“This isn’t going to be some big romantic trip”

Now why would I think that? This was the first time we would be childless and we could take as much time as we needed. I must have missed the part where I would be driving the entire time. That’s all we did, drive, eat, sleep. Eat, drive, eat, drive, eat, sleep. Repeat three more times now.

Since our electric plug adaptor adaptors were stolen, and they’re a rare Canadian breed, we went without electricity the whole time. Also since I didn’t winterize before we left, we didn’t even want to find out if there was anything wrong with our water system until we got down to Texas, so we also went without water. And then, since I forgot to shut off the propane when we left in October, we were also out of propane. As if this all wasn’t joyful enough, our shit tank is still FULL. Five days of this, and no showers, ummm..yeah, not so romantic.

On the final day, our last two hundred miles, out of eleven hundred, I spotted diesel for only $1.99 and since Joey didn’t have his radio on I decided to pull up on his right (where he was making a right turn) and alert him to tell him to turn his radio on, and look..Cheap Gas! Only he didn’t see me and continued on with his right turn, right into me. Because of my brilliance and desperation to save a dime, we now need a new corner panel and lights for the truck, and the bus was seriously scraped between the front tires and the front door. I’m actually trying to forget the whole ordeal, so moving on…..

The kids did great with my parents, and really didn’t even miss us. I cried when we left thinking our plane might go down, and Joey had a talk with Jacob that if anything were to happen to us, they’d be living right there with Grama and Papa, and they DIDN’T have to go to school unless they wanted to. We like to cover our bases. :) My parents are really great for watching them and more surprisingly, respecting our wishes. I know it’s not always easy for them, especially when the kids stay up until four or five in the morning, or want mac and cheese at eleven at night, but they were super. Thank You, Mom and Dad!

In my last post I wrote so nonchalantly about First Class. I don’t know why I do that. It was actually kind of a big thing for me. I’ve always wanted to get bumped up to First, I hear about it all the time, but I’ve always been too chicken to ask. Since we were completely alone with this agent and there weren’t people waiting in line I felt brave. This is exactly how it went down: “Ummmm…uhhhh….I hear about people getting bumped up to First Class all the time…ummm…uhhhhh…..how could we do it?” I finally worked up the nerve, and then showed my ignorance by being on an airline that doesn’t even offer it. I just felt a need to clear that up.

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My Mom said Jewel told her she missed Dad the most.

Because he’s funnier.

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I discovered Windows Live Writer before I left, and I just knew it was the answer to my blogging dilemma. Then I decided it wasn’t because I didn’t always have an internet connection to blog while I’m traveling (with Live Writer I can be offline), I really just needed something interesting to blog about.…THEN I invented Mind Writer. When I’m driving I come up with the BEST blog posts, now if someone could just figure out the mechanics of Windows Mind Writer, I’ll be all set. In the meantime, for some real family adventure involving poop icicles you should check out Bluebird Family while they make their way up to Alaska. One storm at a time.

Happy Travels!

Long Overdue Update

The main thing everyone wants to know is How is Joey doing? Joey wants everyone to know that he is doing good. It's been thirteen weeks since the accident and he's happy with his improvements and he's enjoying the down time, dreaming and plotting our future. He's been in physical therapy three weeks now and reports back to the doctor end of January, to check on his progress. His arm is all they're focusing on at therapy, but that doesn't stop me from giving him a hard time when he still grabs a cane or a crutch to walk with. He's actually walking again! Something he was sure would never happen again. He's not pushing himself, rather letting himself recover one day at a time.

Once Joey started getting around on crutches he felt he could build some things and try selling them, so we, Jewel, Joey and myself, made a quick trip up to Colorado to get his truck. We were barely home when my best friend from grade school was only two hundred fifty miles away visiting family, that we had to make another road trip to visit her. Last week we were invited to family in Dallas, then over the weekend we had a family gathering here for family I hadn't seen since I was a baby. All this with therapy three times a week, Christmas shopping, keeping my mom entertained, baking, and trying to keep everyone healthily fed.....we've been busy.

