On Friday, Leah and Jack were off from school, so we planned to go to Wonderworks. It was going to be a bit of a tight schedule because we had to drop Will off at his school at 9AM, get to downtown Orlando and Wonderworks and get back in time to pick Will up by 2PM. Intrepid adventurers that we are, we headed off. (John didn't come because someone has to go to work. Cousin Andrew was able to come with us though!) As we were driving down I4 and doing pretty well with the schedule so far, we heard a bit of a bang at the rear of Amy's new 3 week old van. Something must have flown up and hit under the car, we thought. A few minutes later, Amy's new 3 week old van informed us that one of it's tires was losing air. We had a flat. Driving very carefully, Amy pulled over at the next rest stop and David got out, prepared to change the flat and get us on our way. But, after removing the spare tire cover we couldn't help but notice the obvious lack of said spare tire. As I am wont to do, I began reading the owner's manual that came with Amy's new 3 week old van. In the tiny print on the "changing tire" page I discovered the reason there was no spare tire. Amy's new 3 week old van came with a special PAX tire system and you are not allowed to change the tire, silly. This amazing system is all computer driven and will tell you exactly how many miles you can ride on the soon to be very flat tire -- 125 miles in case you are wondering -- and it will suggest you head to your friendly Honda dealer or Michelin man. It will also alert you when you need to hurry and then will kindly tell you that you've gone too far and you must STOP DRIVING NOW! So, we made a tiny change to our plans for the day and went to see the nice people at Honda, who told us it was going to take at least 2 1/2 hours to fix the amazing computer tire (depending on why it was flat, of course). As appealing as the idea to wait in the Honda showroom with 3 kids and read Honda brochures for maybe 3 hours or more was, we decided to take the advice to rent a van from the Hertz down the road and see what we could salvage of our quickly dwindling Wonderworks time allotment. After a rather harrowing white knuckle ride to Hertz from a somewhat talkative Honda employee, our hardy band of adventurers came to the conclusion that we should head back to Lake Mary, grab some lunch at Tijuana Flats, pick Will up from school at 2, and go home to await the all clear call from Amy's new 3 week old van. And that is what we did. By 3PM we were back on the road returning the rental, admiring Amy's new 3 week old van's newly puffed up tire (minus one evil nail) and heading back to Wonderworks. By 5PM, we were back to where we had planned to be at 10AM...
