An Unexpected Adventure

Last week, Josh's sweet 97 year old grandmother passed away. We were sad that she was gone, but she lived a fabulous life and we have faith that she is happy where she is now.

This event brought about a trip to Boise to be at the funeral. We did our best to try to make it a kid friendly trip as much as possible and found some fun, free things to do in Boise so the kids and I would not just have to sit in the hotel while Josh was helping prepare the funeral. Besides, a trip to Boise for eight is not cheap so any money we had set aside for a mini vacation this summer was now being used for this trip, so we needed to make it the best we could.

.

Anyway, once we arrived in Boise, the casing to our drive train exploded.

.

Literally.

.

We found the pieces of twisted and burned metal all over under the suburban in the parking lot of Walmart.

This was turning into an adventure.

So, we called the local Big-O Tires and they came to our rescue. I cannot say enough good about those guys. They went above and beyond what they had to do to track down the part (which wasn't so easy) and get it repaired and installed and still have us on the road without having to pay for any bonus hotel nights. They were amazing.

Also, miraculously, the local car rental place happened to be having a "sale" (I don't know what to call it) and the rental car for those days ended up only costing us $21. It cost $12 to replace the gas we used so the car was almost as inexpensive as the fuel.

Even if this was a not-so-welcome and not-so-inexpensive calamity, we still feel very blessed. We feel blessed that the piece didn't explode while we were on the road in the middle of nowhere (which is a lot of the road between Salt Lake and Boise). We feel blessed that we had family nearby to help us get where we needed to go. We feel blessed that we happened upon incredible people to help us get our car running again and get around in the mean time. This could have been so much worse in so many ways.

We didn't end up being able to do much more than swim in the hotel pool a couple of times a day, but we were able to honor Josh's wonderful grandmother and that is what we were really there for.

It was definitely an interesting weekend.