It always rains in Chillicothe

The dud truck that caused us so much trouble and hassle.

What a day.  I don't even know where to start.

Dan drove Dad to go get the products truck at the Sheriff's Office (they kind of frown on leaving trucks with mass amounts of explosives near hotels...) and started for Chillicothe, which was a drive a little over 2.5 hours.  Mom followed in her car, and Dan and I in the truck with trailor.  At 9:00 a.m., I get a phone call from Dad saying that his truck (with all the explosives) was stranded at a rest stop along Route 71.  Now, This is a HUGE problem for MANY reasons.

1. It's July 4th.  No one is coming to fix it.

2.

Moving stuff from the dud truck to the good truck. We're already very late.

3. We're already running behind on a very LARGE show.

Dad and Mom take off for a nearby town (Mansfield) and gets a truck from another guy in our company.

  Meanwhile, we call the rental truck place and let them know we're stranded.  Dan and I sit at a road side rest along 71 for 2.5 hours amusing ourselves by counting cars that go by.  Dad returns with the other truck.  Now, we have to unload an entire show off the broken down truck into the new truck, which the three of us do successfully and fairly quickly.  Dad zooms off in the new truck, Dan and I follow him, and Mom sits at the rest stop waiting for the truck repair person.

The shirt explains it all.

We arrive at Chillicothe around 2:00 p.m. for a show that's to go up around 10:00 p.m.  This is cause for LARGE amounts of stress.  While setting the fronts (ground show - that's my baby) I tripped over a firework and thought I broke my foot.

Now you have to understand, you can't just stop working in this business.  We simply were out of time.  There could be no setbacks or the show doesn't go up.  So Dad found me an instant ice pack, I took my sock off and put the ice pack into it and used the super adhesive tape to secure the pack-filled-sock to my foot.  I then took a K-Mart plastic bag and taped it around my foot so it didn't get wet.  Hobbling all over the site, we ended up doing final checks and firing at 10:15.  Sitting only a few feet away from the 10" shells, it was quite a rush.  Due to the rain and pressed time constraints we didn't get pictures at Chilli.

Me after driving my first "big rig".

After the show it's clean up time and this is the part I hate the most.  However, God smiled on us and sent torrential rain.

  We can't do a full clean up in the rain.  So we grabbed the firing system, threw it in the truck, and left for the hotel (but not before the rain drenched us).  If you're ever in Chillicothe Ohio, STAY AT THE BEST WESTERN!  It was clean, the room was nice, and the staff is friendly.  Needless to say, Dad and I were soaked to the bone.  The gal behind the counter let us into the hotel laundry faculities to dry our things in the dryer!  We were able to get about 5 hours of sleep that night.

We woke up the next morning and went back to the site.  3 of us cleaned up this massive show.  It's dirty, back-breaking work.  6 hours later, we filled the truck but still had racks to load.  So we sent our helper home and Dad and I took off to get the truck that previously broke down and was supposed to be fixed.  We needed that truck to finish loading.  Off we went...