Friday's travels

Friday morning we woke up at 5am (yes...not much sleep!) and running on giddy adrenaline we rolled up our sleeping gear, got changed and I cooked our kids some eggs as we were not stopping for a couple hours for breakfast (but they hardly ate anything as there was others riding in our van with us and it was too much fun!). It was weird to arrive at that church while it was still dark and then leave again in darkness!

We enjoyed at beautiful drive with the sun comming up and arrived quickly at a resturant for breakfast-it was delicious!

After driving again for awhile we stopped at a rest stop and as we turned off the van smoke started pouring out of one side of the engine! We opened the hood and found that a rubber tube to the coolant had rubbed raw from all the driving and coolant was burning on the engine. Thankfully, we had lots of guys who know vehicles and they figured we would have to get new tubing. We decided to switch some of the car seats around into different vehicles so some guys could stay back and get a new tube while the rest of us continued on.

It was really fun to get into a different vehicle and sitting next to new people (we have had the chance to really chat and get to know others when we sit near them for a couple of hours-I LOVE IT!) Auston was sitting next to Mel for awhile and she shared some of her fun electronic toys...they "raised the roof" together.

Playing a fun game with mama to make hours go faster.

At lunch we stopped again for an hour to eat and let everyone stretch or run around.

We found that even though we are trying to eat healthy we have found salads at fast food resturants that we can eat and fruit and even hardboiled eggs at rest stops...Auston loves his hardboiled eggs!

Too much driving, lack of sleep, excitement and siblings sitting too close=cat fight.

No I'm not kidding...Abbi and Jackson just started swinging at each other-if I wasn't their mother, I'm sure I would have found it funny. After they freaked out at each other I made Abbi get up and sit in a different row. I couldn't believe the way they acted-and over who knows what!

Right after their tiff...this is what we found...

Talk about exhausted!!

Going through (actually around) LA...traffic as the sun sets. A long day of driving.

We all met up at dinner with the team that stayed back to fix the van as we stopped for dinner.  We were all getting to the exhaustion phase and I was feeling the "oh goodness was this a good decision to do this whole trip?" as we pulled into the church we were going to stay at around midnight.

It was a very long day. And I'm sure we were all REALLY glad to get unloaded and into bed as fast as possible. Thankfully, this evening the kids were out like a light!