Seashells .... part one

Our, or at least, my favorite vacation when the girls were young was to go to Sanibel Island in the summer to look for seashells by the seashore......

Our first trip we had more fun finding sandollars by scraping the bottom of the gulf with a foot until we felt something then holding our breath and reaching in to bring one up. This was before a limit was made on how many live ones you could take. We also bought a "shell scooper" to scrape along the sandy bottom to bring up seashells with live animals in them. Talk about a stink when you took them back with you, needless to say there was a lot of bleach involved in getting them craft ready, which was our goal. Though that never stopped us from visiting She Sells Seashells but our favorite place to go for crafting supplies was Sanibel Seashell Industries . You can find display boxes, fiber board shapes, mirrors, lamps with clear bodies to fill with seashells, empty snow globes to fill, just all kinds of things including shells from other parts of the world.

On one Sanibel vacation the women decided to go shopping off the island at an outlet while "the man" took the Chevy van and had the tires rotated and balanced due to vibrations while driving down. It wasn't until we were on our return trip home that we discovered that the tire people had made a grave error.

An hour from home while travelling in the left lane of I-95 north with bumper to bumper traffic and a tour bus on my tail that I felt an issue with one of the tires. Somehow and I firmly believe by God's hand did I make it to the right hand lane then onto the shoulder. When my husband examined the tire he discovered that the lug nuts were not only missing but that 4 out of 5 of the studs had sheared off. We only had one lug holding the tire on! He then proceeded to check out all the lugs on the other wheels to discover that not a one had been tightened down!

You have to understand we only had one bench seat in the rear of the van, no kid seats, it was not a fancy conversion van but a work van. If we had rolled, children and adults would have been flung every where. God showed his mercy and protection that day.

It took about an hour to go one mile to the nearest exit with him jumping out every few yards to tighten that one lug until we safely reached a gas station where we could make a phone call to my brother to bring the necessary items to repair the wheel. 

Thank goodness for brothers!