My friends and family never stop laughing about how anxious I always am, and how much I overthink. They never let me live down all the times I’ve called them near tears after I’ve worked myself up at the grocery store. Every time I take more than ten minutes to decide what to eat at family dinners, they taunt me. They think it’s so cute how I never fail to overpack the van in preparation for every worst case scenario under the sun, even on short weekend trips. But after this past weekend, they had to eat their laughter, because my overthinking saved us all. My family and I were traveling though the mountains and pulled over at a hotel we never would have stopped at if we didn’t have to. But there weren’t any others nearby, and the road had gotten too dark to safely drive on so high up. But the hotel’s less than lavish looks wasn’t our problem: when we entered our cramped, smelly room, the air was cold… Like, freezing cold. As in below 30 degrees. The front desk clerk told us over some phone game he was playing that the heating units were all pretty much the same in the hotel, and there were no other rooms or heaters for us. He never even offered to call an HVAC worker or the service department, and judging by how much more interested in his game he was than our chattering teeth, asking him to wasn’t going to get us far. Everyone’s nerves were quickly rising, with more than a little talk about the possibility of freezing to death in the night and making backup plans to cram into the rental van so we could use the heater all night. In the midst of this, I walked out to the van, dug around, and emerged with a tiny electric heater in hand. The area heater was enough to raise the temperature somewhere around 55 degrees, and all talk of freezing to death died away. Now, as often as they tease me, my family admits how good it was that I’d been ready for a complete HVAC failure wherever we travelled.