Those crazy Rosses loaded up the family minivan and hit the road at 3:30 p.m. yesterday. Destination: a country church in Arkansas, 400-plus miles from home.
And we did it on little sleep, to boot. Why do they call those things sleepovers when there's so little sleep happening? We took the trio of insomniac girls to Krispy Kreme before their last basketball game of the season to make sure they were sugared up enough to run up and down the court.
We had planned to leave right after that game ended, but tornado watches and warnings along our Interstate 40 route caused us to wait out the storm a bit. Confident that the worst weather had passed, we headed to a Hampton Inn in Clarksville, Ark., about two-thirds of the way to our destination. We made it there in time to swim last night, then got up at 5:30 this morning and were back on I-40 by 6:30.
We met up with Lou Butterfield, the minister of the Remmel church (our ultimate destination) at 8:45 a.m. in Searcy, home of Harding University. We followed Lou, a communications professor at Harding, the final 40 miles to this thriving church out in the middle of nowhere. I'll save most of the details, which I found quite inspiring, for my Chronicle story in our next issue. It's part of our "Are We Growing?" series. (I will offer one tidbit unrelated to the story: Lou roomed with Kenneth Starr at Harding, and Starr was the best man in his wedding.)
Tamie took photos - lots and lots of them. She was particularly inspired by the contrast outside the building, which you can get a sense of from this photo.
The high point for her had to be when she got the van stuck. Really stuck. As in the front tires were half submerged. She was driving around looking for good angles, since it was chilly and windy and wet. The nice folks at Remmel told us it happens all the time (they carry chains in their pickups as a precaution) and used said chains to haul us out. The whole time, Tamie said she was thinking about the song, "Love Lifted Me" - especially that verse that goes "I was sinking deep in sin ..." That'll teach her to skip the sermon to take photos, hmm?
Alas, we left Remmel (which is an unincorporated farming community about seven miles east of Newport, as if you've ever heard of Newport!) about 2 p.m. and began the journey home. We pulled into our driveway at precisely 10 p.m. The children were walking funny, but everyone survived. They're already asking where we're going next.
The answer is AQUILES, MEXICO. In 18 days!
2 comments:
Been to Newport! I was on my way to Tuckerman....
Sounds like you had a great time. Growing up I remember all the "family trips" we took. They were the memory makers. Funny, the long family trips we take now are the ones the boys seem to remember best too.
Blessings,
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