Watched over

It's kind of hard to tell from the picture, but the front left tire is crooked. And if you're familiar with cars at all, meaning you drive one, then you know that crooked tires are bad.

We didn't know it was crooked. It was all a bizarre sequence of events that led up to probably saving our lives. And no, I'm not exaggerating.

A few weeks ago, Jeff's little commuter car finally had it. The timing chain blah, blah, blah was bad or something, and since the car is a 94 Saturn, we just said, "Forget it, lets find another one."

In the meantime, some awesome friends of ours lent us their car while we looked for one for Jeff. And you'd think that finding a car would not be hard. Granted our budget wasn't huge, but there are alot of cars on Craigslist in our price range. But either our offer was turned down, or no one called us back, or something. And after a week we still didn't have a car.

Well on the way to return our friends' car, I was driving ahead of Jeff in the big van, and he starts honking at me and motioning for me to pull over. When we stop, he tells me that the front wheel is all crooked and he tries tightening the lug nuts thinking that is the problem.

Well, the lug nuts are on tight, which means something else is going on. So we drop off the other car, and then head straight to Les Schwab.

After 3 hours they call and tell us that the arm and ball joint on the front left side are completely shot and that even though they can't fix it until Monday (this was on saturday) that they can't let us drive it because it's so dangerous. And that even if we don't have them fix it, we should have it towed.

What?!

So basically the front left side could have suddenly, without warning, been riding super low, as in scraping the ground. So now we have two cars out of commission. And at first I was bummed because we were supposed to head over the mountains on Monday for spring break.

But then it hits me. We were supposed to head over the mountains for spring break!!!!

Was it possible that our van had another 300 miles in it before it collapsed in a ruined heap? And what if we were driving it at 70 miles an hour with all of our children when it failed? Can you say tragic roll over accident?

So now I realize what a huge blessing all of this is. Jeff's car breaking down led to us borrowing a car, which led to us returning it, which led to Jeff following me and able to see that we had a problem. Cuz when would I have ever noticed it?

And not being able to find a new car for Jeff? Well that made it so that we still had money to pay the rather large cost of fixing the van. And all of a sudden Jeff's little 94 saturn feels worth fixing.

And thanks to both sets of parents, we had a mini van for the family to drive during this time, and a commuter car for Jeff to drive while he fixes the saturn.

So all's well that ends well. And having my family safe is the best ending of all.