"Adulting" and the Rule of Three

Well, we started our road trip on Saturday without driving anywhere all day. I guess that's another way of saying that we decided to leave on Sunday instead. Friday turned out to be a traumatic day of "adulting" so we weren't quite prepared to leave Michigan. 

I thought Brandon and I had made up the word "adulting", but a google search proved otherwise. Apparently it's a thing. Urban dictionary defines it as the following: Adulting (v): to do grown up things and hold responsibilities such as, a 9-5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grown ups. 

There are many benefits of adulting (including eating ice cream or cheesecake for any meal you want), but, of course, all good things come with difficulties and responsibilities as well. The first chore of adulting on Friday required us to make sure our car insurance company had our new address. We've changed our address to my parents' house after giving up our rental in Holland. The insurance company required current pay stubs or utility bills to prove our new address, both of which we don't have as we're not working or renting a place. We had done the address change on our driver's licences, so we were hoping that would suffice, but we hadn't heard back if the change was accepted or not. Brandon chatted with the insurance company online and they straightened the situation right away. It was a blessedly easy interaction. 

A second session of adulting occurred on Friday after discovering that our health insurance company had not been receiving our electronic automatic payments set up through our bank and was terminating our health insurance. What?! We had done all the appropriate paperwork for this payment system weeks ago. And the company had already been doing this for our health account with them last year. And, despite requesting paperless communication from them we learned all of this from paper mail. Seriously?! After many discussions with our insurance agent and the health insurance company, it was determined that our insurance plan from last year had never been cancelled. Ironic, since we wanted to keep that one, but the insurance company required us to drop that plan and get a better one. Brandon is 30 years old, and apparently at 30 years old your health is depleted enough that you are required to have a plan with a lower deductible. So, in the end we had two health insurance plans and confusion of the automatic payments. Brandon did his best to resolve the whole thing, but with it being a Friday and the weekend coming, we're still going to have to check in again next week to get it all sorted. 

Unfortunately the "Rule of Three" of the universe required that we had to have one more incident of unfortunate adulting on Friday. So on our way to get some errands done around town we were rear ended by another car. Arghhhh! We weren't at fault; the road was wet and the 20 something year old driver failed to pay attention and apply his brakes soon enough. The hood of his car was clearly a bit crumpled, but we had no visible damage other than some small paint loss. The bumper did its job. Despite having no visible damage we now had to worry that there could be hidden damage and we were leaving on our road trip out West the next day and it was too late on a Friday afternoon to have our car looked at with the weekend fast approaching. Arghhhh again! 

Since then we've test driven our car a couple times and there seems to be no issues. We thought at one point during our test drives we smelled smoke, but oddly it smelled more like cigarette smoke. Upon further investigation we found a cigarette butt smashed on the driver's side floor, so Brandon must have accidentally tracked it in during our errands. The universe was just not on our side Friday. But at least it wasn't something wrong with our car. Thankfully, our car insurance company is a large national corporation so we can always have things checked out in the Quad Cities if something comes up in the next few days. And, most importantly there was no bodily injury. 

So with all that adulting and the "Rule of Three" we gave up on leaving on Saturday and pushed back our road trip a day. Life improved with a visit to our friends, the Blanskis, on Friday night and then hanging out with Pauley on Saturday and doing some productive Spain planning. We gave ourselves more time to pack and to relax. So now we're calmer and ready to go. Onward and out West!