The Scale Effect

This past weekend my AH took off with his brother and a friend to climb Mt. Adams. I was worried about how I would do with the kiddo's all by myself but as you can read below we had a fantastic time without Daddy. Unfortunately for Daddy, just like a scale of justice, when one side is up the other side is down. Poor poor Daddy was on the downside this weekend.

The Abridged Version:
It all started out on Friday when he was out the door at 6:45am for the 4 hour drive to the Mt. Adam's trail head. He met up with his cohorts in Tacoma and they consolidated down to one car for the trip. To make a long story short the route they thought they were to take dead ended after several hours and so they had to backtrack and try a different route. By the time they did finally get to the trail head it was 6:00PM; 11 hours after AH left that morning. They hiked in for about 90 minutes and then set up camp for the night. During dinner preparations my husband realized his freeze dried meal had expired some 5 years earlier and was inedible so he went without.

The climb the next day was easy and fun and they were by far the most relaxed climbers on the mountain not having crampons, plastic books and other arctic gear with them. AH was proud to say they passed about 50 people on the way up (he hates to be passed).

On the way home they stopped in the little town of Trout Lake to cool off with a swim (and probably BO deterrent too) and once back on their way it was just 2-3 miles outside of town that the car decided it had been abused enough and wasn't going an inch further. Stranded in the middle of nowhere and with no way to call for help (the cellphone was out of range) they caught a lift with a local back into town to the only garage. Being that this was 4pm on a Saturday the mechanic wouldn't be able to get parts from his supplier in order to fix the car so the boys were stuck.

A tow truck was called to take the poor car in to the next major town (over 30 miles away) and the boys were once again left stranded as they closed up shop for the night. Luckily a family member didn't live too far away and offered to go get them and loan them a car to get home. AH called me at 10:45pm Saturday night to say they had just arrived that their house and I urged them to spend the night instead of trying to drive for another 3-4 hours late at night when they were all so exhausted.

The next day when they arrived in Tacoma to retrieve AH's truck they noticed some broken glass in the parking garage but AH's truck looked okay. When he got in to start it the engine sounded like a Harley and AH immediately knew what had happened. Someone cut his catalytic converter off his car while it was parked in the garage. This is a growing trend due to the valuable metals contained in the converter and the number of thefts are rising dramatically across the country.

The underside of the truck today:


The culprits are lucky AH didn't catch them in the act since he's 6'3" and was carrying his ice ax.