Becoming Bosom Friends with Your Vehicle (or, Secrets of a GMC)

By Shannon

Twelve days out makes our just-finished road trip the longest our family has ever taken. In that time we’ve driven the north-south length of Saudi Arabia and skirted the Persian Gulf through the United Arab Emirates and half of Oman. Long live our GMC Yukon!

It was the first time since we purchased the vehicle that it had returned to Riyadh, where it had lived before it was ours. It was only by chance that we came into possession of the Yukon—weeks after we first arrived in Jeddah I had mentioned to one of my neighbors that we were struggling to find a vehicle that would meet our needs. She had accompanied her husband on a trip to Riyadh later that week and saw a flier advertising the sale of our destined Yukon. She jotted down the info and passed it off to us when she returned to Jeddah, and the vehicle was ours within a week.

A schweet panorama from the coast of Oman. The gallant Yukon waits patiently for the kids to finish going potty (kids not pictured).

Our family has driven all over Saudi Arabia in this beast of a GMC. It has braved the bone-rattling non-Muslim detour around Mecca, spirited us across the Empty Quarter, tried not to look puny among the towering sandstone plateaus of the northwest of the Kingdom, and gripped the safe side of the suicidal switchback road that climbs into Al-Baha.

And all this time and all this distance, we didn’t even know that our Yukon is a Mormon lover. That revelation didn’t come until our recent trip when I reached into one of the passenger pockets to fish out a barf bag for one of the kids, and I retrieved a Young Women’s activity agenda from 2011.

Last week I pulled out that agenda again when we were sand-surfing with a group of LDS friends in Riyadh, just to prove that I was telling the truth. And wouldn’t you know it, that agenda found its way into the hands of the woman who had printed it three years earlier. “This activity took place in my house!” she laughed. 

The Yukon also laughed (inwardly, of course). We felt privileged that the Yukon saw fit to confide some of its history to us. That's a rare event.