a fun snow day . . . except for the part where we almost died.

We always think we are going to go play in the snow each winter. Then we let our calendar get in the way. We'll go when we have a "free" Saturday sometime. (What family ever has a free Saturday??) So this year we just put it on the calendar and hoped there would be snow. We collected the kids, a couple of their friends and headed up toward the Heber and Forest Lakes area. We got off the highway and saw some awesome spots to go sledding, but we also saw that the cars that stopped to play were being ticketed, so we drove on looking for our own cozy spot. We were driving along a dirt logging road looking for a place. The road started curving back and forth into a valley (note - there were death defying drops at the side of the road) but had some potential for some good places to play if we got to the bottom. Then 5 minutes later the car just starts skidding BADLY like we were on ice. Fortunately we had been slowing at the bottom of the hill and we just went "DOINK" gently into a snow bank. We couldn't back up and so we got out and couldn't figure out why we had skid. There was no ice on that area of the road. Then we noticed the two front tires were pointing in completely different directions. Whatever it is that holds the steering mechanism in place was unattached, broken, bent and protruding in places where it's not supposed to be protruding. The steering broke! Have you ever heard of the steering of a car suddenly breaking?? Minutes earlier we were driving 25 miles an hour around narrow curves of a mountainous cliff. (ok, I don't know how fast we were driving, but we were going around scary curves on a logging road with scary drop offs that I would describe as death defying, perhaps.)Anyway - a couple of pickup trucks full of boy scouts stopped and loaned us some tools, Dave figured out how to 'band-aid' fix it to drive it back up the hill to civilization, then my parents came and put the van on their trailer and hauled it to Heber for us, not exactly how they planned to spend their Saturday, but THANK YOU ! Dave got to the store, bought a couple of parts and fixed it in about 10 minutes. He truly is SuperDave. If I had been dealing with a problem like that, it would have been a 3 day ordeal getting the car into a repair shop and getting back to the valley. Dave saved the day. We definitely were being watched over. (Thanks for that little blessing)

But the fact that we could have died did not stop us from having a little fun in the snow. (Jennifer, I stole some of your photos. Most of yours were better than most of mine.)

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P.S. On an unrelated, but important note . . . Rachel's boyfriend, Kyle, just got his mission call today. He's going to the Domincan Republic. YAY !