My Florida vacation...the beginning.

OK, as promised I will give a breakdown of my Florida vacation trip, which started last Saturday and ended yesterday. As with any good story, I need to start at the beginning.

My wife and I recently bought a used car. I just can never bring myself to buy one new, because I just can't see the value in it, so we were in the market for a car and narrowed our search down to two cars. One was a Volkswagon Passat and the other, a late entry, was an Audi A6. Both had some miles on them, both were the color my wife wanted (silver) and both had leather interior (my choice...I just love the smell of leather). The Audi, in my mind, was a much better choice and it didn't take much to help my wife see the logic in the decision. During my negotiations for the car, I got a sizable discount in the price but gave up my 30 day warranty to get where I wanted to be in price. I had had the car checked out by my mechanic and gotten a clean bill of health, so I took the chance.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this story, but I'll bore you with the details. We decided to take the Audi on our extensive road trip to Florida. My vehicle is a Jeep Grand Cherokee, so I was looking at the much better gas mileage of the Audi as a bonus. My wife drives the Audi daily from Wilkes-Barre to Pittston (about 20 miles one way) and we use it when we're together for everything, so I didn't expect any problems. We managed to get about 3 hours away from Wilkes-Barre before it happened. The alternator went out. Yes, the alternator went out and we were driving on the battery at 12:30am on I81. We got to about 70 miles from Wilkes-Barre and had to stop.

Our story is made worse by the fact that we only just signed up for AAA that day and it takes a full 7 days for all of the benefits to become effective, so it was going to cost us $200 to get the car towed to the house so we could start over again!! We were stuck, so we decided to head back to the house and get the Jeep so we could start over. The only problem was, how do we get home? We were 70 miles from the house and didn't want to call our friends to wake them, hoping that they would come get us, so we did what we could. We said a quick prayer and hitchhiked home.

OK, so we didn't actually have to stand at the side of the road and hitchhike. Since we were at a gas station off I81, I just asked a nice looking young couple if they would give us a ride as far up I81 as they could and they cautiously obliged, since they were heading that way themselves. We got about 20 miles from the house and, after a few phone calls, were able to get a friend who lived nearby to come get us and take us the rest of the way home. What a great trip so far!! Susana was actually checking in to plane tickets at that point, but it was way too late for that.

Since I had been up for over 24 hours by the time we got home and it was almost noon, we decided to get some rest and head out again with the Jeep later. We awoke around 5pm and got ourselves situated to start again, then headed out with the Jeep to pick up our belongings from the Audi and continue our trip. We were able to contact the hotel in Daytona Beach and they willingly moved our reservation forward a day, so we were in good shape there, albeit a day later and one car down.

It may sound like an awful start to our vacation, but we were in great spirits and not put off a bit by what had happened. Things like this happen in life. We can either deal with them positively or negatively, but they must be dealt with nonetheless. We decided to stay positive and keep moving forward. This experience made me think about how similar selling Real Estate is. Yes, I was still thinking Real Estate while this was going on. I can't help it. I love what I do. So, this is the parallel I drew.

We run into problems all the time in our business. We have to be able to creatively handle problems when they arise in order to get the deal to close properly. It's very easy to get negative about things when this occurs, which can very easily spoil the whole transaction. I've learned to always look forward and keep my eyes on the finish line. Whatever hurdle comes up can either be jumped over or run around in order to reach my goal. That's why we have addendum forms. We shouldn't be afraid to use them. Life isn't perfect, things change and we are better off realizing that fact and adapting.

With all of this in mind, we continued on our journey...which will be told in other posts.

Until next time...