Bertie

A little more about Bertie...

 

A) He's huge.

 

B) He's fantastic.

 

C) I'm incredibly thankful for him!

 

While we were in Colorado, Luke's uncle told him about these snazzy rideshare van you can get reasonably from places like Enterprise Rideshare or vehicle auctions. The vans are usually only a few years old with 60-90,000 miles and in pretty nice shape... They're 12-15 passenger vans that have been made with 8-11 full size captain's chairs instead of the bench seating and they have an aisle down the middle of them! Pretty cool, in our opinion!

 

So we came home and thought about it some... our Big Beulah Bus was a 1 ton, getting about 12 miles a gallon with about 120,000 miles on her... so we decided we'd just give her a shot on CraigsList. Well... after about a week of zero calls, we'd decided that was probably just our easy answer to keep her and be thankful for her. (Which we were...) Then Luke found an entire set of new carpet/flooring for her on CraigsList for $30 {remember the milk incident?!} so we were LOVING her and had decided we were actually thankful she hadn't sold.

 

Then we got the call--- we'd forgotten to take her off CraigsList--- and a (very nice, Jesus-serving, 6 1/2 children, homeschooling) family from the other side of the state had *finally* found the van they'd been looking for (for 2 YEARS!) Beulah! Sooooo... they came and bought her. Just like that.

 

We were not overly sure what to do... we had no vehicle for the next week and prayed about what to do. There were no "right" vans on CraigsList anywhere around and we weren't really sure if we wanted an ex-rideshare van after all. All the available ones were white and for some reason Luke didn't really want white... :)

 

Then Bertie showed up!

 

In South California, of all places! AND he was Silver and not white, had the 9 captain chairs instead of 8, was a 1/2 ton instead of a 1 ton (16-17 mpg, baby!), was CLEAN & never smoked in, had 30,000 less miles than Beulah, and industrial strength carpet :) ...

But still in S. Cali.

 

So we checked our free ticket situation... and lo and behold, there was enough for 2 one way tickets to LA! Ta da! So Luke and Riley flew out the next morning and were home about 36 hours after they'd left... along with Bertie.

 

I'm in love.

I've seemed to have gotten clean over my big-van distaste. Ahem. I love driving him... Luke just is convinced he'll find some snazzier wheels on CraigsList for some stellar deal, a guy thing I'm told. I couldn't care less. :)

 

Ahhh... no "MoOoOoM!!! He's TOUCHING meeeeeeeeeeeee....!" ;)

 



And there's one more to add here soon!

 

{Thankful God loves us enough to even care about blessing us with the *perfect* vehicle for our family!}