Road trip, Being stranded, and new cookbooks

The joy of air conditioning in a car...we are enjoying it once again-in my car today (although the breeze on the highway next to the smoking car was pleasant)....let me start at the beginning of Saturday...

We took Lillie to St. Libory to see her grandparents and great-grandparents (who happen to live on one of the prettiest farms I've ever seen). I gathered up gallons of fresh rhubarb (which is begging to be made into pies and cakes) and Lillie and Martin and Connie (Grandma) played with apples. Lillie tried bouncing them on the concrete (she wasn't impressed with the result) and then threw them in the swimming pool and watched them bob on the water's surface. She thought this was very funny.

At the ripe old age of 15 months, she was finally allowed to be on a riding lawn mower with Martin. He was beaming with pride. They were on the lawn mower at least an hour....Lillie was not happy about having to leave the mower and go inside for a nap. So, after a day of fun outside and no nap, we leave for home around 6pm. Long story short, the car starts smelly funny about 30 miles from home. Fortunately, we are in a small town and can pull over near the highway but on a side street. The compressor part of the air conditioner (which wasn't working anyway...made for a warm 85 degree drive home with the windows up b/c the window roll-down thing is broken) decided to fail and apparently this part is integral to the car actually running, so we had to stop before the belt snapped. At least we weren't in a blizzard like in March when we got stranded...but that wasn't car failure...that was simply a good old-fashioned blizzard...
I digress, so we call my brother and he comes to pick us up (after I tell him to bring an old blanket for his mini-van because we have our dog with us...its not that my brother doesn't like our dog, he just isn't a dog person). But he gets us anyway! We got home at 10pm and Lillie finally went to sleep around 10:30pm...so I finish cleaning and freezing the rhubarb and I think I was asleep by midnight.
We got up early today and got the part needed to fix the van (still no air hooked up, but, hey, it runs now). Its just time for a nap now!

Oh-my two new cookbooks came in (I happened to be reading one of them when we had to pull over and call for a ride last night)...
* Weber's Big Book of Grilling (I was actually reading parts of this to Martin while he drove)
* Pie (by Ken Haedrich)...I bought Apple Pie Perfect a couple months ago and just had to have this book after eating the Key Lime Pie that Carol made...definitely perfect pie :-)

I think we will not be trading in my car for awhile...it is our only vehicle that currently has working air conditioning and windows that roll down...its the little things in life...