Travels to a far off land.

As most of y'all know me and my family, minus my brother and mother, traveled to V.A. about a week ago. It is a trip that has been made by members of our family for the past several years, since 2004 to be precise. But to start this story I will have to take you a year further back, to the 2008 trip. That time it was my two sisters and my brother who made the trip. My brother was still driving the first leg of our journey when the car started acting up. A sort of sputtering and choking fill to the way it was running. We made it all the way up to Houston before it broke down. This was the first time that we had ever broken down (in my memory, so the time when I was one does not count) on a trip. Triple A came to the rescue within ten minutes, however the toe truck could only hold one other person. So Calvin (my brother) went with the man driving the truck as me and my sisters headed for the closest donuts shop. In Gods mercy the mechanic shop was only a block from where we broke down. So Calvin walked back to where we were and took us to the shop where we began our first wait. Again mercy was shown to us, as the men who worked on the car stayed late to get us on the road again.

Late that night I was driving, as we were pushing hard to make up lost time. Around 11:45 or so I looked down and my thermometer. It was hovering right above the little red line on the wrong side of the meter. After an hour of driving with the heater turned on to full blast and the windows down trying to cool the engine down, we finally made it to a hotel. Next morning we found a mechanic shop and tried checking our selves in. But they were booked. That story repeated two or three times before we found one. But even then they were booked as well. However the owner of the shop felt so bad for the sorry lot of Texans that had just walked into his shop, that he did something unexpected. He came out of his two year retirement from being a mechanic and fixed our car himself. He got us back on the road after only two hours, for which we were and still are grateful. The first time we broke down it turned out to be the fuel pump that had gone bad. The second and final time was the thermostat in the radiator that had went out. It was 1:30 am when I pulled that car into the parking lot at Bluefield Collage for the family conference. We had mist the first night of it.

One year later and two week ago. We were about an hour and a half from home when the van started filling with the smell of gasoline. Upon getting out and inspecting the damage I found that we were leaking gas very bad. My father turned us around and we headed back south for about twenty minutes before reaching a gas station where we tried to find a mechanic who could fix the problem. Only thing was, I had to work earlier that day so we left home at 5:30 P.M. which of course means that all the shops are closed. however we were saved yet again. We got a hold of a mechanic on wheels and gave him directions on how to find us. He soon found the problem after he arrived and with the right tools fix us up and had on the road after only a hour or so lost. Skipping forward. When we left Tazwell V.A. and started home the last thing on our minds was worrying about having car trouble. I mean we already had on breakdown this trip, and two last year...but that is what we ended up doing from V.A. to T.X. after we left, the sound of small part of tire hitting the undercarriage of our van motivated us to pull over. Again I inspected and found that the driver side rear tire had started to came undone. However we pushed on. From state to state, we moved closer to home and the hope that the tire would hold became more and more of a reality. However we never found out. The passenger side rear tire blowout before the driver side. No problem...all we had to do was replace it with the spare tire. Big problem...one of the nuts was striped. Try as we would nothing work in getting it off. Triple A said it would take them an hour and forty five minutes to get to us. So we found a cow pasture and sat down under some trees and waited for our rescue. It came...an hour and thirty minutes early. Not Triple A but a man who had a socket set. He found a socket that almost fit and with the help of a hammer we had, he went to work. It ended up reshaping the nut down to the size of the socket. Again, for the fourth time in two years we were saved, by the kindness of complete strangers. We fixed the other tire at the next town.

Another post will follow highlighting the time that was spent at the Family Conference. featuring new and old friends, good fellowship, fun dancing, and some of the best competition in sports.

Robert L.