Went West

I have not blogged here for awhile, just been busy, that`s all.

We took a road trip to South Dakota for most of last week. This adventure was totally planned by Dad and Trevor. They took care of everything and I have to say they did a great job of it. They found us a cabin or more, like a rather nice house. It was built like a tree house on 4 levels so there were plenty of stairs on a spiral staircase. for Paul to drive his cars and trucks up and down. The place was laid out so we could keep Lauren on one level, too. It had a huge porch that wrapped around 3 sides which was furnished with more then a dozen chairs.

We had dinner and a country music show one afternoon/evening, went to an animal reserve to check out the bears, buffalo, deer, wolves, etc. (Paul was not really to excited about this event, though). Of course we went to Mount Rushmore, too. One afternoon I stayed at the cabin with the littles while they went to check out a cave. We had a relaxing time sitting on the porch while Paul arranged all the chairs into a school bus.

The trip home was a bit wild, but we made it. As we were leaving and had stopped to fill the fuel tank up the check engine light went on so we went to the dealership a couple of blocks from the gas station and they said they did not repair diesel engines and they sent us to quite a large truck/tractor garage across the street. There we met Turbo (that is actually what it said on her name tag). She was a very slender, early thirty something, blonde, mechanic. Taking one look at this chic and you might think "oh my goodness we are in trouble now", but this chic really did know what she was doing. She changed some clogged filter, added a little oil, and adjusted some other thingy. This all took awhile so Karre and I were left to entertain the llittles in the "lounge", which thank goodness was smoke free. We found popcorn, pretzels, bottled water, a TV, and old magazines. Lucky for us Allen will eat popcorn and watch cartoons all day and Paul will look at cars and trucks in magazines forever. Karre took Paul outside to walk around the parking lot to look at vans, tractors, trucks, oh did I mention LOTS of trucks. I know this was Paul`s favorite part of the entire trip. Well they did the fixing and the check engine light was still coming on so they did some more investigating and fiddling with things.and it still came on. Turbo and 2 other guys, Dad, and Trevor finally decided that there is something wrong with the computer board and how it rwsets itself so we got to drive home with that light on all the way. We made it though and now we have to take it to get this computer thingy fixed.

I don`t deal with this vehicle repair stuff, that is Dad`s job. I have enough to do to keep the kids repaired.