Our extremely long road trip . . .

After a mad-dash remodel, which we couldn't have done without loads of help from friends and family, we were finally on our way to San Diego the morning of November 1st. Gary was driving a 28' bright yellow Penske moving truck and hauling our white VW Golf behind it, and Jack and I were following behind in Gary's work car, a silver Impala with "Sentry Insurance" written all over it. We had intended to make the 10-hour drive in one day, but ran into a setback when the Penske truck blew a high-pressure oil line just outside of Beaver, Utah, spewing 5 GALLONS of oil all over all of our vehicles! It was horrible! (I've attached a picture of us sitting on the side of the road. It was taken in the dark, so most of what you see are the reflectors on the truck) The repair took about 5 hours, most of the time bored out of our minds sitting on the side of the the freeway. We were exahsted and it had gotten late so we decided to spend the night with Grandpa Joe in St. George and start again in the morning. That morning happened to also coincide with daylight savings time, so by the time we finally arrived in California there was a two-hour time difference from when we had started our trip out of Salt Lake. We still haven't fully recovered from this as we get tired around 8:00 pm and seem to wake up around 6:00 or 6:30 am just about every morning. Gary's Uncle David said we could stay at their house until we found an apartment, but before we finally landed there we headed north to Thousand Oaks to see Bliss' cousin Casey, who had just returned from his mission to Ohio. It was fun to catch up with Casey, Erin and Uncle Bob for a few hours, and Jack was relived that the people throwing Casey's homecoming party were so hospitable and let him walk around and stretch his legs a bit. We wish we could have spent more time with them, but we were tired and we still had two more hours to go before we would be in Del Mar, so we said good-bye and headed back on the road. We finally landed at the Smart's house around 10:30 pm and immediately hit the sheets. We were lucky to stay at David and Brenda's house while David was in town. He travels a lot for his job and had just gotten back from China a few days before we arrived. It was great to be able to chat and catch up with them over the next few days.