I've had many of you reach out to us, offering support and encouragement, and I can't say with words how much it has meant to us.

Caterpillar to the Rescue

The first thing Joey did after landing in the trench was tell the guys to call for help, "I've got a broken leg and a broken arm, but I'm stable". The guys...

took pictures.

The Fire and Rescue crew out of Battlement Mesa also took pictures, and gave me a CD today containing a few of them. They left out all the pictures of the actual rescue, including harnessing him to the basket and lifting him out with the trackhoe. No pictures of them putting the traction unit or the neck brace on, or even any close up pics of him or the actual accident scene. I have enough pictures though to show you where they had to go to get him, and how they had to do it. Plus they're pretty pictures.


The ambulance had to park at the bottom of the hill because the incline is way too steep for it to make it up. I don't know how they made it up there, but they came down with Joey, loaded into the back of a pickup with the Caterpillar backing it down the hill.

He said that ride was the worst!

But at least he had a beautiful view on the way down. :)

He rode down a hill, then up a hill, then they backed up, then down another hill. They talked him through the bumps and kept telling him they were almost there, and he did his best to stay calm and relaxed.




After talking with more people today we learned that he was thrown on to the metal pipe, then flipped one hundred eighty degrees before being catapulted almost seventy feet to hit the rock wall of a trench, then bounce to the other wall before dropping to it's eight foot bottom. What a ride.

We got new X-Rays at the hospital today, and the doctor is very happy with his progress and says we can go to Texas whenever he's up for the ride. We were planning on leaving in the morning but now we can't leave until workman's comp finds us a fracture specialist in Texas that will adhere to Colorado's laws. Slight bummer, but really after being in the car for a few hours today, I think it's best if he wait a little longer anyway.

After the Accident

I got the call Joey had been in an accident while I was at the laundromat. The message I got said he was OK, but he had a broken leg and arm, and he (Jake) would call me back once they knew which hospital they were taking him to. I didn't freak out, but the fact that Joey wasn't calling me, did have me worried. Jake called back about ten minutes later and said they were taking him to the Rifle, CO hospital so I called the boys at the bus and told them to get ready, I was picking them up. They were, surprisingly, ready and waiting for me. No one said a word in the car on the drive to the hospital, until I got another call from Jake saying the ambulance has finally gotten there and they're getting him out of the ditch now. WHAT?! Over an hour had passed since I was told they were taking him to the hospital! Another half hour passed, and I got another call from Jake: They're getting him in to the ambulance now. By this time we're already at the hospital and umm...trying not to freak out. Almost THREE hours since the accident happened, he finally arrived in the ER.


The kids were left to themselves in the ER waiting room while I stayed with Joey and helped the ER crew get the rest of his clothes off, and pull the basket he'd been rescued in, out from under him. He was amazingly very calm, and even joking with everyone. The Fire and Rescue guys put a traction unit on his leg and had his arm wrapped in a cast sort of thing. He spent about three hours in the ER taking X-Rays (which he says was the scariest part: him alone with five women and a pair of scissors), going through a CAT scan, getting morphine pumped into him along with shots into his wrist to numb it so the docs could set his bones back into place. The Doc showed me the Xrays and the best way I could describe his wrist was to compare it to broken glass. It was shattered.

We went straight to surgery after the ER, where the kids again had to wait, but this time the nurses were feeding them.....and I've long since declared them the best kids in the whole world. Joey came out of surgery around 9:30 pm and he was feeling GREAT! He was laughing, wanting to get back to his dream and wondering when they were going to do the surgery. Of course, he remembers none of that. During the surgery they put a rod in his right leg with a screw to hold it in place and the surgeon says it came out beautifully, and even showed me the Xrays. There were still bits of bone floating around in his ankle, but the Doc said those didn't matter, they got the most important bone fixed. They also had to do surgery on his wrist because the attempt to set it in the ER failed, and the bones collapsed again.


The kids and I stayed the night in the hospital with Joey, against the nurses wishes but there was no way I could leave him....and she wasn't allowed to not let us, so....Jonas and I spooned in the spare hospital bed while Jewel curled up in a chair and Jake slept in a recliner. Joey never slept.

