the dead animal pick up truck would come by in a couple of hours.

Then we still had to get the freezer cleaned out, scrub and mop the floor and everything on the floor in the pantry, and air out the smell in our house. It was hours later before we crawled into bed for a little rest.

The next day, our neighbor heard what happened and said "Why didn't you just plug your freezer back in and re-freeze everything, then throw it out?"

Hmmm, . . . yeah, that would have been a real easy solution.

We had another major disaster just this past week while we were on vacation. The power in our neighborhood went out for about 10 or 15 minutes on the first day of our trip. The cable box turned off and didn't turn back on. Our favorite shows that were scheduled to record on TIVO all week were not recorded. Bummer.

I tag Lezlee , Suzanne who both vacation a lot and Amelia who always has a good story to tell.