SC Trip

We took advantage of Andy being off from school the week of President's Day, so we drove (yes drove with 2 children over 2 days) down to SC. It was a long trip with a few unexpected car troubles, but we arrived safely and had a great time catching up with friends and family. In my naivete I thought it would be a tolerable drive, we would coordinate Gabriel's potty breaks with Judah's feedings. HA. HA. Each leg of the trip took a few hours longer than it should have because we literally stopped at least once an hour for EITHER Gabriel or Judah (sighs). We were fortunate to have friends/family for pit stops along the way! We were incredibly fortunate to walk away from what could have been disastrous car trouble in Richmond, VA on the way down. Let me try to sum it up: 

We are on day two of the drive down, Gabriel has been yelling in the back seat to get out for over an hour, Judah has been crying for about an hour, we have been in the car for about 5 hours and FINALLY pull off the highway for our pit stop for the night with a friend. Literally as soon as we turn onto our friend's street, the car begins to lurch and all of the gauges go nuts. Andy gets us safely to the house, unloads us for the night, looks up an AutoZone and is able to get the car there ... they run the codes, lift up the hood, say "dude, this is NOT good", Andy plays helpless (as it is 6pm on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend and NO ONE, including a dealer, will be open to help us), AutoZone employees make a call to a "local" who agrees to look at the car, Andy gets directions to this mechanic's shop, except it's just this Vietnamese guy named Sar who fixes cars in his backyard, which is in a sketchy neighborhood. He takes one look under the hood and explains that the car is not drive able without being fixed and curses the blankety-blank engineers for configuring the engine the way they did because the hose that blew is right next to ALL of the electrical wires for the entire car ... he even goes so far as to state that the car would've caught on fire had we been cruising down the highway when the hose blew (yikes). Andy explains that we have to drive to SC the next day and is there anything he can do. The man hammers something into the hole where the hose blew and says "that'll get ya to SC, then you're going to need to get it fixed". He charged Andy 20 bucks. That's it, 20 bucks! It would have been thousands of dollars to have a dealer fix it for us to continue driving, thank you Lord. He clearly knew what he was doing, as his fix got us all the way to SC where my dad and Andy were able to repair all of the damage themselves. Oh. My. Goodness.

The drive back was less eventful, although not less painful as the drive down ... we had planned to take Gabriel skiing at a local ski slope we had scoped near our half way point in VA, but upon arriving it was 68 degrees, so that plan was a bust :(. We did take advantage of the pool in the hotel, which Gabriel loved of course and Judah got to experience for the first time ... he really seemed to like the water.

We finally made it home with a few days to spare of Andy's vacation. It was a very long trip that we will not be doing again any time soon, but it was good to see everyone along the way. Enjoy the re-cap: