Is it real or not?

We were underemployed, underpaid, and scraped together enough money to pay for expenses in stages. Race fee, used bikes, sale gear, and swim lessons. Flying was out if the question, so after five months of hard training, we loaded everything in Ginger's Explorer and hit the road for a 24hr drive west. Forget the race, we were hardly prepared for the road trip.
Just on the way there we almost ran out of gas twice, in the middle of the night, passing through El Paso. We made it to San Francisco by midnight to share a friend's "luxuriously large" hotel room,which was in fact smaller than a postage stamp. We decided to walk down the street to a local bar about for a nightcap. It took us through a lovely little neighborhood with real drug dealers on the corner. We bailed and just called it a night, with two of us sleeping on the floor between the door and the bathroom.

We made it to Santa Rosa, pushed our bodies for 6+ hours in the heat, and we're back on the road. We but managed to pack up and hit the Korbel champagnery for a celebratory toast. The hard part is behind us! Little did we know.

The highway was closed at the San Fernando Valley so we were stuck in traffic 2 hours without air conditioning. We stepped into zombieland. Every person we saw looked drugged out and homeless - no shoes, torn clothing, crazy eyes. We couldn't get out of there fast enough. But it wasn't long before we were hours out in the middle of nowhere, before we heard a loud thunk and felt a tire wobbling. We pulled over on the side if the road and tried to change the flat, but it was still making a loud noise. There wasn't a thing in sight and no cell service. We tried driving slowly down the shoulder and came upon an oasis. There was a deserted auto repair shop with rusted out cars, abandoned gas pumps and plastic curtains where doors should be. "Hello?" we yelled and in fact a craggy old man in overalls appeared. He told us the bearings had fallen off the wheels and it would be 5 hours before he could fix it. Five hours we spent huddled under the shade of the decommissioned gas pumps, reading my friend's movie script in dramatic voices. 95 degrees in the shade but miracle of all miracles we got it fixed and figured we had just enough time to drive through the night and coast into town in time for work the next morning. I tried to look it up, but that auto shop had no name and no listing. It didn't exist as far as the Internet knew. Maybe it wasn't real, but we made it home.