Day 29 - Oh MY!

Well... we did it. We stopped at the Spam Museum in Austin, Mn. Ellen, I must say that it was very enlightening! There are more products manufactured by Hornell Foods than I ever imagined, they are not just about making Spam. Their samples were tasty (but not enough of them... I was hoping for a Spam burger with the Hot and Spicy Spam - guess I will have to try that one on my own!) There were a couple of kids there while we were looking through the museum and they were having a really good time with some of the hands on stuff. Nice stop for a couple hours if it is on your way.

Our day actually started before that when we were trying to get to a church for morning worship. What an ordeal! Let me just say, that nothing seemed to work out from the church we had picked from the listing in the hotel room (it had combined with another church several blocks away which took us too long to find) to the extra 45 minutes or so that we spent driving around searching for a church (we only found one which started at 10:30 - it was 10:50). Finally we gave up and hit the highway, only to find a church was five minutes further than the point we had turned off to go searching! Crazy!

So after leaving the museum, we hit the highway once more. As we approached The Dells, traffic began to pick up. When we got to The Dells traffic was bumper to bumper and creeping! Can you imagine? This was all traffic heading toward Chicago and we were 150+ miles from Chicago! Every time I thought about getting off and following an alternative route, the speed would pick up. Unfortunately, there was not a good "other route" so we stayed in the giant slinky for the rest of the afternoon, evening and night!

Along the way, we decided to stop and get some directions for the hotel we had reservations with (one of only two reservations we made on the entire trip - if we didn't have these reservations we would have stayed the night somewhere else and let the traffic move on its way!) We needed directions because my Tom Tom couldn't find the hotel. Long story short, the Tom Tom went on the blink and wouldn't find any satellites, we couldn't get in touch with the hotel and we didn't know where it was located (except of course, what city it was in). Grrr!

Around 7pm and rather frustrated, we decided to stop for a bite before getting to the hotel. As we did, we ran into a woman who had been there since 3pm with a broken down van and 6 children. Her spirits were very good and she was taking care of business, but her van needed to be towed, she needed to get to her hotel with 6 kids, and she needed to be at work in Cincinnati in the morning! And her spirits were high! Wow, did that ever put our rough day into perspective!

It seems that the Lord has a way of doing just that - you know, putting things in perspective for us. Pray that she will get to Cincinnati with her children today and all will be well with her. As for us, we are on our way to Michigan to visit Uncle Dan and Aunt Linda. They don't have high speed internet, so if you don't hear from me for a couple days, you will know why.

Lesson for the day... God is good all the time! Be patient, He has a plan.