Just before my alarm on Tuesday–an early alarm so we could drive to Provo to see my married kids and arrive before rush hour–a loud crash rocked the USB. Instantly I knew. “Someone hit us.”

Melanie ran out to attend to the person who hit us. Her small Volkswagen looked very broken up. No injuries, thank goodness, but the nine-year-old was very upset and took several hours to calm down. Thankfully, the rest of the family took care of him because I had too many other details to attend to.

Batman had flown back to Tampa on Sunday to testify on a case. I got to call the police, the insurance, the repair facility, and the roadside assistance folks. And I had to tell Batman that I broke our new toy. He refrained from yelling at me for parking in front of my sister’s house so my nieces could have a slumber party with me.

Luckily, all the little girls had already gone back into the house so only my kids were still aboard for the collision. My kids were already on the phone with one another explaining that there would be another delay before we could be reunited in Provo. Insurance doesn’t cover emotional anguish over travel delays, even if you haven’t seen your siblings in over a year.

I drove the USB to the repair facility. Mom picked me up and the phone work really started. It took some arm twisting, but we finally convinced some repair places to help us. The senior adjuster helped. The shop went from “We don’t have any openings for three weeks,” to “a day and a half,” to “we are working on it now, and now we are doing the parts of the repair we had previously refused to do, and it will be ready tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon.”

They will make it road safe, but ugly and I will have the body work done back in Florida.

The girl who hit us said she was reaching for her Chapstick. This repair is likely to be over $10,000 total. Her car looked really bad as well. Expensive morning. But, it’s just stuff. And no one was hurt.