FOURTH OF JULY!!

Our Johnson Jinx, which we hoped to leave behind us when 2009 ended, reared it's ugly head many times in the first half of this year. It seems that when we travel, it gets magnified. This year, to celebrate the 4th, we traveled to Utah, and lo and behold, the jinx traveled with us. We always take college kids as passengers down to Utah with us in order to pay for the trip, but after this trip, we may have a poor reputation spread around campus that will prevent us from finding riders ever again.


You see, on our way down Friday afternoon, somewhere in Salt Lake City, our van broke down while we still had 6 passengers with us. We limped along as far as we could down the freeway, with the van starting and stalling the whole time and us pulling off and on the shoulder of the freeway. We managed to drop off 3 more passengers before Hyrum's mom and his brother-in-law, Jon, came to our rescue. We got a ride with Jon, and our passengers and some of our kids went with Nana. We called a tow truck and got to see our mega-tow-hook put to good use. 

Since our van was a crummy (in Oregon, the loggers call the vehicle they ride to work in a "Crummy") in it's first life, it needed to be towed up logging roads on occasion by a dozer and thus has a mega-hook attached to the front. 

The van looked enormous on the tow truck's flat bed! 

Strangely enough, after unloading the van off the tow truck at Jon's house, it never gave us another stalling problem. 

We pitched a tent on Maren's lawn for the weekend and called that our "camping" for the year since school and work is preventing us from doing any real stuff. On Saturday morning, Hyrum hooked up a fuel gauge thingy (and kept it on the rest of our vacation) to diagnose the problem, but, naturally, the problem never reoccurred. We were beginning to think we had just fueled up with a bad tank of gas at Tesoro or Maverik. We spent the day with family, swimming at Nana's pool, while Hyrum played mechanic most of the day, then that night, we set off to watch fireworks. Celebrating the 4th in Utah, falling on a Sunday as it did, meant the fireworks were on Saturday night and the parade was on Monday morning. We found a secluded little spot on a weedy hill to watch the Stadium of Fire fireworks, so we set down our sleeping bag and settled in, hoping for a great show, only to be disappointed by the long lags of nothing while the program was going on in the stadium, which we couldn't see. It was so disappointing after last year's fireworks at Diamond Lake and all the years before watching the Ashland fireworks.


Suddenly, Kiersa started complaining about her legs hurting. I assumed they hurt because she was wearing a skirt and we'd walked through tall weeds, so since I was holding Paisli (who was asleep), I had her go sit with Hyrum. She wouldn't stop complaining about pain, and then I started to feel bites on my arms, like massive aggressive mosquitoes, but then I noticed that Paisli and I had ants crawling all over us. By then, Tilly and Hyatt were being bitten, and Whitnee (Hyrum's niece) also. We were sitting on an anthill and were being bitten like crazy! We jumped up and made a run for the car, trying to brush off the kids along the way who were all screaming about bites and pain. In the car, I could see their welts and the ants kept on biting though we brushed off any we could find, so we drove to David's house to shower them off, since it was the closest place. After showering the kids and shaking out their clothes, we went back to Maren's, but we couldn't use our sleeping bag because we knew we would get bitten all night, so we camped in the house on the bunk bed.


(Stinking jinx!)


On Sunday morning, we met up with family again and we took a family picture as a spur-of-the-moment thing. 

Trying to get 4 kids under the age of 6, and Hyrum, to look at the camera all at the same time and not make strange faces is a HUGE undertaking, so our pictures normally look like this. 

But somewhere amidst a few dozen shots, we did manage to get one decent picture.

We decided to take our van up the canyon on the 4th to see if the problem would happen again. John and Maren's family, and Meghan, Marlee, and Whitnee, came along too, driving a separate car (John's a mechanic), yet still, no repeat of the problem, but...the van did decide to overheat!!! Our plans for enjoying the Alpine loop were dashed! We got out and let the kids wander in the woods while the men tried to fix the car, but in the end, we had to give up on our scenic drive and head back to town.

That night, there were some fireworks for the kids to play with. Snaps and sparklers are always the biggest hit. 

On Monday morning, we went to the Provo parade. 

It was looooong, and had huge gaps between the various groups, but it was still fun. The highlight was definitely when the UVU mascot (a wolverine) came up to Hyrum, and seeing that Hyrum had a BYU shirt on, he proceeded to smother Hyrum with silly string. 

As soon as he was done, our dog, Cowboy, 

who was NOT at all pleased at the apparent attack made on his master, lunged out, in a snarling and barking fury, at the wolverine. The wolverine was a little surprised at this puny, yet viscous attack, so he played along with Cowboy. He got down and challenged him and the two had a stand off, much to the crowd's amusement. Maren finally managed to snatch Cowboy up and hold him 

so the wolverine could go on down the parade. 

After the parade, it was time to head home. Naturally, the van worked fine the whole way home. I guess we'll just have to use the expensive gas from now on, but at least we didn't have to change out the fuel filter/pump!


The silver lining to this cursed trip was the garage sale we stumbled upon where we bought an unstained double mattress for $5 (to put in the van for watching drive-in movies) and a 25 cent bike for Hyatt. Okay, so it was purple and totally girlie, 

but Hyrum took it apart and put it back together for me so I could paint it blue and black (colors chosen by Hyatt). Bike: 25 cents. Paint: $1. New petals: free (salvaged from an old ruined kid bike we had around). It's not as cool as a new bike, but he's only 4 so he'll never care, and it was $1.25!!! He'll scratch up whatever bike he has anyway. Might as well go cheap!