Monday, December 28, 2009

I’ll be stuck in my car for Christmas. You can’t count on me.

Not really.  This story has a happy ending.  The stuck in the car part was only temporary.  If 11 hours is “temporary.”
Christmas Eve day, this family of four left from Grant’s grandparents house in southern Missouri to head to OKC to see Justin, Erin, and new baby Haylie.  It should have been about a 3-hour trip or so.  But there was bad weather, so we were thinking it may take 4. 
Halfway there, the weather got bad.  The kind of bad that stresses me out.  The kind of bad that makes Grant and me fight about the tone of my voice.   The kind of bad where you pass a hundred cars in the ditch.  The kind of bad where you call any car that passes you an idiot.  The kind of bad where it takes you 7 hours to go 11 miles! 
Christmas 09 031
On top of all those good times, how much gas did we have?  Not much.  The dashboard read “0 miles until empty” for a large part of this trip.  We had to turn off the car off several times, and things got pretty cold inside the Jeep.  There was a lot of praying going on, to say the least. 
The cause of this delay?  14 inches of snow and ice, closed highways, jack-knifed semis, and hundreds of cars stuck in the middle of the road.  If it were a game, it would have been called BlindFoldedBumperCarSlipNSlideMazePrayForYourLife.   
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The boys' behavior during the delay was surprising well.  Thank you Lord for those DVD players.  And thank you Great Grandma Cornell for sending all those cookies with us on the trip. 
When I wasn’t praying, I Facebooked to pass the time.  A couple hours later, when my phone was dead, and the really real reality of having no gas was staring us in the face, I regretted using my phone’s precious battery life on such frivolous social networking. 
Lots more praying…..
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We did our best to make the best of it.  We let the boys get up out of their seats when the car was off, and they were thrilled with that kind of freedom.  We sang “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” a million or two times, and we had fun counting all the cars in the ditch.  Is that last part weird?  
  Christmas 09 035
Anwho, we made it through without a scratch and have never been so happy to see the inside of a house.  Thank You Lord!  I would have been thrilled to sleep on the garage floor, but luckily Justin and Erin gave us a nice warm bed instead. 

1 comment:

  1. Oh, goodness, Brei -- what an experience. I was kinda worried about you guys that night -- I thought you might have literally spent the night on the highway! So glad you guys were okay!

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