...and perseverance produces character

It seems that our move to Utah, and all that it entails, is not going to be blessed with a smooth ride or ease. It has been remarkable how many events necessary to moving have been temporarily thwarted in small and grand ways. For example, when I, Jennifer, went to see my new doctor (a very important thing to do when half way through your pregnancy and haven't seen a doctor in a month), the entire insurance company's system was shut down for the morning and they weren't able to process our information, so they weren't going to see me. However, since we were leaving to come back to Denver to close on our condo, it was a big deal to try to post pone the appointment (which would have been another three weeks). In the end, after giving them enough information to steal our identities, they decided that they would see me. Little and big things alike have been happening like this for the past few weeks. Yesterday was no exception...

Benjer and I started out our road trip to Colorado so we could load our condo in a u-haul truck and get Benjer back on the road, driving a 26 foot van back to UT the very next day, so that he could help lead a trip to L.A. with about 50 youth at our new church. We were making great time after leaving at 3:30 in the morning. But, about half way through the trip (8:30 a.m. around mile marker 241 on I-80 in Wyoming) Benjer's car stopped accelerating. It was kaput. We were amazingly blessed at this point because not only were we within cell range right there so we could call a tow truck and our insurance agency, etc, but we were also only 20 miles outside of a town called Rawlins. We could have had to walk miles to find the next cell or been very far away from the next town. Very long, long story short, we were able to get a tow truck within an hour and then he took us a U-haul/gas station in Rawlins where we were able to rent a trailer hitch to tow our own car back to Denver. Apparently there are no car rental companies willing to do one way rentals there, and the cost of a tow to Denver would have been about a thousand dollars or so. We were in conversations with friends in Denver and along the front range hoping we could figure something out when a friend, Cassie, who just miraculously had the day off and no major family obligations was able to drive up with her Trailblazer so we could hook the trailer up to her car! God is so good to us. We still needed to wait for about 5 hours before Cassie could arrive in Rawlins to get us. If we hadn't had a one year old with us, the day might have been a little bit easier, but Bethany was such an amazing trooper! She was willing to play with the rocks in the awesome terrain that Wyoming has to offer and was delighted with a ball we bought at the City Market there. She was such a great little girl since we had no where for her to nap or be comfortable during this whole time of waiting. We were also blessed with good weather (it could have rained the whole time), and we even had a McDonalds with a playplace!

Meanwhile, we were supposed to be picking up the big truck from a u-haul in Parker during this time. My wonderful father drove out to get the truck, where they informed him that Benjer had not paid (which he had in advance), and they were missing some of the things we had reserved. Benjer spent some time on the phone with u-haul sorting this out while my father waited patiently and then drove to get the other things we had reserved. At this point we decided this had become a comedy of errors :). During the day we also found out that very, very few people were going to be able to help Benjer load the truck the next morning, which has never happened to us. Since I'm 5 months pregnant, I was going to be of no use here whatsoever either. So, Benjer and I decided to hire some movers to come and load the truck instead.

Once Cassie arrived, then began the difficulty of hooking up the trailer to the hitch. It took two trips to car part stores to get two parts we needed and a very nice old man helping us hook up the car so that we could get it on the trailer to get it down to Denver. Another blessing in this was that Cassie's teenage daughter, Abby, just so happened to want to go on an impromptu road trip to Wyoming and also loves Bethany, so Bethany had a someone to love her and play with her during a lot of this waiting time. The drive back to Denver was quite a bit longer than normal because now we had a truck trailing another car on Wyoming hills with Wyoming wind. Abby was amazing and played with Bethany in the back the whole way home, helping keep her from completely losing it. I don't know how Bethany did it, to be honest. I would have thrown in the towel a lot sooner if I were her yesterday. After dropping our car off at a garage, we finally arrived at my parents house around 10:00 p.m. Bethany had only had two 20 minute naps all day at this point and was still awake!

Today worked out much better and Benjer ended up being able to leave Denver by 2:00 after loading up the u-haul with all our stuff and even stopping by the hospital to see our brand new nephew born this morning (yay!!!). He drove the whole way back to Ogden, WY (about 550 miles) by himself and I have just heard that he has made it safely with no lightning hitting the truck and no plague of locusts had come...