For Spring Break the kids and I decided to take a trip to Utah to visit family. We stopped halfway and stayed over night in Vegas with my cousin. We left the next morning to finish off the trip. We stopped in Cedar City for lunch. Right after we ordered our food we looked outside and it had started snowing. The kids were just fascinated, since it doesn't snow where we live they thought it was so cool. We took a picture of our car just before we left to show the snow.
As I was pulling back onto the freeway I got the impression we needed to say a prayer. We always say a prayer before we leave on car trips, so we had said one before we left home, but I felt we needed another one right now. I asked Reagan to say one for us as I was driving. I am so glad I did. Then the snow just kept getting worse. I kept thinking about pulling off for a bit, but then I thought it will just get worse, I need to keep going. About 45 minutes after we left Cedar City, in the middle of nowhere, all of the cars in front of us started to slow down and stop in the middle of the freeway. Since the roads were so slick, I just couldn't stop in time and couldn't even steer the van away from other cars. We ran right into the back of another car. Thank goodness no one ran into the back of us. There were a bunch of accidents happening at the same time, in about a half mile of freeway there were about 10 we heard, a few involved semis. Luckily nobody was very injured in any of the accidents, just scared and maybe a little sore. In one of the accidents behind us the semi jackknifed and blocked off the freeway, which made it nice that we didn't have traffic trying to get around us. Just behind the semi was a freeway exit so traffic was able to bypass all of the accidents. We were stuck because our engine was damaged, so the car wouldn't even start. After sitting in our car for hours we were finally taken by the tow truck to Parowan, a VERY small town, and a motel for the night. I had Reagan sit in the lobby with Carter and Jack while Walker helped me empty everything out of the van. We figured they would total the van and we would never see it again so I wanted to make sure we got everything out. After we had emptied the car and were all in the room I needed to find us some food. There was a little pizza place next door, I had them deliver a pizza and Rootbeer to our motel room. Luckily the motel had breakfast the next morning, or we would have gone hungry. It was Sunday, and being a small town in Utah, everything was closed. We had to check out of our room the next morning before we had a ride if we didn't want to have to pay for another night, so we hung out in the lobby for a little more than an hour. We were rescued later, by my sister's boyfriends family. They were coming back from Vegas and had room for us.
In all the craziness of the accident and trying to keep my kids calm and warm and making sure they stayed in the car, I forgot to take a picture of the van. On our way back home we stopped by the shop where the van was and took some pictures through the fence. It looks like all of the damage is in the engine. It didn't look anywhere near as bad as I had remembered it. They did total it because it will cost more to fix it than it is worth. So now we are in the market for a new mini van. Unfortunately Steve is going to have to wait a little while longer to replace our 1997 Nissan Sentra that he was hoping to get rid of. He has been looking at trucks for months now, and is bummed that he is going to have to wait.
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