The Good - The Bad - and the REALLY UGLY!!!???!!!

THE GOOD
We were all going to camp out at the lot for the 24th of July weekend. Meili loved the outdoors - especially sleeping in a tent. She thought it was party time most of the night because Mommy and Daddy were sharing the tent with her. She got the hang of it though after the first night. She loved crawling around in the dirt and we were constantly pulling pine needles and rocks out of her mouth. A little dirt never hurt anyone, right? And Tyler LOVES LOVES LOVES to broken pieces (his own words) being at the lot.
We also had a great time at the Demolition Derby. We had sat in line most of a day in June to get tickets so we were a little nervous if the kids would like it and if it had been worth sweltering for a whole day. But it was really fun. I liked the Powder Puff part best. The women were more entertaining than the men.


Even Meili got into it. She liked staying up late and having the crowds cheering all around her. The fireworks display afterwards was awesome. There were fireworks we had never seen before.
Gary is still smiling (surprising) even after what had happened earlier in the day (read on)
We hit the rodeo on Saturday night. Tyler liked watching the cowboys.
A crazy part of the rodeo called the Hide Ride. A person has to jump on the hide being pulled behind the horse and hang on for dear life. Pretty entertaining.
THE BAD
Gary had bought a brand new truck (at least to us - it was 3 years old but very beautiful) on Wednesday. We drove it to the lot on Thursday. On the way up the road Cris heard a noise in the back, turned around and saw flames, and then yelled for us to get out. That was scary to get the kids out not knowing what was going to happen.
Gary and Dave threw dirt on the fire in the bed but after the bed liner caught on fire it got really bad and blew out the back window. Then the cab caught on fire. You can see how close we were to the trees. Tyler was praying as only a 4 year old can do that the trees wouldn't catch on fire and amazingly they didn't. We won't even think about what that would have been like. We had called 911 and after they had taken a few wrong turns, they arrived to hose it down. And it was just in time too. It was fully engulfed and we were waiting for the fuel tank to blow.
The REALLY UGLY!
This is what our beautiful truck now looks like. It is surreal to watch something like this go up in flames right before your eyes and you are basically helpless to do anything. The guys tried valiantly to save it but it was out of their control. Cris and Dave lost all of their clothes, car seats, pack and play,blankets and pillows and we lost quite a few things for the lot. And no, insurance doesn't pay for contents. We asked ourselves a lot of "what if"s over the next few days. What if it had been in the suburban (keep reading for that story), what if Cris hadn't heard the noise and looked back, what if the trees would have caught on fire, and many other things. I'm sure the faith of a 4 year old helped. And someone was definately watching over us. Thankfully.
The rest of the story is we came home on Sunday night in our Suburban which a friend had brought up to us. As we came down the offramp from the freeway, we noticed smoke coming out from the front wheel wells. We thought it was maybe the brakes or something but then we saw people waving at us and hanging out their windows and yelling "Your truck is on fire!" We pulled over really fast and we were out of there even faster. I don't even remember getting out of the burb (I guess it was the practice we had only 3 days earlier). Gary and Dave popped the hood and there was a fire down low in the engine. They doused it with Gatorade from the coolers. A lady pulled up behind us and told us there were huge flames under the burb as we were coming down the ramp. That was why everyone was screaming at us. Cris and I refused to ride home in the burb so I called a friend to come get us. Needless to say, we are looking for a new vehicle.

And all we had wanted to do was go to the lot to have a few relaxing days to get over all of the excitement of the past 2 weeks.