Saturday, April 2, 2011

Middle of nowhere...

On Thursday afternoon we left for Cyle and Athena's wedding in Utah right after watching the first BYU game of the Mountain West Conference. We began our drive up and through Wyoming. The drive was uneventful until we got to the middle of nowhere. With a semi next to us in one lane, out of the darkness something black appeared in the middle of our lane. It all happened so quickly and there was no time to do anything but hit it straight on. We thought it might be an snow chunk that had fallen off a semi-truck. Sadly, no.

We hit it with an amazing crash and such a loud noise! We looked behind us to see sparks from what we thought was the thing we hit dragging along the asphalt. Ken pulled over as quickly as possible and we got out to survey the damage. Of course it was super dark and the wind was blowing fiercely as we got out the flashlight and laid down of the side of the highway to see what in the world had happened.

Whatever it was that we hit had completely ripped off the entire exhaust system under our van. It was literally hanging on by one pin. The pipe looked like it had just exploded! We removed the pin and it clunked to the pavement. We worked it out from underneath the van and we left with about 10 feet of pipe, muffler, and resonator. Fortunately we did not see any leaking fluids or any suspicious warning lights so we decided to put our exhaust system and take it with us and we would keep going toward Utah. It was super loud, but we made it!

As we were loading the exhaust system into the van (it barely fit!) Peyton said such a sweet comment. "Mom," she said, "I am so glad we said a prayer before we left. That could have been even worse!" I second that thought. As Ken was taking the van in to multiple shops on Friday trying to get things fixed enough that we could get home, hopefully without incident, he was told how lucky we were. There were multiple gouges in the fuel tank, but no leak. There was also several sensors that were just barely missed. Had those been knocked out our travels would have been even more difficult.

So thankful for the angels that were with us!


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