Summer road trippin': Part 1, Starting off with a smash

For the third weekend in a row, we're on the road. The last two weekends we were on our family summer vacation before school started.  We left on Evan's birthday and headed south to Arizona via New Mexico. We split the drive up into two days, stopping overnight in Albuquerque. Then we spent 4 nights at our friend's cabin in Forest Lakes, AZ. After that,  we headed to Durango, CO for 2 nights, and then had one more overnight in Montrose, CO before heading home so the kids could start school last week.  Today, however, we are headed to Nebraska to be in the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse on Monday.

But first let me recap our previous road trip. On the second day, when we were almost to the Arizona border, we were passing a large truck, when a huge rock flew out from under it. The rock launched up high and then came down right at the bottom of our windshield. It hit so hard and loud, and left a big smash spot on the window, with cracks already emanating outward from it. In fact, some glass on the inside shattered onto the dash. 

We immediately started thinking about how, when, and where we could get it fixed while not derailing our vacation plan too much. One option we considered was to wait and fix it when we got home, but that was over a week later and we had no idea how quickly the cracks would grow (pretty quickly it turned out). Also, we didn't know if the main smash point where glass broke inside was water tight. What if it rained before we got it fixed?

We ended up calling a few autoglass stores in Payson, AZ, which was about an hour from the cabin we were staying at, to see if they could fix it while we were in the area. They ordered our glass and it came in a few days later,  on the morning we were due to leave the cabin. John got up early that day and took the car to get it fixed while I packed up our stuff. Luckily it had not rained any of the days we had the crack, but it was lightly raining as John came back with the new windshield. We also were lucky the crack was located on the window in a place that it didn't interfere with the driver's view, so we were able to drive it around places during our stay.

Good thing we got it fixed then, though, because the next few days of our trip through southwestern and central Colorado were beautiful and having a brand new window to take in the sights was really essential.

The poor windshield, right after it got smashed.