That was Scary!!!

Ok, so once again I am horrible at updating and I have a ton of posts I want to do but I have to share this experience first. I will make one huge post later this week with all the things we have been up to this month. But for now, I just have to thank all the angels protecting my family yesterday.....here's the story:





We decided to head up to Forest Lakes Friday afternoon to spend time up at the cabin with Ryan's Dad, brother, and 2 of his nephews. We took the Altima because it gets better gas mileage than the Buick, but Ryan was hating me for that decision. On the way up, the DVD player broke so I had to listen to whiny cries for the last hour. We had fun roasting marshmallows, making smores, and enjoying the cooler weather of the Arizona mountains once we got there. Drew was in heaven. We all slept in one room which ended up being a horrible night with both kids continuously waking each other up throughout the night. I think I got 3 hours of sleep, but that is expected when you go "camping". This was our best attempt at camping for the year. We had fun riding the 4-wheelers and the Ranger but the rain cut our day short. I wanted to go on a hike as a family but the rain came and that put an end to that idea. So we headed home at 2 PM so the kids would sleep on the way home, which they did till the accident. Just south of Payson we hit a huge rain storm. It was nasty and hard to see. Drew woke up to the loud rain and there were few spots that the rain was coming down so hard it made it hard to see. Ryan was taking it slow and was maybe going 40 mph and thank goodness he decided to pass the car in front of us so it was just us on the road when we hit a gush of water that decided to enter the highway. We were in the right lane and hydroplaned to the other lane and into the ravine that ran on the side to the highway that ran parallel to the mountain side. The car did a 360 and then a 180, and thankfully stopped in the mud up against the side of the mountain. During the incident, my husband kept his cool and my thoughts were on the safety of my kids, Kylee more specifically because she was on the side of impact if we hit the mountain. Miraculously, we didn't hit anything and was just stuck in the mud.







We get out and tried to get the car out of the mud but our efforts were useless. We were blessed with 2 trucks stopping and coming to our rescue in the pouring rain. One truck, I call the BYU boys because that was on their license plate, were such troopers. They walked up the highway in the pouring rain to get cars to slow down while the other truck tried to tow our car out of the mud. Their truck wasn't 4wheel drive so it didn't work. But this other truck stopped and he hooked his beast of a truck up to ours and was just about to pull us out when a police officer showed up. He yelled at all the guys who were helpingand told them to leave. He was pretty rude. We were literally 30 sec. away from freedom. So then we had to wait for more officers to show up so they could close the highway and the lieutenant got his truck hooked up to our car and pulled us out. I was amazed it was drivable. So then we drove to the next turn off and inspected the car and there was absolutely no major damage, just a few scratches and a rubber cover above the front tire came off, but that's it. We felt so blessed and grateful that we had angels watching over our safety. Unfortunately, that nasty police officer gave Ryan a ticket for failure to control the vehicle. He said we should have been going 25 mph on the freeway. We tried to argue nicely but he wasn't going to budge. I could go on about the ticket but I won't. Our neighbor is a police officer and we have a handful of lawyers in our ward so Ryan is going to talk to them and decide if he should contest the ticket. But we are just blessed to have no injuries and a fully functioning car. So, that's my huge story that everyone wanted to know. So in the future, I will not be driving the Beeline if there is rain in the forecast!