Our vacation melodrama, rife with love and hate, technological failure and success, idiocy and genius, began when Joe, our younger son, informed us that he wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas. He would be spending the time instead with friends in Paris. We were crushed.

We had been thinking about going to France in October and suggested that we meet him in Europe in December. While Joe is very kind—in thinking back to when I was 20, I suppose, if I tried really hard, I could imagine something worse than meeting my parents in Paris—he didn’t exactly encourage us to go out of our way to change our vacation plans.

So my wife and I despairingly looked at one another, still clinging to a hope which has since been dashed, that our older son Luke, who lives in Tokyo, would visit us during Christmas, and decided we should reevaluate our vacation plans.

Still wanting to work on my French, which over the years has degraded well below the high-school level I never learned, I proposed Tahiti as an exotic destination. My wife began to feel better, which is not to suggest that a mother’s wounded love can be healed by beautiful beaches, and began talking to a travel agent.

But costs rose, and air travel was difficult to schedule because we were trying to take our vacation during the Olympics (Tahiti is in the general direction of Sydney), and we thought we might get bored spending two weeks on a small, isolated, tropical island. Seeing an opening for a long-dormant desire, I suggested that we bag our Tahiti plans and go camping at National Parks. I reminded my wife that while we had frequently camped with Luke, we had never camped with Joe: it had been more than 20 years since my wife and I had camped together.

I watched the long-forgotten expression on my wife’s face as her eyes clouded with remembrances of black-bear, dirt-sleeping, middle-of-the-night-cold-treking-to-far-off-latrine excitement. She scowled, accusing me of having set her up. After enticing her to abandon French dreams for Tahiti beaches, she said, I was now ridiculously suggesting that it would be more fun to wallow about on lumpy, cold, wet, rock-larded earth.

For this parry I was prepared.

No, I protested. Never would I suggest camping in a tent. Instead, I told her, we should buy a tent trailer. She would have the comfort she needed; I would have the tent I craved. It would be the best of all possible solutions. Costing no more than a Tahiti vacation, we’d be able to camp again and again in the future.

Oh joy, her expression seemed to say, but, for inexplicable reasons, she agreed that it might be fun.

We checked out various tent trailers and found one we wanted, only to discover that none of our cars could tow more than 1,000 pounds. We decided to trade our ’96 Ford Contour, a really terrific car with 80,000 miles on it, for the smallest car we could find capable of towing about 3,000 pounds. While we knew this would mean we’d be spending more money than we had budgeted, we reasoned we could keep expenses down by finding an older used car with more miles. We had never before bought a used car but figured that purchasing one with a warranty from an established dealer would reduce our risk.

Unfortunately, an even trade for our Ford meant we were looking at cars and trucks that were almost ten years old with more than 100,000 miles on them. We started looking at newer used cars, realizing that our vacation costs were steadily climbing, and stopped at a Vallejo dealership where we drove a clean, ’97 Chevy Blazer with 48,000 miles on it. It was comfortable, quiet, not much bigger than our Ford, and could tow an elephant. We bought it with a four-year warranty—wanting to keep the ever-escalating costs down, I opted for the $200 deductible—and figured we were set.

Within a week, the transmission made ominous noises and the car, named Ruby by my wife, was difficult to start. The Service-Engine-Soon light, SOS, blinked its ominous yellow eye at me for the first time.

GM offers a 30-day safety warranty. The Vallejo dealer fixed the transmission without a deductible, so we paid nothing, but told us that the hard-starting problem couldn’t be reproduced. Since our vacation was still more than six weeks off, surely, we reasoned, any additional problems would be resolved before we departed.