Driving to Florida

   September 3, 2013-We loaded the last few things in the car this morning and probably exceeded the weight limit of the van!  The rack for our bikes on the van was nearly touching the ground because of the weight.  We only had a clearance of a few inches!
It was certainly very different to have the family divided between two cars on a road trip, but at least we planned to drive down all in one day.  Mom and I got in the van and Kate, Benjamin, Noah and Lydia rode in Kate’s car.  Lydia was nice enough to let Benjamin sit in the front seat with her.
  Mom hadn’t had a good night’s sleep the night before, or the night before, or the night before that, therefore, by mid-morning she was having a hard time staying awake while driving-despite my efforts to keep her awake through the powers of music.  We pulled off the highway to do a “Chinese fire drill” and let me drive.  I continued driving until we stopped for gas and ate lunch.

Making sandwiches (and getting our water kefir :-D)  when stopped for gas

  I continued to drive after lunch and my Mom and I listened to Doug Phillips’ message on “The Roaring Twenties” from the recent History of America Mega Conference.  It’s a very fun message and helps to capture this very important and transitory time in American history.  We also listened to the newly-released Jonathan Park album: “The Whispering Sphinx.”
  We ate dinner in Alabama and were back on the road before sunset.  The rolling hills in Alabama were very beautiful, but alas, I was driving and couldn’t take photos simultaneously!

Lydia after dinner

During the last 4-5 hours of the trip I finally switched cars and was able to take some [blurry] photos.


  At this point I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we arrived at our house in FLORIDA!

Tire Trouble

 

We’re very thankful that God kept us safe during our road trip to Michigan.  A couple of days after we got back home Noah noticed that our front left tire had a large chunk taken out of it and needed to be replaced.   My Mom knew that that tire was getting old and had wanted to replace it before the trip.

Thankfully, we had no blowouts while we were hauling the canoe and trailer during the 1500 miles that we drive to and from and also around MI.

Sep 1, 2011

Day 1-Heading to Lake Michigan

   We were up pretty last night to celebrate Noah’s 13th birthday with family.
   We had a later start that morning than we had planned for and half of us weren’t even packed.  However, it was only mid-morning when we had the van loaded with our bags, the trailer loaded with bikes and our canoe loaded on top of the van.



  Because of a few errands we had to run we didn’t hit the road until after noon.  We made some good progress and listened to a few teachings on tape-no, I mean on CD-no, I mean…well, they were actually tiny bytes of information encoded in MP3 format transferred onto a tiny hard drive inside of an audio player.  We’ve been on a real Sherlock Holmes kick lately so we listened to a few mysteries as well.  We made a couple of stops to make sure the canoe was strapped securely.





   We were nearing southern Chicago when we stopped for dinner at Jimmy John’s.  We ordered our sandwiches and then asked for cups of water. 
We can’t give you our water.
Well, could they give us ice?  We had warm water bottles in the trailer.
Yes, we can sell ice. It’ll be $1.75/cup.
No thanks!
   We drove on and ate at Boston Market as it began to get dark. We gassed up (please take this to mean what I mean it to mean) and drove up along the Eastern side of Lake Michigan.
  We had a few delays along the road…someone smelt rubber burning, so we stopped a couple of times to check and sniff everything…Noah thought he saw someone being held up in a gas station…called the police, but I think everything looked fine.
   Arrived at our home away from home after 1am (but we lost an hour due to time zones) and then we had to unload all of the bags before we could hit the sack.


As you’ll see in this video, we got a bit slap happy towards the end of the trip.

Expedited Move

   Wow, what a day we had yesterday!  Our cousin, Deanna,  and her mother, Doris,  who will be taking care of her needed a place to go when Deanna gets out of the hospital.  This resulted in a move that needed to be expedited this weekend.

The day began by rising early and driving 105 miles in our van (with our trailer) down to to Aunt Doris’ home.  We loaded up the trailer with out door furniture and then loaded up another trailer with more picnic tables and benches.  We were joking that Ellie Mae and Granny needed to be sitting on the bench.  Someone took the joke even farther and taped this sign to the back of the pile.

Everyone worked hard and worked together to pack things up and load them onto the truck

 

26’ U-Haul

 

Loading the truck for maximum storage is like a puzzle……………………..…..Packing up boxes                           

 

Time for lunch and for a quick birthday celebration!

 

 

 

The house is empty! Time to move out!

 

We formed a caravan of 5 cars as we drove north with the cars, truck and trailers loaded down. (Notice the Beverly Hills or Bust sign is still on the picnic bench.) 

Two hours later, we made it to the new house where other family members had been painting and repairing the house.  A few fresh hands also came over and helped us unload the truck.  We also had some pizza together that evening before it got dark.

 

 

 

 

 

Noah hanging out with our cousins

 

By the time we got home we were exhausted and slept well.  It looks like Lydia was tired too!

Tune Up on the Van

 

  It’s hard to believe it’s already time for an oil change on the van, but we’ve put a lot of miles on it in the last few weeks.

I guess that the main reason for doing the tune up was because the check engine light came on and cylinder 3 was misfiring.  We went ahead and purchased plugs and wires for all of the cylinders.

Our van is a Ford Freestar (formerly Windstar) and they’re famous for the difficulty it takes to reach their plugs.

It’s impossible to ever see a spark plug, but to even feel it you have to lay on top of the engine and reach your arm down the backside of the engine as far as possible.  In that position it’s difficult to get enough torque to unscrew the spark plug.

Benjamin and Noah did the oil change with no problem, but after Mom and I worked on replacing just one of the plugs for hours we decided to have a mechanic do it.  Mom’s arm was very bruised and I was bleeding because it was so difficult to get to the plug.

 

It worked out that our Grandpa knew a guy who replaced the sparkplugs very inexpensively and in less than an hour and a half (that includes waiting for the engine to cool down after driving it to the shop.)

Anyways, the van now has much more pep and cylinder 3 is no longer misfiring!

Time for an Oil Change