Flashback Friday

We will be in Utah on Friday, so my Flashback Friday is a day early. I decided that it would be fitting this Flashback Friday, to remember all of our family automobiles over years past. Our van is making a terrible noise -- we think it's either the power steering pump or the idler pulley. The windshield looks like a jigsaw puzzle, the blinker never worked correctly and now doesn't work at all, and piece by piece our beloved Big White Van, a.k.a. The Millennium Falcon, is falling apart. A month or so ago we asked our home teacher, Shane Petty (Cami Barney's husband) to begin looking for a new 15 passenger van for us. He has called us almost every week telling us about a new van he has found, but none of them have been quite right for us.

This week, however, he did find the van that had "Whiting" written all over it. It is being shipped to Lander even as we speak, and we'll have it in our possession on Tuesday. We will be very sad to see our Big White Whiting Van go, but everyone will be relieved to know that our "BOYS" license plate will be transferred onto our new Big White Van!

This is our Neon, which was a wedding gift from James' parents. We had this car from 1995 to 1999 and loved it. It was a sporty little car. That is Cameron poking his head into it. This photo was taken at our house in Provo in 1997.

The boys affectionately named this car the "Honda River." We bought it from James' oldest brother Eric in 1996 and had it until 1998. This photo was also taken at our house in Provo in 1997.

This is our very first mini van, purchased from James' 2nd oldest brother Pete (you're seeing a theme here -- Whiting Family Car Swap, we call it) in 1998. We had this car until 2004 when we got our sporty little Mazda 3. This photo was taken in front of my parents' house because they always had the blessed privilege of selling our old cars for us (since they live in a more populated area and on a relatively busy street!). We got this red van the same weekend DFS brought us baby Adondas (remember "Baby Don"?) and the same weekend we brought home Oliver from Aunt Pat's friend at work.

Herbie Suburbie
Our lovely Suburban! This photo was taken in front of our house in Laramie. We bought our suburban in 1999 when we lived in Moab because we wanted to go four-wheeling! And we did! We did some pretty dangerous stuff with this hefty suburban - some things that I would never do again now that I'm all grown up! We had some great adventures in this car, including our final adventure on the way to my 10 year high school reunion when the suburban caught on fire by Wagon Wheel Rest-stop. James put the fire out with the fire extinguisher that DFS required us to have in our cars (thank goodness for that!). Our awesome friend Matt Gardner rescued us out in the middle of nowhere, bringing us the needed parts to fix our suburban. We had our little foster daughter Latavia with us so we had 7 kids in car seats waiting for the suburban to be fixed before we continued our very long journey to Bountiful from Laramie. Ahh, memories! We left our suburban in front of my parents' house with a "For Sale" sign on it and came home with the Millenium Falcon, and the rest is history!

Ah, there it is! A vision of beauty! Our beautiful Big White Van that has taken us to Mount Rushmore and back, to Nauvoo and back, to Utah countless times, to Montana, Idaho, and all over the great state of Wyoming ever since 2002. She was a 2002 Olympic Shuttle bus (her main Claim to Fame) and has served us well all of these years. Now sporting over 300,000 miles, it is time for her to retire. We will sell her, but I doubt any of you are going to buy her after I already listed in detail all of her broken parts (not to mention she's still operating on her original transmission and engine!). We'll sure miss this big Bucket of Bolts, but all good things must come to an end.

Here is our sporty little Mazda3, our current car. He was a hurricane salvage car so whenever it's cold and rainy we get a very interesting smell coming through the vents. Hmmm.... We can only wonder..... I love zipping around in this car and so far I don't have any speeding tickets! Neither does James (that I know of...).