Fabio

There has been much talk of Fabio in our lives recently. Why is an Italian model invading our Irish vacation?

...Over 4th of July weekend, our family celebrated at King's Dominion Amusement Park, and as we waited in line for various roller coasters, we reminiscing about our past trips to Busch Gardens, Disney World, etc. And while I'm mentioning Busch Gardens, does anyone remember when the model Fabio rode in the very front of the newest ride, Apollo's Chariot?? And that a bird smashed into his nose...

http://www.ultimaterollercoaster.com/news/archives/april99/stories/040199_01.shtml

Well...we named our rental car Fabio after similiar events. Model Fabio got himself an f-ed up nose on a roller coaster and our Toyota Fabio got himself an f-ed up nose on a gravel hill in Glendalough. Note: we had been in possession of this car for LESS THAN 4 HOURS, and had successfully driven straight through Dublin, on the other side of the road, narrowly "missing" a small tap of our sideview mirror with another car's sideview mirror. Things were going well for us. At this point in our first day of travels, we were jet-lagged, had to pee, Kate was hungry and we both just wanted to get out of the damn car and enjoy some green grass. We had finally found our way to the street where our B&B was located, but unfortunately, the hand-drawn map our innkeeper had emailed us wasn't cutting it. We just couldn't find the "Big old oak tree" noted on the map amongst the many other "Big young oak trees" growing along the road. So Charlie was turning the car around for the 7 thousandth time to try and find the inn's gate, when we hear gravel crunching and some popping sounds. Oh no.

Charlie negotiates the car down the little hill and we hop out to assess the damage. Not surprisingly, the rental office hadn't given us their best car (I wonder why??), and our little Toyota Aventis has nearly lost it's entire front bumper. Seriously, the thing was hanging on by a few little latches. We decided to do our best to pop it back in, find our B&B and ask them what we should do.

In the end, we decided to hang onto the car, and for the first week, we'd have to stop about once a day to pop the nose back into place. At one point, as Charlie is laying on a pair of pants, in the middle of the Irish wilderness, trying to pop the undercarriage back into place, he came up with the perfect name for our car: Fabio.

On our longest day of driving, along the West Coast, we picked up some tape to basically tape the bumper to the body of the car. And wouldn't you know, the bumper stayed in place for the rest of the trip, an the nose didn't even come un-popped from the hood for the duration of the trip. We managed to turn him back into the rental office without incident, or fees, and just like that, Fabio was no longer with us. Not that we were sorry to see him go. The car had several idiosyncrasies that made it not at all user friendly, and was pretty dinged up. And the front left tire lost a lot of air b/c of all the parking we had to do on the sidewalks.

RIP, Fabio.