Right Place At the Right Time

Saturday, Opa had final sermon and Sunday school preparations to do and hubby was getting back from his business trip.  He's had some long, busy days, so I knew Jon would want a nap when he got back.  Being that both of those goals are more easily accomplished with no kids running around the house, the kids and I went to "The Living History Farm" in Des Moines with Oma.

At one point early in our drive there, we encountered so much rain that we considered turning around and trying again on Sunday afternoon.  I'd looked at radar images before we left, so I was pretty confident that we may encounter some rain but that it wouldn't be nearly as bad as what we were driving through.  Luckily I was right.  The fact that I had brought rain jackets and umbrellas made the decision a little easier as well.

For those of you not familiar with The Living History Farm, it is a hands-on experience that takes you through Iowa farming from 1700 through the early 1900's.  They have "actors" who tell you about how life would have been during that time.  We talked to pioneers from the 1850's who were eating lunch prepared over a wood fire using food grown on the farm from their time period (let me just say it smelled so good I wanted to join them).  We saw how they made brooms and RX pills in a "town" set in 1865.  We spent about 3 - 4 hours at the farm learning all kinds of new and interesting things.

About the time I was expecting Jon to be getting to his parents house, I got a call from him.  Unfortunately, he was experiencing car troubles.  You see, our truck was too big to fit in the parking lot at the airport so he had taken his parent's car.  After calling his dad, it was determined that he would just drop it off at the dealership so they could work on it next week (apparently this problem had happened before and it is still under warranty).

Of course I felt kind of bad that this happened to him, but I was glad his mom and I didn't have that car for our trip because then we could have been stranded with the kids somewhere.  Then I got to thinking some more.  He had been able to limp the car for a while, but made the decision not to drive any further once he got to Des Moines.  What's more, he was only 2 blocks from The Living History Farm and 1 mile from the dealership when all this happened.  If we had turned around and decided to come back another day, he would have been stuck there waiting for someone for much longer than he did (he had to wait for us to finish part of the tour).  Talk about being in the right place at the right time.