Bumps in the Road

While we would much prefer smooth sailing, we have been awed by God’s ability to provide and protect in unexpected ways as we have encountered several bumps in the road. I’ll list some examples here:

*April 6: The aforementioned “stair injury” when we left the stairs to the main door down then hit a curb with them. They were damaged but it could have been much worse, as they at least are still useable.

*April 14: rain delays and curvy roads caused us to delay our trip to Buffalo Mountain by a day…we were grateful to find a Cracker Barrel that allowed us to overnight in their parking lot that night.

April 16: at Buffalo Mountain we discovered that one of our tires was flat the day before we were to leave.

What a blessing that:

-the flat didn’t occur while we were driving on slick, windy roads

-the hosts had a tool to remove the over-tightened lug nuts

-this clued us into the fact that we needed to get the rig to the tire center to loosen all the lug nuts in case of a future flat (ahem…see a couple of bullets points down…)

*April 18: We were driving to Richard’s boarding school buddy’s house in Virginia when we suddenly saw water spray out from under the hood. Oh, dear. We were able to quickly pull off the road to a Circle K. Richard assessed the situation while the kids and I went into the Circle K for a restroom break. On our way in we noticed a man in a convertible and Creed admired his car. As we went back to the camper we noticed that the “convertible man” was looking under the hood with Richard. “Danny” (aka, “Convertible Man”) turned out to be our Good Samaritan! He is handy with cars and spent hours (seriously, HOURS) that day helping us out with a busted radiator. What are the chances?? Oh wait, not “chances,” but Providence! Richard will hopefully write a post with more details on the radiator.

*April 24: nail in sidewall of tire (yes, 2nd time, and same tire (that we had already replaced)). I noticed the nail as I was chocking the RV in New Jersey. Again, gratitude that there wasn’t a blowout or flat tire as we navigated the streets of New Jersey (just outside NYC). And since we had the lug nuts loosened to the proper tightness (after Buffalo Mountain incident), Richard was able to put our spare on with no issues.

*April 27: In the course of replacing the radiator, a cap was broken. Our next stop (in Essex, MA) was a Boondockers Welcome located at our host’s service station. He found out about the cap and our tire with a nail and immediately ordered new ones, in addition to changing our oil for us! We had changed the oil not too long before leaving home, but by the time we got to Essex we had hit 17 states…that’s a lot of miles, y’all! It was time for another oil change.

I can’t list all these provisions without admitting that I was wringing my hands and feeling a lot of stress and frustration from time to time. That’s one reason why I am so behind on blog posts; that stretch of time was pretty exhausting and I didn’t have the bandwidth for writing. But what was stressful and annoying could easily have been frightening or even dangerous. So, I am grateful to the Lord despite a few “bumps in the road!” And thanks so much for all of your prayers on our behalf. They really are a big deal. Much love to all of you! We are having tons of fun, but we also miss our people!!