We made the rainy trek home yesterday. Between the rain, fog, and stops, our 5.5 hour drive took exactly 8 hours. It has been a long time since I've traveled through such thick fog. It is a bit anxiety provoking to be going through mountains and not be able to see the tail lights only a few car lengths ahead of you.
Another amazing sight was the flooding of the Ohio river. Since we haven't explored the Cincinnati or Kentucky areas much, I'm not familiar with the geography. However, we saw amusement parks, roads and buildings under water. I'm not unfamiliar with flooding, but this was awful. It was similar to what I saw traveling to Minnesota during my senior year of high school.
Our area has been saturated with many, many inches of snow and rain the past two weeks. While we didn't have to deal with flooding, the excessive precipitation did effect us. We returned home to a mess. As I have said before, at our previous house the sewer monster haunted every single vacation. We seem to have a similar streak here. In October, we returned home to a backed up septic system and had to spend an additional night in a hotel.
When we walked in the door, we were hit with an awful smell. It smelled like stagnant water. My husband hit the obvious things first. He hauled out a rug that soaked up all the water from our grimy vehicles and feet. It wasn't the problem. Then he ran a cleaning cycle on the washer. It wasn't the problem. When we went to bed, I still smelled it. A half day of burning candles and having windows open hadn't fixed the problem.
After church, I suggested my husband check under the house for standing water. We had seen the problem on inspection last year but hadn't had a problem since. Sure enough, the crawl space had a lot of standing water. And by a lot, I mean he has been pumping water out for over five hours and it hasn't hardly made a difference. Fun stuff!!!!
Our cabin had a hot tub that was incredibly inviting. However, the deck underneath looked extremely rotten. Not that rotten wood necessarily bothers me. But, a rotten deck that is held up only by four extremely long wooden poles on the side of a mountain....well that does bother me. So, I was looking forward to using our hot tub again when we got home.
About dark last night, my husband discovered our hot tub was not running. The excessive rain/snow had shorted out the heating element and ruined it. Unfortunately, there aren't many hot tub repairmen in this area and it's like pulling teeth to get any of them to return calls. Strike two for us!
I'm so thankful we had a restful week, so we had the energy to deal with the messes waiting for us at home.
This was truly one of the better vacations we have taken inside the US. It was enjoyable and relaxing. We probably got along better than we ever have on a vacation because there was no stress, exactly how a vacation should be.
Now, we are fully back to reality. Grocery shopping, dealing with messes, Sunday afternoon naps (well for me anyway).
Tomorrow, I start my second term of this semester with Biology and History. I have done some prep work and I am hoping a two class schedule is a little less taxing this next 8 weeks.
I'm already looking forward to our next mini-vacation next month and some time with friends from back home, friends from back home who have moved to Indiana and will be going on the mission field soon, and a friend that is very special to me. It will be great to see familiar faces.
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