The next day he had physical therapists teach him how to use the walker with a special platform to brace his broken arm, how to get in and out of the wheelchair, and to teach me how to put the "boot" on and off his leg. Joey's company got us a hotel room for the next ten days since there was no way we were getting him in the bus, and the hospital released him at six pm. Only Thirty One hours since the accident happened. Joey wanted to stay.

Our first hurdle was getting him into the Hummer. There was me..and three nurses... and us standing by helpless while we watched Joey pull himself up by his left hand into the car. Good thing he's strong! I don't know what we would have done otherwise. We stopped by the bus for the Wii and a few other things before heading to our hotel room.

The kids were ecstatic about the hotel. They had a heated pool and an indoor jacuzzi, so they declared this a vacation. I wasn't really looking forward to that long away from the bus, but staying in that hotel was exactly what we needed. They had an ice machine to keep his arm and legg iced up. They had a very nice continental breakfast which I took advantage of every morning. Twenty four hour hot coffee for Joey, guest laundry, yummy restaurants within walking distance, on site Pepsi machine for me, wi-fi, housekeeping, and a big bathtub for Jewel. Aside from the constant non stop caring for Joey, it was kinda like a vacation...

During the ten days in the hotel I made one trip to the bus to get a TV for the kids to play their Wii on, and to get Jewel's rat, and one trip back to the doctor so he could determine whether to cast the arm or do more surgery to put a plate in it.

He decided the five pins are holding his wrist together nicely so no need for more surgery. After a week of learning and dealing with worker's compensation (and their puny limits) that was the best news we'd heard all week! Jewel picked out a black cast for his arm, even though the doc and I tried to get her to pick hot pink.

Our ten days in the hotel was up. We could have asked the company to extend our stay but we all chose to come back to the bus. We couldn't wait to get home, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on my DVR. When we pull into the campground it's windy as heck and we immediately see screened tents blown over, so we brace for the worst. Yep, our sixteen foot awning has blown completely off and is flapping in the wind. Then I go check the black tank to make sure it got dumped earlier that day, and the handle to the valve has been broken off, and the tank is full. We are literally full of shit. The worst part, Joey can't do a thing about anything, and I have to deal with it all on my own.

I wake up the first morning back in my home, and I can't stop crying. I don't even know why I'm crying, but I can't stop (Probably because I held it all together this whole time). I called my Mom and asked them if we can come stay with them while he recooperates. Now I can take care of Joey, while my mommy takes care of me.

Emergency in the Mountains

Just to keep everyone informed - - - Joey (Vicki's husband) suffered an industrial accident yesterday. He is going to be okay...........but he will have a long road back to being himself. He was flung some 50 feet into the air - - - hitting the side of a rock pit, then dropping about 7 or so feet into the pit. He suffered crushed radius/ulna and right wrist - - also shattered his Fibia/Tibia and has a crushed right ankle. I have not heard from Vicki today, but as of last night they were going in to surgery - - placing a steel rod into his leg and doing a lot of repair work. Because this was a remote site, the ambulance could not make it up the dirt road - - - Joey had to endure the transport in the back of a pick up truck, until they could get to an area where he could be medivac'd out. He was injured at 11am - - did not get to the hospital until 2:30pm. We will keep you posted.

Carole - Vicki's Mom

Correct way to handle yourself...

In an accident like this:


Is to always show your good side:

Deer Don't Disco

Deers Don't Disco
Originally uploaded by jakesmome.

We're just waiting on UPS to deliver a welding part I ordered four weeks ago. It'll be here Monday. We're going to leave as soon as the brown van rolls away. The plan is to head to Dinosaur, UT, spend a couple days at Dinosaur Nnational Monument, a museum, and a fossil site. Then make our way down to Arches National Park before soaking in Lake Powell. In Lake Powell we hope to find a houseboat to spend even lazier days on, cruising the Canyonlands. Then it happened. What every driver in these mountains fear, happened. A deer ran into my Disco.

This could change everything. :(