Ooooh, and so the road adventures continue!!! It’s been a little too long since we’ve checked in with you guys out on the interwebs. We’ve been keeping busy with both life on the road and at home. Buuuut, today’s update is going to revolve around our recent road adventures. I know…some of you may be looking to hear some more crazy stories from domestic home life (see past posts…), but those are going to have to wait for the moment. I’ll pull some of those out of the archives at a later date. For now, we’ll discuss the rigors of the road, and more specifically the rigors of our band van…
If you’ve been keeping close tabs on us, you would have seen some Twitter and Facebook postings that mention our van…and boy has this van been a source of adventure. Here goes the story…
About three days before we were to leave for our tour this month, our transmission decided to die on us. Which, for you out there who know cars, you know that replacing or rebuilding a transmission costs a lot of money. Well, lucky for us, we have a pretty new van and our transmission repair was covered under warranty. This was a huge blessing, as otherwise we would have had to shell out some crazy money to get our ride up and running….soooo, our van quite literally got fixed at just about exactly the moment we had to leave for Montana to start our tour. That’s right, Montana…that’s a long drive from Nashville if you’re counting. We made it to Montana to play the Downpour Festival (which lived up to its name, fyi. But it was awesome!!!)… Ok…back to the van.
After Montana we drove to Oklahoma to meet up with Decyfer Down to play a handful of dates with them. On our way down, our “check engine” light turned on. Of course, this isn’t good… We immediately took it to a shop to check the engine codes to see what issue would turn up, and sure enough, the onboard engine computer said that we had transmission trouble. Again. Well…we didn’t have much choice but to take it to a shop in Oklahoma, who said they thought we’d be okay to get as far as Little Rock, since we had some time there to get it into the shop for a couple days to get fixed. We then shipped off for Little Rock, and thankfully we made it…and back to the shop it went. The guys in Little Rock got her all fixed up (so we thought). Sure enough, by the time we were 70 miles or so outside of Little Rock, we started getting a big “thump!” every time we shifted from first to second gear. This is bad, folks. Really bad. Well…we didn’t have much choice but to try to get as far as the next shop if at all possible. The next shop was in Beaumont, Texas. Once again, they said they thought we’d be able to make it. So, after our last show with Decifer Down, we drove through the night to get to the next shop, and our next show…
Now Beaumont is where things got interesting, and quite cool. The guys in Beaumont said that it would take at least two days to fix the transmission, so that left us with needing a ride to our next show in Santa Fe, Texas, which was 90 minutes away. Let me just say….the Santa Fe folks are really second to none. Two of them actually drove their van up to Beaumont and picked us and our trailer up, and drove us to Santa Fe so we could play our concert. While at the concert, they offered to drive us to the rest of our shows around Texas!!! Granted, we only had two more after Santa Fe…but they included driving to Corpus Christi, and then to Petersburg, which is 10 hours from Corpus. Sooooo, that’s a lot of driving, and these fella’s were completely game to help us out. We went from feeling quite defeated, to feeling like a million bucks within a single day. Justin and Pat….you guys rock!!! We not only made it to all of our Texas shows, but we even managed to get back to Beaumont to pick up our newly fixed van. So far so good, it’s still working. And that’s a great sign.
This whole adventure is a perfect example of how God has been providing for us out on the road. We had to get our transmission fixed three times within about 3 weeks and our warranty has covered all the expenses…and then a couple of new friends graciously drove us all over Texas. The timing of all of this is amazing. We were within 8,000 miles of our 100,000 mile warranty running out. It’s a good thing our transmission went bad now, rather than later. God has definitely been watching out for us not only right now in the immediate, but also for our future endeavors as well. We aren’t completely broke because of the van, and we’ve built lasting friends all over Texas because of our awesome new Santa Fe friends.
As difficult and stressful as our August has been, God has provided in so many ways. Sometimes it seems easy to over-look what God is doing in our lives, other times it’s quite obvious. Right now, it’s obvious God is here with us helping us along the way. The difficult thing is knowing that God is always there. We’re never on our own. This month has been a lesson on how closely He watches over us.
Be Well,
David