The Quebec City Trip- Entry #1

I like to keep a little vacation journal. My mom always had one for our yearly camping trips when I was growing up and I love to look back at them. Her's was fancier than mine- with postcards and pamphlets inserted at appropriate spots. I used to love to by postcards of places where I've been but as our lives have become more transitive I've found that having piles of postcards isn't really helpful. So I began a vacation journal on our trip out east.

Last Christmas my sister-in-law gave me a beautiful vacation journal book. I decided that I wanted to begin that journal with our journey to the Philippines next year.

There were just enough pages left in my current journal for our trip last week to Quebec City. We went with Dennis' entire family (dad, mom, brother, sisters and their families). It was a lot of fun.

We started out by loading our van to the gills, as usual. We stayed in Ottawa on Sunday night with Aunt Bee so we'd have a 2 hour head start on our next day's journey.

Journal entry-Day 1

Pulled out of Brenda's at 9:00am. Stopped to pick up breakfast at Tim's. Coffee, a sour-cream glazed donut and breakfast sandwich for me, a breakfast sandwich and donut for D, muffins for the girls. Finally got on the 417 at 9:45. Cloudy, overcast. No rain... YET (doom, doom, doom).

Stopped at the Quebec Welcome Centre at 10:45. Got some pamphlets and maps. Went potty. Back on the road at 11:00. It drizzled for 15 min. or so awhile ago. Ok, now it is raining- 11:15. Stopped at a BK with a playplace for lunch. Stayed a long time while it rained and rained. Left around 2pm.

That was a long stop but the girls had a good play. Squeaky and Button took Winnie up by the hand and helped her come down the bigest slide. They came down all together like a big train. It was so cute to see them helping Winnie.

We arrived in Quebec City around 4pm. As we pulled off at the exit and stopped at the light the van started chugging. We barely made it into the lot at Petro-Canada. Transmission fluid started pouring out of our van. We had to have it towed to a garage. We called Dennis' brother and sister-in-law who had just unloaded their van at the campground. Ron was able to come and pick us up- we were only 3km from the campground.

My kind sister-in-law helped me set up our tent while Dennis was taking the van to the garage. We ended up moving out tent to a different spot across the road because of a swampland at our site... I'm so glad we did! It was so muddy.

We were so encouraged to see God providing for us- even through the experience of our broken-down van. It happened so close to the campground and our family was there to bail us out.