Something to Blog About

For Thanksgiving Darren and I went to Oregon and surprised his family. They had no idea that we were planning to come up there for the week so it was really exciting. Darren's family does this silly thing that whenever people come home everyone in the house pretends like they are asleep. Sometimes they even drop to the ground in the middle of the floor and pretend to sleep when someone walks through the door. When we were staying at their house this summer, I would always laugh while I was pretending to sleep. I thought it was so funny and I had the hardest time keeping a straight face. So when we went there for Thanksgiving Darren came up with the idea to ring the doorbell and then pretend we were asleep on their doorstep. They loved it that we surprised them and we had a really fun time with them in Oregon. We did a lot of black Friday shopping and hanging out with family. On Saturday Darren's parents work in the temple so Darren and I were going to go to a session so we could spend more tine with them. We drove Darren's dad's car to the temple and on the way his car started to act super weird. I thought Darren was just swerving a lot but a few seconds later we heard a pop and the car started jerking. Luckily, we were able to pull over safely. Darren got out of the car and saw that the back tire had popped. We were both in church clothes and we both had no cell phones. It is really scary being pulled over on the freeway with all of the cars zooming past you. It took us a while to get the car jack and the tire out of the car and I hadn't even realized someone had pulled over to help us. The guy asked us if we were going to a wedding, we told him no, but he said one time he was on his way to a wedding and his tire blew but no one pulled over to help him so he got all dirty. He didn't want us to have to get dirty so he offered to change the tire for us. It was so nice and we were so appreciative! We ended up missing the temple session but we were just happy that everything worked out. The next day when we were driving back to Rexburg our bad car luck continued. We had been driving for about 6 hours when we noticed that the speedometer on our car was flickering back and forth, it started to make us pretty worried and then we got even more worried when a bunch of lights started coming on like the airbag light and the ABS light. I told Darren to pull over right away, luckily he didn't listen to me and waited until the next exit to pull over because when we got off, our car completely died. Everything was dead. The lights wouldn't even turn on. We were driving 2 girls we had found from the ride board that we didn't even know very well, but we all got out and pushed the car to the nearest gas station. It was pretty lucky that we only had to push it for a minute and then the car was able to roll the rest of the way because it was downhill. When we pulled into the gas station we called Darren's parents and told them about what had happened. They said there was nothing we could do for our car that day because it was Sunday and the shops were closed. Darren's family just happened to know some people who were driving to Utah and they were an hour behind us. They came and picked up the two girls that were riding with us so they could take the shuttle in Boise back to Rexburg. A few people stopped by because they saw that we were broken down and they said they thought it was a computer problem with our car which is very expensive to fix. We were super bummed because of the situation that we were in and that we were going to have to miss class the next day. Even though we were in a stressful situation Darren and I remained pretty calm, except I did cry for a few minutes to my mom, but other than that we handled the situation well and worked really good together. We couldn't have been luckier about where we broke down. Even though we were kind of in the middle of nowhere, Darren just happens to have a great aunt who lives in the middle of nowhere. She was only a few exits down the highway, so after sitting at the gas station for at least 4 hours trying to get everything situated, she came and picked us up. We were worried about leaving our car over night with all of our stuff in the car but Darren's second cousin, Kay is a police officer so he called some of his buddies and had them drive by a car a couple of times. Kay also called a mechanic for us and he came out the next morning to look at our car even though it was his day off. We figured out that a connecting fuse had fried and that little fuse powers the whole car. They don't usually carry that specific part in the stores but the mechanic was able to make one for us. Once we got that little wire fixed, our car was good to go! And guess what? The fix only cost 25 dollars! Wahoo! We couldn't have been more blessed! Throughout this whole situation everyone kept telling us that we had an angel watching over us. Considering the circumstances, things worked out so well. We could have broken down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and things would have been a big mess. God was watching over us and we realize that it wasn't just luck. Everything worked out and it didn't even cost us hardly anything to fix the car. We are so thankful for how things happened, and to know that God was watching over us. It was a good Thanksgiving week that reminded us of all of our many blessings!