The race is on!

Well, we are home from our adventures and have walked into a pot of boiling commotion. Our travel was a bit costly, but not as much as it could have been. Getting the car back on the road nearly wiped out our extra money and what was so bad is that it could have been avoided had the car just been started and driven at least three times a month, but there it sat for 16 months, lonely and undriven. Wasps made their home under the hood and the new tires and hoses began to rot. The brakes needed replacing also in the end. But thank God after all of those repairs, "Old Trusty" got us to Texas without a single problem!! That old Volvo saved us money in the end vs renting a car or flying. We just had to get tough and ride through scorching New Mexico and Texas on leather seats with no air conditioning in 104 degree weather. We had to stop and hang out until the evening,(maybe 5 hrs), also a trip to a childrens hospital helped eat up some time-and they had REALLY GOOD AIR CONDITIONING, story to follow later, but that forced us to rest and we got to eat while not moving!

God bless good friends and relatives who let you stay at their homes when they are gone! And bless all friends that make you feel like family even when you seem to overrun them! The song says, "Give and it shall be given unto you....Pressed down, shaken together, running over, running over..." That is how good our friends and my sister have been- homes, cars, whatever we needed, it was handed to us so generously.
Thank you so-ooooooo much! I didn't know I had done the same for you before.

Now we had to get home because some of our friends from Scotland (we visited them last year), were coming to spend 2 nights with us on their annual trip to Poland. They are a family of 7 and we have known them since we only had 2 children! We also needed to get home for a couple of appointments and to see if my flowers survived,(they died-sniff, sniff). We left Texas Wednesday night, picked up a rental van, drove to Dover, spent the night, hopped on a plane at 2pm, flew to Germany, stopped at our friends house for an hour, ate lunch and got on the road to home. We crossed the chunnel and were making good time till we hit traffic in London. It took an hour and a half to drive 6 MILES!! Needless to say, we didn't get home until 10pm Friday night and our guests were due on Saturday evening. We go to bed at 1am with the knowledge that there is a LOT of work to do at our house before our guests come in a few hours. Top that with time change and jet lag and you have a recipe for--exhaustion!
So get ready, cause here they come!