What really happened

OK, so nobody is really buying the alien story. Maybe it's time to tell the real story. It's a doozy, too.


The van initially overheated in the middle of nowhere

The Mazda had worked perfectly on the trip to Cloudcroft and on the days while we were there. The drive home started uneventfully. We packed the van the night before so we could leave together with Berlin and his family. We had talked about driving separately, but he seemed a little apprehensive about the possibility of icy roads, so we figured it would be safest to be together. We were about an hour into the drive when the van overheated. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't get cell phone service at the time, probably because we were here. Fortunately, Berlin was able to drive back to a store to get some antifreeze. We tried driving on, but the car overheated again within a couple of miles. We parked the van while Berlin drove on ahead to call a tow truck. After he dropped off his family, he came back to pick up Teressa and the boys.


The tow truck driver decided to do a little muddin' on the way to Roswell

So the truck comes out to tow the van to the nearest town, Artesia, N.M. The driver asked me what shop I want to take it to. I told him I don't know since I'm not very familiar with the town. Of course, there's no Mazda dealer in town (and evidently no independent shops either). At first the driver wants to go to the GM dealership since he thinks Mazda is a GM brand. I informed him that the car is Japanese, but it does have a Ford engine inside. So we went to the Ford dealership. The discussion that followed went something like this: (The following account has been highly fictionalized.)

Manager: What on Earth is that thing?
Me: That's a Mazda.
Manager: Elroy, you ever heard of a Mazda?
Elroy: Nope, but it does have some initials on the back. I think it says UFO.
Me: That's MPV.
Manager: UFO? We only work on Fords here, not spacecraft. You'll have to take that piece of space junk to Roswell.

So maybe that's not exactly how it went down, but the gist was the same. There was no place in the whole of Artesia that would work on a Mazda. So the Ford folks called around until they found a Toyota dealership in Roswell that would do the job, but they couldn't take a look until the next day. At this point Teressa and I decided that maybe I should repair it myself, so the tow truck took me over to the Autozone, which didn't have the part I needed. Now there really wasn't anything else to do other than take the van to Roswell. The tow truck driver pulled around behind the Autozone (rather than backing out into traffic) and managed to get stuck in the mud. Eventually someone in a four-wheel-drive truck noticed our predicament and helped pull us out. It was just that kind of a day.


This is proof we saw an alien while driving home in the Honda

The next day we got a call from the Toyota dealership. They could fix the van, but it needed a new radiator. And because of the holiday weekend, it would be five days before they could get the part. That wasn't going to work for us, so we came up with a plan. We decided we would go look at some vans and SUVs at the Toyota dealership and see if there was something we liked. If not, we would rent a car and come back the weekend after the car was fixed to pick it up and drive it home. We ended up finding a nice used Honda Odyssey. We traded in the Mazda for the Honda and drove it home.