Last week I experienced some crazy ass car trouble, all from a tire rotation. You see, I finally decided to rotate the tires on the beater Hyundai. Now this is my cheap to purchase, cheap to maintain, look dead sexy while driving car. Unfortunately, rather than rotating the tires every 5,000 miles or so, like the manual recommends, I let it go almost 15,000 miles. Yeah, I know. Let the flaming begin!

This past weekend I finally decided to get off my butt, go out into the sweltering summer heat of my garage, and do the dang rotation. Yes…because I’m too cheap to pay the $20 a local shop will charge. Well, that and I wanted to time myself and see if I could knock it out in under 30 minutes – mission accomplished by the way.  BOOYAAA!

Anyways, after 30 minutes of summer sweating glory, I completed the rotation and patted myself on the back, thinking “You just saved $20 Shaun… good damn job”. Meanwhile, the Mrs. decided to take the Hyundai to pick up my son. Upon returning she made a passing comment to me that the car didn’t feel or sound right while driving. I decided to take it for a spin.

Holy hell! She wasn’t kidding, something definitely wasn’t right. Every bump felt like a sledgehammer right in the culo. There was absolutely no give in the suspension. I’m pretty sure my spine compressed and I’m probably an inch shorter after that drive.

If you’re like my wife and I, sometimes you just like to get out and go on relaxing drive. Sometimes we’ll go into the mountains for a nice quiet scenic drive, other times we’ll just explore areas of our city we haven’t managed to get to. Occasionally, we’ll travel to the uppity areas and gawk at the mansions, with their well-manicured lawns just waiting for my dog to discover the holy grail of lawn pooping places.

As fun as it is to day dream about having a 10,000 sq ft. mansion that we’d get to spend hours vacuuming every week, for me, it’s all about the cars. Being a car guy, I never miss an opportunity to attend a car show. There’s nothing like drooling over a brand new Ferrari, Lamborghini, Dodge Viper, or my personal favorite the McLaren. Knowing that the chances of me ever personally owning one are about equivalent to that of me benching 400 lbs and looking like the Terminator, I love to get up close and personal to those beauties, even if it’s only for a brief moment. I had that opportunity to do just that this past week.

I recently traveled for work, from Los Angeles to Mississippi. The evening prior to my return was a beautiful gulf coast evening. The air was crisp and cool, the beach was almost empty, the sun reflected a deep red off the water, and as I strolled along I couldn’t help but envy how relaxing everything felt. It was a completely different feel from that of Los Angeles. There were no car horns, no road rage, no concrete highways 8 lanes wide, and best of all, no traffic. Oh, and this was a Thursday….