Sidenote

Oh, and a word to the wise. If you are spontaneously driving down to the ocean, you should try to avoid driving over large mufflers lying in the middle of your lane of traffic. It doesn't do good things for your car. More specifically, it doesn't do good things for your front left tire. It will cause a two/three inch gash in your tire, which is more than sufficient enough to let all the air escape.

Yes, I hit the muffler that was lying across the left of my lane of traffic while driving down the freeway to the ocean. It blew my tire quite nicely, but thankfully didn't do any more damage than that. We managed to get the car off to the shoulder, and about five minutes later the department of transportation's "Incident Response Team" pulled up behind us (after picking up the muffler, and the shredded bits of tire that were in the road too, though not from my car). The DOT peoples were really nice, and they pulled out into traffic and had us drive in front of them at about 10 miles per hour until we reached the next exit, where they'd set up a sort of "car triage" unit. There, they changed our tire and directed us to the tire place that was just off the exit. The tire place happened to be Les Schwab, where my tires were from, and they replaced the tire for free.

Thus ended our adventure with the road debris, though it was only the beginning of our ocean adventures (which did include getting stuck in the sand, but that's another story...)