Tour Day Six

First of all, I need to catch up on our recorded mileage!

Day 4's Mileage (9/16/11) was 464.2 miles driven for a total trip mileage of 1262.2
Day 5's miles - 226.5 for the day and for the whole trip 1488.8

Day 6's miles - 197.5


I was supposed to write this blog on Day 6, but we got into our hotel at around ... I don't know ... midnight or one or so. So no blog then. :) Here it is now.

We had to get up early to go to church at a fan's house. When we got in the car and started driving, we noticed a rumbling but didn't have time to do anything about it.

A hot air balloon we saw outside our hotel that morning.
We saw a total of five, and I got a lot more, better pictures, but I forgot to get the camera chip into the camera, so they didn't take, and the balloons were all gone except this one once I had it.

We attended church before going to the same fan's grandparent's house for lunch. We had a nice time, but had to rush away to our next event. (See why I said it wasn't a restful Sunday? :) )

It was a long drive between the two events and I took some pictures on the way.
This is a train with 87 + cars on it.

Here's a sign we saw that we thought was funny.
Just think a moment. What's wrong with this statement?

Our next event was speaking at a lady's house to her kids and all her friends and their kids. It was a pretty big group, considering.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a single picture taken there! But I had a good excuse.

While we drove to this lady's house, the rumbling got a little worse, and our air pressure warning light came on for one of our tires, but of course, no time to stop.

We arrived, unloaded the books, walked around the side of the van and . . . a tire. Completely flat. Because a giant piece of metal was sticking out of it. It was a V shape, about 2 inches long. I meant to take a picture of it, but it got lost in the van during the bustle.

So we went in, unloaded the books, I gave my short author talk and then my dad took over while I went to see about the van and its tire.

See the bit of metal sticking out there? We also discovered the tire was almost bare, but only on the inside, so we couldn't see it without taking the tire off.

Bare spots

One of the dads in the group helped me change the tire to a spare so we would be able to get on the road again. We had to rush off from this event, too.

We're thankful for the protection given us while we were driving. The tire could have blown on the highway, but it just went flat in the neighborhood, and we didn't even feel it.

(Don't worry, we unhitched the trailer before jacking up the van.)

We had to rush back to our hotel, find a place to chain our trailer up so we didn't have to drive 45 minutes away, pulling this trailer on a spare tire.

That took even more of our time, but as we had a 45 minute drive,
I had more time to take pictures.

We thought the wording of this sign was funny, too.

The last event went well. It was at Abundant Life Church and we had a very attentive audience. I didn't get pictures there, but I did get some video, which I will post later. :)