after falling into our beds ( well, it was the bentz bed and schubert beds really :) wednesday night after midnight, exhausted from the day's events, we had planned on doing finishing touches around the house thursday morning and pulling out mid morning. i braced myself for leaving.. i had played out in my head how it would be to pull out from our neighborhood one last time. how it would feel to pull past 206 and bound up the hill. how it would feel to pass our turn to church and keep going, even though everything in me begged to turn. and finally how we would pass wood side inn, the place where our life in king george had begun 3 years earlier. when i thought about it i always cried, when i actually DID it, i sobbed... even as i remember doing it; i cry. leaving was SO HARD. being away from our VA life is SO HARD! it is particularly hard on sunday mornings when we long for our church family and all things familiar, and sunday afternoons when we long for deep rooted fellowship with our friends.
we very quietly left the county of king george and our hearts ached.
our morning/afternoon was going smashingly. we only had a little over 300 miles to go on our first day. my dad, andrew and some miscellaneous child were in the penske. vanna the chevy venture was loaded on the car carrier attached to said penske. (at this point it is vital to mention that the 26 foot penske truck was loaded to the brim and so was the mini-van on the car carrier) the rest of us were residing in honey the honda. it continued to be blazing hot. it was around late afternoon. we were still about 3 hours from hotel but progressing nicely. we switched the riding arrangements. i was driving honey with dad and andrew and two kids, and mark was driving the penske with the other two children. we were rolling through the hills of west virginia. mark was leading. obviously, the penske had to down shift every time we climbed a hill.. there were a lot of mountains in west virginia. the honda was doing LOTS of down shifting. on one particular hill the honda refused to down shift and died on me. quickly, i pulled to the side of the road at which point we tried to call mark, BUT we didn't have any service in the rolling hills of the mountains. mark kept on trucking. we died. after some experimenting a little we realized we could crank the van roll for about 30 seconds then the engine would disengage again. this allowed us to get a little further down the road and get phone service to contact mark. about that time a highway patrol man came flying up on my bumper with his lights on. i don't care if you are princess pure and holy, any time you see flashing lights in your rear view mirror, you want to pee your pants.
the highway patrol man was SUPER nice. he even allowed myself, katie, and lucy to ride in his car. at this point we already had our plan of action ready to go. mark was going to unload vanna from the car carrier, drive to the honda, load the honda on carrier, come back to me, and we would pull a swith-a-roo. unload stuff from vanna into honda and vice-versa. no tow truck necessary. just 3 loooonnnggg hours in the melting heat. dad willingly took the 4 grands to the partially air conditioned dairy queen while us young folks did the hard labor. when we were finished unloading and loading the vans, andrew literally rung his shirt out and you would have thought he had just jumped out from the pool. DISGUSTING!! ok, so at this point i didn't melt down, i just rolled with it. i kept thinking, it could be worse, it could be worse. our arrival to the hotel was going to be postponed til 10pm. no biggy. my kids had been staying up til at least 10pm for last month and half. the kids were being TOTAL troopers. dad just kept feeding them ice cream... :) after changing clothes, we grabbed dinner and were on our way. in my mind it was just a little 3 hour hic-up in the grand scheme things...
really, it was just the beginning of the night that refused to end....
~s
No comments:
Post a Comment