Family Blog: A weekend to remember...

We had a very memorable weekend. We were invited to our friend Mark & Julie's in Dubuque for their son, Asher's birthday party. We haven't seen where they live yet and there was nothing on our calendar for the weekend so we decided to make the trip. We left Saturday at noon and planned to be back early this morning for Zach's basketball game at 12:30. So it was a short, quick trip.

We actually got on the road at the time we were planning which never happens for me! Zach drove and Isaac fell asleep right away, which was the plan. However, that is pretty much where the plan ended. I should back up and say that we took our trailblazer in on Friday to replace a vaccuum pump that was causing our check engine light to be on. The guy told me that they had to put the vehicle on the hoist and leave it in neutral for a couple hours, so it ran our battery down. But he didn't seem concerned and I didn't think anything more of it.

We reached interstate 80 and after passing every car on the road, with ease, we realized that our spedometer might be a little off. Zach slowed down and tried to gage off the semi's where 70 miles an hour was. He finally set the cruise at 45 and we stayed with traffic. We estimate that before we realized it was broken, we were probably doing 100 mph! Shortly after we got on I-380 north our vehicle started vibrating and not 2 minutes after Zach asked me if I felt it, our tire blew out. Zach got us off to the side of the road safely and we started getting the necessary supplies to change the tire. Luckily we have a full size spare. Unfortunately we had to take Isaac out of his carseat to reach the jack underneath the back seat. Isaac sat in the front with me and had so much fun being a "big" person.

You might be thinking, "wow that's some bad luck". It gets worse. Zach changed the tire, we got Isaac back in his seat, we went to start the car and everything was locked up. I noticed our hazard lights were no longer on and so we determined that our battery was dead. We aren't stranded on the road very often and I have to say I've never called Triple A. Don't know how...so I called 911. This method probably took longer but eventually someone came to jump start us. The guy couldn't bypass the battery so we sat there hooked up for 10 minutes while our battery charged. We were thinking we would have to be towed and our trip was over. However, charging the battery worked and we started right up! The guy was nice enough to tell us a place to have our spare blown up for free. We finally got back on the road after 2 hours of sitting on the side of the road. But we must not have been paying attention because we missed our next turn off and ended up a few miles out of our way. Luckily Zach had researched our route and realized this before it was too late.

We made it to Dubuque, got lost trying to find our friends house, but we finally reached our destination an hour after the party had started and 5 hours after we left our house. Isaac and Asher had such fun together and it was great to see our friends again.

You'd think that would be the end of our terrible luck but at the hotel Saturday night Isaac tripped in the bathroom and split his upper lip open. Not something one wants to deal with at 9:00 after Isaac only slept 45 minutes all day. There was lots of blood but we got ice on it and it finally stopped bleeding. He doesn't look too bad today. I am happy to say that our ride home was boring and uneventful!