Oops!...Thank you, Jesus!

Okay...for the rest of the story of our trip to SD! After video-taping the wedding and the reception at Nathan's wedding, Trint & I went back to the church to get the rest of our gear and we found out that WE DIDN'T GET THE RECORDING! Our main video camera was recording to a laptop and for some unknown reason, it stuttered and STOPPED! WE WERE SICK! We felt soooo awful, but it was nothing we did or didn't do--just a malfunction. GRRRRR! THANKFULLY, we did have 2 cameras recording and so we did get all of the wedding, but the 2nd was a handheld one from a less desirable angle for the most part. It won't turn out nearly as well as we wanted, but we are so thankful we did have 2 cameras going! We went back to the room we were staying at and felt so awful. Then we had to sleep so we could get up the next morning to drive the 13.5 hours (or however long it would take) back home.

(Trint video-taping at the reception.)

The next morning, we got out of town about 7 AM. We were driving 2 vehicles back and so we knew it would most likely take a lot longer to get home than it did to get there because of having to stop more and possibly rest some since we were both driving the whole way. We were still feeling bummed because of not getting the video recording that we wanted.

The Lord encouraged my heart with a pretty sunrise and then he put rainbows in the sky around the sun!!! There was a portion of rainbow on each side of the sun--something I had never seen before. Usually a rainbow is opposite the sun's direction!
(Above and below: Rainbows around sun on either side!)Our first part of the trip was 0 degrees and windy. The snow was blowing across the roads pretty bad. Wind is also bad for a high-profile vehicle like our van!
Then through Iowa, we saw probably about 50 (NO EXAGGERATION!) vehicles like the following pictures contain!

You can see 4 cars in the ditch here and there were some right behind us too--must have been a really slippery road at one time!

A vehicle and semi on their side! I did see one truck that was up-side-down as well. Some of the vehicles were the same ones that we saw on the way to SD 3 days before that, but many were new ones.
We were doing well and were about 3 1/2 hours from home in IL when all of a sudden...it happened to me (I also had all 3 kids with me)! It was about 6:30 in the evening. The sun had gone down. It was windy, misting and about 10 degrees with a wind chill of about
-20 degrees! We didn't know (neither did other traffic) that we were driving on a sheet of "glass!" Anyway, we were going with the flow of traffic when all of a sudden, a gust of wind hit my van just right and caused me to spin and back into the ditch! Trint was driving ahead of me and when he realized I wasn't behind him, he called me and had to back track to where I was.

THANK THE LORD, nobody was hurt and the van was pulled out shortly with a tow truck without problems and was drivable!!! The tow truck man said that his company had 28 tow trucks out on the roads pulling out people since 5 AM that morning!

Just a few minutes after I went into the ditch, a minivan did the exact same thing I did and was blown into the ditch. (You can see it's headlights to the right of the picture.) We saw another truck with a trailer almost lose it too. The tow truck man tested the road by trying to walk on it and almost fell down because it was so slippery!!

We are THANKING THE LORD that we didn't get hurt, that the van ran fine, and that more cars going by us didn't hit us!! I am thankful that there were no cars around me at the time and that I did go into the ditch rather than staying on the road and causing a pile-up! Although, I wonder if there would have been cars around me, I might not have got the gust of wind that I did. I'm just thankful I'm alive!

Because of my ditch experience, I received an answer to a prayer--I had lost my Bible and couldn't find it anywhere. I figured with our move, it would show up somewhere, but it didn't. Well, when the van ran into the ditch, my Bible was dislodged from it's hiding place and I found it in the back of our van! It was not the way I wanted my prayer answered, but God does answer in mysterious ways!! :-)

Once we got the van out, we crept to the nearest exit, went to McDonald's and then got a hotel room at a hotel next to the McDonald's--we didn't want to drive any further than we had to! The parking lot was also very slick.

(Our boys playing in the Playplace at McDonald's and the kids on the hotel bed.)

The next morning, we drove the rest of the way home (about 3.5 hours) and didn't have any troubles and the roads were fine again. We were so thankful to be home! (This picture was taken in Dec., not when we got home. There wasn't much snow at all here when we got home.)
Home, Sweet Home!

"Be it ever so humble, There's no place like home!"