Finding Education in our Vacation: The drive

We are finally beginning to dig ourselves out of the mess and the icky cold thing we seem to have developed so I thought maybe I should share what happened on our trip.  As usual God was totally involved and I have lots of awesome pictures to boot.

Our trip was divided into 4 parts–two visits with one set of friends, one visit with bloggy friends, and a trip to OC, Maryland.  To start we had a 5 hour drive to our friends’ place in Alexandria, VA.  The first few hours were totally uneventful.  We stopped at my grandma’s on the way through where she gifted us with a bit more money for the trip (we already had enough for the whole trip but God knew we would need more.)

Once we got back on the road we drove for several hours without stopping.  Then, just after taking a break at a rest stop we hit trouble.  Traffic was backed up for several miles for over an hour due to an accident.  At this point I gave the kids the camera so they could take pictures of the windmills above.  They then read books, listened to Lord of the Rings on the cd player, and played while we waited for traffic to start moving again.  I decided to save gas and turned the car off with just the blinkers on.  Bad move.  You may remember from previous stories of our poor little car that it has issues, especially with  the alternator belt and the battery dying.  Um, yeah.  Just as the traffic strted moving my battery died.  Now this time I remembered to bring my jump starter.  A nice trucker stopped and helped me get the car off the road then tried to help me jump the car.  No go–the kids had used the jump starter to pump up a giant floatie and I forgot to recharge it.  The kids and I started back to the service plaza asking all the stopped cars along the way if they had jumper cables–finally we found someone who did but didn’t know how to use them, then some others who were willing to help us use them.  Then a tow truck arrived–it seems that the helicopters who were flying over for he accident called in to say that there was a car blocking the road. After everyone made sure it would be all right they went on their way leaving the tow truck driver to help.  The car jumped no problem and the cost was EXACTLY how much my grandma had given us (the driver tried to get me to call around for someone with AAA but since I knew I didn’t know anyone with it and that I HAD the money–I knew God had provided it just for this, I didn’t fuss about it.

We made it the rest of the way with nary a problem.  The kids handled all of it wonderfully and loved seeing how God had provided for us, a wonderful lesson to learn early in life.