The Universe: 3, Adulthood: 0.

After spending two weeks in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia, Scott and I spent the last leg of our summer vacationing in Utah.

Because we wanted to spend the majority of the time on bikes, we had to drive. The irony that, collectively, our bikes were worth more than the car we were hauling them with was not lost on us.

Nonetheless, we decided to be proactive (read: stupid) and have our car serviced before we left.

It costs a lot to be responsible.

We're no further than Hisperia when Scott notices the car is running hot...so hot that we have to turn on the heater to draw heat away from the engine.

There we are in the middle of the Mojave desert in the middle of August in 112 degree weather with the goddamn heater on.

There was nothing we could do except laugh and continue to fight over control of Pandora.

We ended up stopping in Vegas to get the car serviced. Again.

We walked into a repair shop that I had found on Google (seriously, WHAT did people do before The Internet was available to find such things), and I was a little scared of what the mechanic would have to say.

Any qualms I had were quickly diminished as the owner, seated behind a disaster of a desk, lit up a cigarette in my face.

Clearly this guy was good people.

After his mechanics fixed our car and he gave us Stage 4 lung cancer, the owner of the shop told us our car was good to go and we hit the road.

We were too busy being grateful to be on our way--after only a three hour set-back--to realize that we lost a few hundred dollars in Vegas in the worst way possible: by being responsible adults.
...

We made it to The Real OC and woke up in the morning to drive to the top of a volcano. It was liberating and freeing, and one of the best moments of this trip, in spite of the volcanic ash we continued to find in crevices for days to come.

And, at that point feeling particularly adventurous, we decided to ride our bikes to the top of the canyon and bomb down. After a short but gruelling ride up to the top and lots of cussing about the altitude, we flew back down the trail, the rain and smell of free-range cows fresh on our faces.

It was the best day of my life.

Until we got in the car and the "check engine" light came on.

Were you fucking kidding me?

Another trip to the mechanic and a few cuss words later, Scott decided that the car would last another 100,000 miles and that, after this trip, we'd drive it til the wheels fall off.

This, coincidentally, was declared mere hours before Scott drove the car into a ditch and had to have my brother pull it out with a tractor.

People were placing bets on where, during the drive home, the front wheel would fall off.

Magically, we are back in SoCal with all of our wheels and pretty much no money to our names.

The moral of the story is obvious: don't even try to prepare for the future. It's futile. Because at any moment, the Universe can open up and take a giant crap on your plans.

I'm almost positive that if we hadn't been proactive in the first place, non of this would have happened and we'd be thousands of dollars (I wish I were exaggerating here about how much we spent fixing that car) richer.