Week 2 of summer had our family on a red eye flight to Saint Louis, Missouri to visit one of Adams cousins Debra Van Orden Stauffer and her amazing husband Dave. It had been over 30 years since Adam and Debbi had last seen each other, and it was the first time for me and the kids ever meeting them! 🥰
It kind of felt like we were on relative race meeting new family!!! It was awesome and we truly did feel an instant connection with them! 🥰❤️
To give you an idea about how incredible these two are, our flight didn’t get in until 1:00 am. We had planned to just take an Uber to their home but they instead drove their two cars 30 minutes away to the airport to pick all 7 of us and all our luggage up! 😱
They also made a sign to welcome us and had made up 5 beds for us all to sleep in once we got to their home at 2 am. I was absolutely amazed at their love and generosity! 🥰
The next morning they fed us a wonderful breakfast of coffee cake, scrambled eggs, and fruit. From there our plan was to go pick up our rental car, but as we were heading out I suggested we call the rental company first as I just had a bad feeling they’d given our car away even though we’d called and let them 2 weeks before that we couldn’t pick the car up until the following day due to our red eye and them being closed at 2 am.
Sure enough our car was gone which began a 5 hour search for another one. We had the hertz manager looking, hertz main office, stopped by an enterprise to see if they had a vehicle, checked Priceline, etc.
Once again Debbi and Dave were absolutely incredible helping us navigate our little hiccup and driving their 2 cars with us in them all over. They ended up taking us by the Saint Louis temple, and to the arch downtown while we waited for another car.
So although our day turned out a little differently than expected, it was actually a really beautiful tender mercy to get more time with Dave and Debbi. They are fantastic people who we are so grateful to now know and love. ❤️🥰 We were able to see some unexpected things, have lunch at Tacos for life, and see downtown Saint Louis.
In the end Hertz did end up finding us another minivan and matching the price we had and by 4pm we were on the road for our 8.5 hour drive ahead of us only stopping for dinner and gas, where we traveled through 5 states ending in West Virginia at 1:15 am! 😱
Adam rented us a beautiful 4 bedroom Airbnb in the heart of a forest in West Virginia with the most gorgeous views, and a ping pong and pool table. We all loved it! ❤️ But a wonderful 1st day of our trip!
