Go West! (Take Two)

As I said, we hadn't planned to go west again this summer, but family calls and we answer!  So, other than the beautiful funeral, here are some of the happenings:

 Selfie on the car-ride out!  Luckily, Uncle Jon was able to come with us!! Isn't he nice to drive?

Since our van is ancient enough to only have a tape-deck, I thought I'd bring out some old-school music supplies...

And train the kids how to use them!  

 This trip, we got a flat tire.  And no wonder! The tires may have been as old as the van (probably not really, but they were very old and split down the center!). 

 

It was such a blessing that Jon was there!  It would have taken me much more time to discover where the jack was and even more, to get the rusted screws off of the spare tire so it could be removed!  We were also blessed that the tire was no longer drivable when we pulled off the interstate and into a gas station.  

Although it was very annoying to have to backtrack to another town to find someone who could fix out tire so we could make it to the funeral, in the end we were blessed immensely to find that backtracking didn't help.  The man in the past town wasn't there so we would have to drive further (another 90 miles) on the donut, to get to a place with a Wal-Mart that had a shop that was open on Sundays.  

Because of our backtracking detour, we missed a tremendous thunder storm, which would have added to the stress and been more dangerous on our tiny little tire.  

I'm so grateful for those tender little mercies that Heavenly Father puts in our path unbeknownst to us!

Once we got to Utah, much of our time was spent renewing friendships with family at the funeral.

Shortly after the funeral, however, my brother, Daniel, invited us to go to a solely root beer bar.  It was chock full of many kinds of root beer, candy from all over the world, and countless unique root beer float flavors!

The Root Beer Wall

Enjoying her "Blue Magic" root beer float.

This young man sticks to tradition and just got a tasty root beer float - can't go wrong there!

 Mom and I sporting our Neil Diamond shirts -- we didn't get to finish them when we saw him live (and you know we didn't want to buy one, these are cooler!).

 The Drive home. (Thankfully it was much less eventful! - more in "Some of the Flemings Come to Visit".)