Days 2 and 3

Hello everyone! This is Lauren writing under Patrick's account.

Patrick neglected to write about our Tuesday evening, where we visited with our dear friends the Queeners. Lea and I have been friends since high school. Lea and Cal met and married in college, and Cal was also a computer science student at Winthrop, so we've also been good friends for a while! They treated us to a delicious Texas barbecue dinner at a restaurant called Rudy's and then we headed back to their house to hang out for the night. It was great to catch up with them. I nearly forgot to take any pictures but I did snap these right before we went to bed:

Wednesday morning, we woke up and got ready and tested the Freon pressure to see if it was holding. It wasn't...

When my family is on vacation and things aren't going exactly as planned, we have a saying that we're not going for an awesome vacation, we're going for a "memorable" vacation. And indeed, years later, we look back and laugh about those memorable moments (when we rode a speedboat in the pouring rain in Charleston, when we couldn't find a level parking spot for the RV in Alaska for like an hour, etc.).

Yesterday was a memorable day.

When we realized the car wasn't holding the Freon we decided that we needed to get it fixed, since the Texas sun is hot and we didn't want to risk being in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona without air conditioning. Our friends the Queeners had told us that leaving the windows open in the desert was not good because all of the sand flying around, and I was worried about the possibility of heat stroke if we ended up in a place where there was simply no way to take shelter from the sun and cool down.

We took the car to a Sears nearby thinking we could kill time in the mall while they fixed the car. As soon as we walked in,  there was a vending machine with some interesting soda. One was called "Big Red", which is what I call my car. I fought to take my car instead of Patrick's, but he wanted to take his and won. I think that this was Big Red's message of venegence for leaving her at home, though.

Turns out that the part that was broken required the entire front end of the car to be taken apart to fix, so it was going to be a while. We were afraid and frustrated. Our friends the Queeners had graciously offered to let us stay another night with them, but not making it out of San Antonio yesterday would pretty much mean we'd have to skip Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. But at this point, we felt like for safety's sake we really didn't have any options besides to get the car fixed. So we waited it out.

Luckily, there was a rental car agency right there in the mall. It was going to take an estimated four to five hours to fix the car (and at that point, we had been waiting more than an hour for them to diagnose the problem) so instead of sulking for four hours in a shopping mall we decided to rent a car and head to downtown San Antonio.

We saw the Riverwalk, which was really nice:

We also saw the Alamo, in particular honor of my grandma who let us watch "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" as many times as we'd like:

And finally, FINALLY, after seven hours of the mechanic's time, our car was fixed. Meanwhile, we had decided there was no way we could make it to Carlsbad, NM that night. It was a nearly seven hour drive and it was nearly 7PM by the time they finished. So we canceled our reservation and booked a place in Pecos, Texas, which was two hours closer to us. (That's how spread out things are here!) Still a late night, but much more accomplishable.

Everyone told us there was nothing in West Texas. They were right. But it was a pretty drive on I-10 while there was still daylight. There were lots of rolling hills, interesting rock formations, and a very pretty sunset.

I think the weirdest part of the drive was on whatever road was between I-10 and Pecos. It was extremely flat and very long, and in the dark it was very hard to perceive distances. The only landmarks  to show that you were even moving were well-lighted oil equipment out in the fields.

It'd be easy to sit around and whine about our delay yesterday (and we did, for a couple hours) but we are so, so thankful that things happened when they did. We're so thankful for the Stablers and for Chris's help in fixing our battery problems. We are so thankful for the Queeners and for Cal's help in troubleshooting the A/C and their gracious offer to put us up for another night. And we are so thankful for God's faithfulness. The delays are no fun, but all things considered, we have much to be thankful for. We are safe! We have everything we need! We could pay for the car repairs, and there was nothing more seriously wrong with the car! Things are good.

Well, now we're off to Carlsbad Caverns and onto Las Cruces, NM to stay tonight. Hopefully we'll have some fun pictures tonight or tomorrow!