A Few Lugnuts Short of a Full Set

Sharon and I drove out to River's Edge Camp this afternoon to pick up our lovely (yet, somewhat smelly) daughters after they spent a week with the horses out there. They actually slept in the feeding troughs last night and were awakened early this morning by Eddie, the pony. It was a small group of campers (only 12) and it sounds like they had fun. I'm glad to have at least 1 out of 3 of my brood back in the proverbial nest. Our drive home was less than predictable! We hadn't gone too far when I noticed a strange sound coming from the rear passenger side tire. I pulled over and half-expected to see a flat tire but when it looked normal, Sharon and I were puzzled for a moment until we realized that 3 out of the 5 lug nuts were missing! Being the resourceful types that we are, we thought we'd just "steal from Peter to pay Paul" and that would give us four lugnuts on each tire... enough to make it home safely. As we were executing our little plan, the road-worker guys pulled up and so did our friends who were also driving their daughter home from camp. Now we had three very capable men to help us out. After jacking up the car they soon realized that three of the bolts were completely sheared off so there was no way to get the lugnuts to stay on. I called Kent, sent my friends home together, and Emily & I sat in the back of the car in the shade and she told me all about her camp adventures. Once Kent arrived he found some other lugnuts in the back of the car and managed to get two of them to stay on the short bolts. He drove the car (very slowly) all the way to Cochrane with me following carefully behind. Thankfully we made it to the Canadian Tire there and tomorrow morning my car will not only have 5 new bolts on the rear passenger wheel, it will also have 4 brand new tires (thanks, Kent! :-) I do have to make special mention of God's provision in all this: ~~ The road worker's truck had a big digital arrow thingy to tell all the traffic to move over and they were wearing bright orange safety vests... this kept us safe on the side of the road while the guys worked on the car and after they all left I just backed it onto a country side road to be completely off the highway. ~~ The Rathje's showed up and had room in their van for Sharon & Bronwyn. Thanks guys! ~~ Emily and I had time to connect after her week away and we had enough water and shade to be comfortable. ~~ The weather was beautiful and we were "stuck" in a nice prairie landscape. ~~ Kent was able to safely drive the car into Cochrane without the wheel going flying into the ditch! God is good even when things don't work out quite the way we planned :-)