The Death of Maander and Starting Anew

So, if you read my previous blog then you know that something happened to our van....and it wasn't a good thing.  Alex and I waited for about 2 hours on the side of the hwy for a tow truck to pick us up and take us to a car mechanic in DeKalb, IL.  DeKalb is roughly an hour from Chicago. We got to the mechanic shop and the receptionist sounded very positive and reassured us that we brought our van to the best place in town.  Well, it better be good if they charge 100 bucks an hour! Anyways, the shop seemed very busy, but the receptionist promised to have someone look at our van as soon as possible to get some type of diagnosis/estimated cost of repair. Waiting is the worst thing ever, especially for me since i'm not a very patient person.  After about an hour, the mechanic walked up to us and said, "Well, I don't have the greatest news, well actually it's pretty bad. I want both of you to come and see what the problem is." His tone sounded like he was a doctor that was about to tell me my loved one had some type of terminal sickness. Talk about a gut wrenching feeling..... He took us out to the shop area and showed us what was wrong with the van. It was like a foreign language to me, but the jist of what he told us is that Maander has died and the only way to bring him back is with a major organ transplant. In other words, a new cam shaft, if you know what that means. It's a really expensive fix and too large of a sum for our budget.

So, what do we do now?????? It still hasn't totally sunk in for me yet. I just imagined that Alex and I would ride into Sacramento with our VW van and then the end of our travels would be complete.  I guess I had thoughts here and there about the possibility of not making it back home with Maander, but I really never thought that would actually happen. I really don't know what to think.

We are going to sell our van in the next two days. We are getting rid of even more stuff than we started our trip with and we're taking a 49hour train ride back to Sacramento.  I think it will really start sinking into my brain that our trip has really ended when we get on that train.