We're Back On Track. And More New Friends Thanks to Pie.

We spent Sunday afternoon developing various scenarios for getting ourselves and Rhoda back to Colorado. Immediately after the accident, we spoke to GM's OnStar folks. They made arrangements for our truck to be towed early this morning to Cedar City, the closest town with a GM dealership that could repair her. Then we looked for RV dealers in Utah who could refer us to transporters that could haul Rhoda back to Colorado. We looked for places that could store her near the truck repair place. Then we looked to see if any companies rent pickup trucks that could tow Rhoda and bring us all home. If we could pull it off, that was the plan that we preferred. There was an Enterprise Truck Rental an hour from Cedar City. According to the website they had big pickups with towing packages available. Since it was Sunday, everything In Utah was closed, including Enterprise Truck Rentals.

We were physically and emotionally drained as we sat out in the late afternoon sun. A truck carrying two young men and a woman pulled up to our campsite asking where to set up their tent. Reece, Sarah and Rudy are British; traveling from their winter jobs at a Canadian ski resort to meet friends in Las Vegas. We had a pie from the Thunderbird Cafe, "Home of the Ho-made pies" that was ready to be shared with new friends. So after they pitched their tent, we built a campfire, sliced the pie and spent a lovely evening sharing stories about our lives and our travels.

We woke up early this morning with a long list of calls to make. We filed an accident report with the Highway Patrol. We couldn't do it yesterday, because shockingly they too are closed on Sundays. I called Enterprise and they had a 1 ton pickup truck available for rent but we would have to bring it back to Utah when our truck was fixed. So we called our insurance broker who patched us through to our insurance adjuster, Shelia. I'm not sure she'd ever had a more complex case early on a Monday morning but she couldn't have been nicer or more efficient. She figured how to have our policy cover the price of the pickup. The tow truck appeared at 8:30 to bring Jamie and our truck to Cedar City. He rented a car there and drove 45 minutes to Enterprise in St. George where he picked up Bruiser, a Ram 2500 Diesel Super Duty truck. He got back to our campsite after a glorious two hour drive through Zion National Park. Bruiser will haul us to a new campsite near Bryce tomorrow; we'll visit the Park and then go home to Colorado on Wednesday..

To celebrate getting back on track, we went to the Thunderbird Cafe for a burger and a new Thunderberry Pie. We're building a campfire and slicing the pie for our new British Friends and maybe the French couple who just pulled into the campground. Bonne nuit mes amis.