Convening and Vacating (Part 2)

Well, it has been a while since I shared the beginning of our journey to Indianapolis and beyond, so it’s about time I continue. Besides, I needed to do something to get that demon serpent off the top of my blog.

My last installment left us in Franklin, Tennessee, where we awoke early (and with ears still ringing) on the Saturday before the convention and began to make our way north. We stopped just south of Louisville to visit some friends, and it was upon leaving their house that the first sign of impending calamity made its appearance. Nothing major, just a slight hesitation and revving of the engine when I would accelarate from a stop. Probably nothing, I told myself.

Things went well as we cruised north on I65 through southern Indiana, and I was beginning to entertain the notion that we had somehow escaped the flooding-related troubles that had ensnared many of my fellow convention-goers. That’s when I saw the brake lights.

We were making good time en route to our planned detour at Columbus, where I intended to exit in order to take my family to a restaurant I had visited as a child. The Brown County Inn in Nashville, Indiana is where I learned to appreciate the beauty of fried biscuits and apple butter, and I was so looking forward to reliving this childhood dream of a memory that my stomach was rumbling when traffic ground to a halt just south of Seymour, some 25 miles from the exit. And there was that hesitation again, slightly worse than before. Oh well, it’ll make it.

We left the interstate at Seymour, and made good time on the back roads heading north to Columbus, then west to Nashville. A stop at a convenience store revealed a slightly deficient reading on the transmission dipstick, but the addition of a quart (and some of another one) of fluid had the old Windstar jumping off the line like the good old days.

Along the road between Columbus and Nashville, we got a glimpse of what all the fuss (and snarled traffic) was about. Major flooding had closed interstate highways (and many lesser ones) and thousands of people were without electricity, or homes, or both.

We ate the fried biscuits (and assorted other old-people food), then wound our way north toward Indianapolis. It was in the northern part of Greenwood (an Indy suburb) where we got a glimpse of what all the fuss was about with our Windstar. And by “glimpse,” I mean “there were copius amounts of transmission fluid on the ground under the van.”

The van was all finished moving forward with this transmission. By God’s grace, we were on a very flat road, at a traffic light in front of a Wal*Mart (soon to be Walmart), a relatively safe place to be stranded, all things considered. I was able quickly to summon my wife to the driver’s seat to do the steering while I began to push. The van rolled easily into a parking space, and the adventure began in earnest.

Some three hours later, we left the parking lot in an airport-bound taxi, which was the undisputed highlight of the trip so far, from the perspective of my three-year-old son. When we prepared to load up into the Chrysler PT Cruiser we rented, he asked, “Daddy, is this a race car?” I’m glad someone was enjoying this.

The next day, we handed off our youngsters to my dad who drove down from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to collect them. We then saw to the towing of our traitorous Ford to a nearby transmission shop, and finally checked into our convention hotel in time for the start of the Pastor’s Conference on Sunday. Three days (and nearly three thousand American dollars) later, we had our Windstar back, now fully able to move forward under its own power.

In my next installment, I’ll skip the convention altogether in order to share some snippets of our visit with Bill Gaither (during which I was able to make him angry at Bart Barber) and our actual vacation, which was considerably more relaxing that the trip thus far.