Vacation 2009

I'm not going to go into a lot of mundane detail about our trip, but I will share a few of the highlights.

First of all, we almost died on our first day out. We stopped in Williams, CA for lunch and as we pulled into the parking lot of the Burger King there was a not-so-good grinding sound. I went in to get our food while my husband looked underneath the truck. He couldn't find anything.

As we pulled back out there was an even worse grinding noise and we carefully drove across the street to an empty lot. Once again my husband got out to look. This time he found a bolt that had sheared off. It had something to do with the steering.

I went to a nearby office and asked a lady inside if there were any mechanics in the area. She directed me to a shop about three blocks away.

We slowly inched our way down the road and made our way to the shop. We had to approach from an alley and as we were going down the alley we lost just about all our steering. We managed to coast to the side and stopped. What a great beginning to our vacation!

Unfortunately the guy from the shop said he couldn't fix our problem. It had something to do with it being a lifted truck, yada yada. But somebody from the used car sales next door recommended a Les Schwab shop in nearby Colusa. We called AAA to tow the truck.

Just imagine what would have happened if we'd still been on the freeway when our steering went out! Long story short the Les Schwab guys saved the day. It took a couple of hours but they were able to fix the truck and we were once again on our way! By the way I can't say enough nice things about the Les Schwab guys. The employees were all extremely polite and accomodating.

We spent the night in Redding and made it to central Oregon the following afternoon. Since the house we rented wasn't available until the next day, we spent the first night at my MIL's. After a hot day it clouded up in the early evening and we actually had hail!

We had to wait until 4 pm before we could go to our rented house the next day. There was a quilt show in the little mall area so we meandered around there for a while. There were all kinds of sizes and patterns, from typical "wedding ring", stars, triangles, squares and rectangles, to more unusual curly cues, and other patterns.

I almost got inspired to start another quilt of my own, but then I came to my senses!

They surely are beautiful though.