Answers in unexpected places

Courtney and I had an interesting Thanksgiving break this past week. Let me go back a bit before Thanksgiving in order to paint you a better picture.

This semester has been a crazy semester for me and it has been increasingly so as the end of the semester approaches. The few weeks before Thanksgiving I was home long enough to have dinner and then I was back to school again. Saturdays were spent catching up on missed homework and other assignments. Needless to say, Courtney and I were looking for a chance to get away. We decided we were going to run away to Bear Lake for Thanksgiving break and shut out all responsibility and just be together and recoup. We did this hoping it would be enough to get us through the rest of the semester and all the way to Christmas break.

Our plan was to leave Tuesday and come back Saturday night. The Monday of Thanksgiving week we heard news of a storm that was coming in. We were told it would hit Tuesday. We decided to ignore warnings. Tuesday came and it was a beautiful clear day. However, throughout the day we were bombarded with emails and text messages warning of this coming storm. I crossed my fingers and continued to believe it wouldn't be bad and we would still be able make it 3 hours north to the Idaho border where Bear Lake was waiting for us. Later that day we received word that campus was closing and we were to get off work early. I was excited. I thought Court and I could leave earlier and get a ahead of the storm. Boy, was I wrong!

Leaving Provo, everything was great. However, as we got closer and closer to Salt Lake the weather got worse and worse. It was so bad that we were slipping, sliding and could barely see. By the time we got to North Salt Lake we had to turn around and go home. We were sad to have to turn around, but glad to be heading back safely.

The next day is when the interesting part begins. We left Provo around 9:30am the next day in hopes to get to Bear Lake shortly after lunch some time. We decided to replace our wiper blades because they were in much need of replacing. As we were leaving Walmart I tried to clean the windshield with no luck. We assumed our wiper fluid was out, so I went back in and got some wiper fluid. I filled up the dispenser and tried again, no luck. We decided we were going to push through anyway. As you probably guessed we had to stop once in Salt Lake just clear off our windshield and then 15 minutes later in Bountiful we had to stop at an auto repair place to see if we could get it fixed. We were pretty frustrated. We were not having any luck getting away to our relaxing Thanksgiving break. Before we left Tuesday and Wednesday we prayed we would arrive safely and we were arriving at Bear Lake like we had planned.

The auto repair shop said everything was working but our wiper fluid froze over solid. They asked if we put water in it. I was a little mad at him asking that because I was the only one that ever filled it and I always used the wiper fluid rated for like 20 below zero. We okayed them to pull it out and thaw it which was going to cost $100 for everything. While we were waiting in the lobby the repair guy came out with our front driver's side tire. He showed me that it had a huge slice on the inside that was so bad, I don't know how it hadn't blown out sooner with all our slipping and sliding. About $800 later we ourselves a set of four new tires.

Three hours later the car was good to go and we continued on to Bear Lake where we arrived safely and had a wonderful relaxing time. We were able to forget about school and work and relax and enjoy our time together. We that we didn't touch the car for 3 or 4 days until we headed back to Provo and the weather was below freezing the whole time.  The funny thing is the wiper fluid didn't freeze over at all. As we talked about the whole situation we realized something interesting. We had prayed to arrive safely after our travels. However, we hadn't thought about our wiper fluid being an answer to those prayers. Our wiper fluid shouldn't have frozen over at all. If it hadn't we would have been able to see just fine through our windshield and we never would have stopped. We never would have found the tire being badly sliced and we could have had the tire blow out while we were driving, even worse, it could have been while we were going over the pass on the bad roads and could  have had a bad accident.

We were and are very thankful to our Father in Heaven for answering our prayers and helping us to be safe over our Thanksgiving break. We are sad to have to spend a lot of money replacing our tires but grateful that we were able to see God's hand in our lives and know that he hears and answers our prayers.

Here are some pictures from our Thanksgiving break. This is just the food that didn't need to be refrigerated or frozen that we took with us.

 Dad, here is the picture of the Lake from our patio. It is in the back left of the picture.

 Here I'm cutting our Turkey breast on Thanksgiving Day.

 Here is our awesome spread. We had turkey, potatoes, sweet potato soufle, rolls, salad and pecan pie. It was wonderful and we had plenty of leftovers.

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break too!