Oh, Lou-Lou.

Hi ya’ll! As promised, we have a bit of news to share about Lou-Lou. She’s been hanging out in Burns, Oregon for the past month and a half in a repair shop. The story of how she happened to land there is pretty standard as far as engine-blowing-up stories go but I’ll try to tell it short yet interestingly.

A little over a month ago, Joe was heading to Portland, Oregon from Boise, Idaho to meet up with me. Our plan was to spend a month in Portland then start heading East to a friends birthday party in the Catskills Mountains in New York State.

Unfortunately, Lou-Lou had other plans.

As Joe tells it, he was driving through the Malheur National Forest when Lou-Lou got very sick. She started smoking. Badly. Smoke filled up the entire cab of the van. Joe pulled over to check things out and when he lifted the hood, there was oil everywhere. Knowing right away that this was not good, he knew he had to get to a repair shop. With no cell reception, he did the only thing he could do. He drove at a very slow speed into the nearest town. He luckily found a diesel repair shop at 4:45 on a Friday of a holiday weekend. The mechanics were able to quickly diagnose that Lou-Lou did indeed blow a piston on her engine and needed a new one. He arranged for her to get a new engine the following week.

That left Joe stranded in Burns for days (unbeknownst to us at the time, it would’ve been months had he stayed until Lou-Lou was better) so the girls and I decided to pack up the car and join him for an impromptu camping trip which was insanely fun, given the circumstances. We left Lou-Lou in Burns to be fixed and Joe came to Portland. As I write this, Lou-Lou is still in Burns and we’re still hanging out in Portland. We’ve been skating, taking small road trips, cooking lots of good food and overall being very thankful for the tiny apartment that I have here.

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in other news….

So, with that little bit of information, that I did purposely try to keep fairly short because, lets face it, there’s not a lot to say about getting a new engine, we do have more news that is much more interesting to write about. News that will include a happy, healthy, new and improved Lou-Lou AND super exciting, life changing, FUN FUN NEWS! And we can’t wait to tell ya’ll about it in a couple days! (you had to know that we’d leave ya’ll hanging on that one. For just a few days, at least).