Fall Break Trip

For Fall Break (which was the first week or so of this month) I went to Monica's house about five hours away in a small town in Indiana. We left campus around 6:30 on Thursday evening planning on getting there around midnight or a little after to surprise her parents. Her mom knew we were coming sometime on Friday but didn't know when and the rest of her family didn't know we were coming at all

Going there, we had gone a little over a half an hour down the road when the car started shaking then it would stop for a second, shake again, stop for a second, shake and die. We coasted to the side of the interstate and let the car cool for a couple minutes then checked the coolant and other fluids and everything seemed to be fine so we continued on. We had only been going about a minute when the car started it's shaking spells again. We pulled to the side of the road again and did the same routine. We tried to think of what to do... our options were to turn back and eventually get back to school or keep driving to her house in hopes that we would someday get there. I decided to call my Dad and asked him what he thought it might be. While he was talking to Monica a truck driver stopped and backed up to us. He got out and asked if we needed any help. We hung up with Dad and told this guy (we think his name was Jim) what was going on. He took out one of the filters and beat it a round a little and looked at some other things. He found out where we were headed and said he was heading in the same direction so if we wanted him to he would follow us until we had to part a couple hours down the road that way if it happened again he could help us or help us call for help. We agreed and continued on our way. About a half hour to an hour later we got onto the wrong road and lost Jim. We praised God that the car was fine the rest of the way.

We arrived at Monica's about about 2:00 or so Friday morning. In order not to wake anyone up we PUSHED the car into the driveway. The dogs began to go crazy and Monica headed into her parents room to surprise them and boy did she ever!

We finally got to bed and tried to sleep in but that was hard to do with everybody waking her up to say hi as they found out we were there. When we finally did get up we ended up making crepes for breakfast/lunch which were AMAZING! Then visited her sister-in-law and little nephew. Later we went back to the house and got showered and changed and went to the little fair downtown and then Sabbath we traveled a couple hours to their old church and spent the rest of the weekend there with some other family members of hers and got back to her house on Sunday afternoon/evening.

We decided we would leave on Monday so we could have a day to get settled back in before classes started on Wednesday. It's a good thing we did! We were about three hours down the road on our return trip when the car started having seizures again. We thought that it would straighten itself out again like last time and we'd be on our merry way. We made sure to check fluids again just in case and let it sit for a couple minutes and tried continuing. We did this quite a few times and it wasn't getting any better. We went for a few hours starting and stopping, starting and stopping but it just kept getting worse. We started timing how long we waited versus how long we could drive. It got so bad that we waited 20 minutes to go TWO minutes down the road. Then we waited 30 minutes to go FIVE minutes!!! By that time we were about a mile and a half out from the nearest town (Logansport, IN) While we were waiting we had called a ton of guys we thought MIGHT be able to help us but everyone was gone to Southern. I finally called Paul because I knew he was there. He was in the middle of something and said he would be done really soon and would call us when he was on his way. By the time he called we thought we had figured out the problem (coolant was below the low line by a lot) so we put him on standby.

We started driving and didn't get very far and we started hearing this awful bubbling sound. We stop and she realized she had filled the coolant over the maximum line. We called her mom to see if that was ok then she sheriff stopped and we asked him, they both said it would be fine. So we drove another minute and the car shook and died again. We called Paul back and he said he was on his way.

I had seen a garage on the way into town that obviously had somebody working in it. We managed to find our way back there and a guy had decided he hadn't gotten enough done during work so he had gone back in about a half hour before we got there (we were there around 10:00pm) The garage was an auto body garage but the guy knew a lot about all parts of cars. He checked a few things and finally arranged a place for us to leave the car and he was going to take car of everything and let her know what was going on. So after exchanging contact information we headed some place to wait for Paul that had was open 24 hours and had a lighted area to wait in. We found ourselves waiting in the CVS parking lot for about 2 hours.

Paul arrived around 12:30am and we loaded our luggage into his already full car (he had EVERYTHING from his puppet ministry in there including a chest, some big plastic tubs, pvc pipe, and some other things. I crammed into the back on top of the back of the seat which had to be down so everything would fit, my head could touch the ceiling/back window when sitting right, and my knees were in the back of Monica's seat. Monica sat with things in her lap and there were pipes and what not going thru the console. But we made it back fine. We were back on campus by 2:45 Tuesday morning. Luckily Monica and I both slept until about 12:30 or so but poor Paul had to be to work at 8 or 8:30 that morning so he only got 4 hours of sleep!

I praise God for everything he provided us with on that trip and all the people He sent to help us, friends that are willing to drop everything to help, and for His love and protection! God is so good to us!