Ok, so I finally get around to telling y'all about our trip to Mississippi! (Haha...how soon is soon?) Anywho, where to start. . .how about sharing with you some entries from my journal and filling in the rest as much as I can. :)

After leaving the house and stopping in Salina, Kansas to spend the night, we headed back on the road for the last 12 hours of our journey. We had driven for a few hours when Dad took the wrong exit nearly crashing in the process! It's scary waking up to an 18-wheeler blowin' its horn at ya! Dad was pretty mad at himself for taking a "detour," but we found out, thankfully, that we weren't too far off the beaten path. We stopped for a break at a *rural* gas station (I mean, it looks like it's been handmade or somethin'!). So we're waiting on Dad to finish filling the tank, he gets back in the bus, and guess what? The bus is stuck right in front of the pumps. Yep. We're stuck in hot, sticky Oklahoma, and we're not being able to find a single place open for someone to fix the bus. We kids are outside waiting on Mom and Dad (who are inside the gas station trying to get some help), and I look at the saying we have on the front of the bus: "With God and puppies, we can lick anything!" Ha, living what you believe sure is hard. It certainly didn't feel like we were "likin'" anything...but God gave me the strength to praise Him and have a good attitude about things. Sining Lincoln Brewster's song "Today Is The Day" helped some. :) Well, we finally did find a guy who was on call 24/7 and wasn't too far from the gas station-praise God! Otherwise, we would've had to spend the night there, which we didn't want to do! It took about five hours, but we survived what with the car part place having an AC building with a little entertainment area for the kids. The Lord is just plain amazing! If we hadn't taken that detour, we would've been stuck on the highway with no means of being able to contact anyone or getting anywhere. God is good all the time; all the time God is good!

Signing Out-
Tiff

We went on to arrive at my grandmother's house at 3am. By the way, scaring people at three in the morning is totally fun! *wink* So after a day at her house, we take our trailer to a lake that's about 30 minutes from where Grandmother lives. It was fun going tubing, water skiing, swimming, cooking s'mores, playing volleyball, getting sunburnt...ok, so maybe the sunburnt part wasn't too fun, but we had a good time. Oh, and we also played a game that was new to me called disk golf. (Google it; it was pretty fun-competitive too ;))

There were two things I learned here. I have a very special friend of mine who lives in Tennessee, and her and I had decided that we would meet-up since I was finally on the "other side of the Mississippi" as she put it. We were both very much looking forward to it! She was going to drive down on the 4th of July, and I was just counting down the days until she could come. So the day for her to arrive finally comes and I am so excited!! And then, I get this call. . .

And that's where I leave you for now, folks! Thanks for being so patient with me! Part 2 is next! :)