A Common Sight at the Ranch

... is a broken down car or truck.  My favorite experience (not) was receiving an email from my husband (he went down a week early) saying, "I am here, the truck is being held together by duct tape, but still running."  What the heck is a wife supposed to think about that?  Needless to say, before I arrived I found out that he was fine and the being held together was mostly cosmetic stuff (like the window latches in the back wont work so he had to tape them shut).   But I did find the truck on the side of the road on day 1, his response - well it died so I had to switch vehicles in the middle of feeding the animals.  Now I'm still not sure if  "it" was the quad (which had a habit of dieing) or the truck, but I'm hopin it was the quad. 

Another likely issues with vehicles down there -- flat tires.  People do not clean their worksites properly and leave nails on the ground, which have a sneaky habit of getting stuck in tires.  That and the whole 9 mile unpaved, rocky dirt road that you have to travel may have something to do with it...  Anywho, we got a flat on Caity & Hayden's first night.  It was about 8 pm and really dark.  Caity was still in a swimsuit, I was sick, and the tools for changing the tire - with a random guy that Matt had been nice to (in the states) and loaned them and never returned them.  We used the jack for my car to jack up the truck. 

That's really cold Caity wrapped up in a blanket as Hayden takes off the lugnuts and Matt adjusts the jack. 

The boys are hard at work and Caity is shining a light so they can see what they are doing... I have a video taken at some point during this adventure, I just need to figure out how to post it to the blog!

This is when Hayden finally got the seal of approval to date Caity (because really, this was just a rouse to test out his manliness) haha  He managed to get the spare tire out with a nail punch.  See, you need special tools to take the tire off of a Tundra, they are up under the bed.  He and I were under the truck (I was holding the maglight, of course) and he had to figure out a way to maneuver around and get it out.  Major props to him.  And Caity is wearing my beach coverup as a scarf.  (I hada already changed because of the sick thing, I ran into a bathroom -- and changed while I tried not to hurl, I expected everyone else to change while I was, but they were being nice and waiting to see if I was okay).

This was our last night in Mexico, talk about going out with a bang, right? haha