Cross country trip- Part 1

Oh where to begin? Well, I supposed we'll begin at the beginning of our trip, but beware.... this will be a very long post! So it all started, for me, on Tuesday, June 21st. We had our family pictures taken and then my Mom, every so saint like, offered to take our kids until we left for our trip to PA. This was going to allow me to do oh so much, and pack too. :) Actually, I probably could have used at least another 2 days, but there was no way I could have gotten all done that I did without her (and my Dad) taking them for those 2 days. I got us all packed, cleaned most the house, got all the laundry done ( a feat for sure!) finally painted Cooper's bed, made bread to bring with us, and oat bars, had a dental cleaning plus 4 fillings filled, went to 2 exercise (the highlight), bought and planted 6 veggie plants, mowed the lawn, went to the library, grocery store, got the brakes fixed, did returns to 5 stores and got to sleep through the night. I'm tired just thinking of all I did, but mainly amazed that I could get all of that done in under 48 hours. Thank you thank you Mom and Dad!

So we began our trip around 4:00 on June 23rd and made it as far as Laramie Wyoming. Not too bad. It was a rough night though because we tried to find a hotel and stopped at like 7 places. It took us over an hour to find a hotel and one of the bad things was we were on our last day of our weight loss competition and because we couldn't find a hotel we missed our 100% on points for getting to bed too late. On a side note though, we did take 1st place in both points and weight loss. Brian was amazing. Here are our before and afters:

  So the next morning I couldn't go back to sleep. I was hoping to so I could get those last 10 points for sleep, but it wasn't going to happen, so I got up and went for a walk around the golf course and then tried to find a Wal-mart. Couldn't find one, so I went back to the hotel and was getting ready to go up to our room and Brian had come down. I realized that I left my phone cord in the car and needed it so I could upload our weight loss results and somehow when I grabbed the cord out, I dropped the keys in the car and locked them in. Funny thing, or not so funny, is that both Brian and I brought a spare key and they were both in the car. Arg! Brian handled it very well. I tried to find a wire hanger with no success, long story short, I married an amazing man. Just look how we got into our car!

 

I took these from our window and could hear him to explaining to people that no, he was not breaking into some one's car, simply his wife locked the keys in there.  It only took him about 20 minutes and he was able to pry the door open with some wood he found in the trees just by the parking lot. Amazing!

So as you can see, not a great start to the day, but not too awful, compared to what happened next. Yep.... next. I was driving and it was about 4:00 and all the sudden I couldn't move the steering wheel. It was mainly locked up and I was going like 75 in the fast lane. I looked and saw the check engine light, check gauges and that it was totally over heated. 

We pulled over and long story short, the serpentine belt had fallen off which ended up being a blessing since it was an easy repair and luckily the car shop was still open and we were able to get towed there and out in 2 hours. Since we had a car full with 5 kids they told us to just stay in the car and they'd tow us on top.  At least our view while we waited was pretty!

 Here we are still on top of the tow truck in front of the place that saved our day!

 It was kind of crazy. I truly thought we were going to tip over when they went through the ditch diving the 2 highways. The kids thought it was fun and seemed to stay in good spirits.

So we continued on our way, took about 1 1/2 hours to find a hotel and got a pretty good nights sleep just to do it all over again the next day 2 days. It was pretty uneventful, although the last night we could find a hotel and gave up to just take a little rest at a rest stop and continue on through the night. We made it in at 5:00 in the morning and were back out the door for church at 9:00. Brian was ever so sweet and let me sleep. He, however, was running on fumes for the rest of the day. So, note to everyone... book your hotels! Don't know what goes on in these cities, but for our trip back we made reservations. It's hard when you don't want to have to stop if you can keep going, but it sure beats trying to stay awake while you search for a hotel!