Trouble in Staten Island

Not so sure everyone has heard the news, but Meredith, Andrea, Claire and I had one heck of a fun adventure yesterday. We had these elaborate plans to go to the NY Aquarium in Coney Island before picking up David and Donna from the airport as they were returning to LaGuardia from Aruba. Meredith, Claire and I met up with Andrea (in Dave and Donna's car as they left it here while they were away) in Bayonne, NJ. We were going to go through Staten Island to get to Coney Island and go to Nathan's hot dogs and then off the the aquarium. Then Andrea called Meredith saying that the check engine light was on in the BMW. I told Meredith it was no big deal since D & D told me not to worry about the lights, and then hung up. A couple minutes later, she called back and said the car was starting to over heat. Meredith said to turn the heat on and open the windows. She did that, but it didn't help. So luckily, Andrea pulled off (the last exit) prior to getting on the Verazano Bridge into Brooklyn. Good thing since the car started smoking. The three of us had no idea what to do so I (who has no idea about fixing cars) went to check out under the hood. All I knew was that something broke and that there was anti-freeze all over the place. I cleaned it up while Meredith and Andrea tried to figure out what to do as D & D were in the air on their way to the US. We finally got to calling AAA and they sent a truck. About two hours later, the truck showed up. We followed the truck to the body shop and found out that the mechanics didn't come in until Monday AM. Now we had a decision to make: we could either try to go to get to the aquarium (closed at 5:30 and it was now about 3 or 3:30), go back home, or hang out until it was time to pick them up. We decided it would be worthless to go back home and knew that there were a couple awesome beer gardens close to the airport. The three of us decided the beer garden was the optimal choice, so off we went. We had a couple pitchers of beer and some much needed food, as we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. To say the least, we had a good time at the beer garden, and everyone around us loved Claire. Now for the fun stuff, time to get our passengers. We tossed around how they were going to take the bad news, and we were pretty much spot on. Donna laughed and Dave said "What are you gonna do?"

Then it was off to Andrea's place. And luck would have it, Paul needed to drop something with Dave, so he and Sarah came down for dinner. We had pizza, beers, and a damn good time. We made the best out a bad situation and got to spend time with people we don't get to see that often. But we'll be seeing Paul a lot more now that he's doing a job about 10-15 minutes from our place.

Now Dave and Donna are on their way home in our car and they'll talk to the mechanics tomorrow to see how to proceed. Good luck to their BMW and let's hope it can be repaired and it doesn't cost too much.