Sploosh!

Fifteen years ago my then-significant other named Pearl and I had loaded the back of the pickup truck camper for an extended trip to Baja California. We were located along Highway One an hour north of San Francisco along a tightly winding road. After situating everything we could possibly need in a primitive desert environment such as Baja by the means of car-camping in the back of the pickup truck, we set out at a leisurely pace for a ten hour drive to San Diego to my brother's house.

It wasn't slow enough. Or perhaps we hadn't tied in the water container well enough. Or perhaps we were too excited about who else we were about to visit on the way there. At any rate, as the driver I swung a little wide on one of the turns and over-corrected a little too fast...and the 5 gallon water container dumped it's contents on our bed.

My significant other pointed to a steep driveway to pull off the road. With the nose of the car pointing up, most of the water went out the back of the tailgate so didn't spend more than thirty seconds soaking the back of the truck. We got out of the car and re-tied the water container after mostly emptying it.

Back in the car and driving down the road, we admonished ourselves for filling up the water dispenser before we left, and not tying it down properly so it fell over.

"Hey," I looked at my significant other and said, "SPLOOSH!" and I started laughing.
"Sploosh? What is Sploosh?" he ranted. "How can it be so funny that our bed and stuff in the back is soaked!"
"Sploosh!" I explained. "We're driving for the next ten hours in the desert with the windows open, blowing hot air on our bed for hours."

Later, we found ourselves halfway down Baja to "Bahia de Los Angeles" on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja. I had become more than a little worried because somehow, despite having a really cool calculator-calendar, Pearl had mis-calculated the amount of gas required to get home. (He had an excuse, which was he had just quit smoking and wasn't in his right mind.) We talked about calling my brother for a rescue when we got closer to the Tiajuana border, or leave our truck and getting just ourselves back to San Diego and going back for the truck...or something. In the meantime we figured it wasn't any different if we continued our camping trip; only the change of heading home the most direct route.

A little closer to the border, I was cleaning out the car near Bahia Conception to repack after camping for our last week, intending to get the dust out of the car. Hidden under the driver's seat footwell mats by the previous owner, I found three stained old travelers checks that totaled three hundred dollars.

"Hey, check this out! As I brandished the checks. "Apparently, a fateful redemption."

"Oh yeah," Pearl quipped. "Sploosh!"