Have Duct Tape, Will Travel

I’m just back from our family’s summer vacation; a road trip that included driving 1800 miles across 6 states in a mini-van (think: Chevy Chase/Vacation [1]). This was especially true during our stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we’d planned to spend a day at the US National Whitewater Center [2] (a very cool place, by the way) tackling Class 1-5 rapids on their man-made river. Little did I know that the action would start much sooner. 

The night before we checked in at the Courtyard Marriott [3] in center city Charlotte. Guests were directed to park at the hotel’s parking garage. Getting the kids to bed early, my wife and I drifted off ourselves – that is until the phone rang at 2:30am. It was the front desk calling to say that our car was broken into and that the police needed me to go down to the parking garage.

Once I arrived, I found our stuff strewn all over the garage floor and the passenger window smashed. It seems that some creeps had slipped into the garage and smashed the windows on 5 cars and then took off. I was relatively lucky, having lost only a GPS. Still, I knew I had another 900 miles to drive on my trip and a car without a right front window!