Giveaway Reminder and Tales from the Road

Don't forget to head on over to Goodreads, where you can enter to win one of three paperback copies of my novel Finding Grace.  There are only two more days to go before the contest ends and the lucky trio of winners will be notified.

There's a handy "Enter to win" button right there on the right, at the top of the sidebar.  Click that and it'll take you where you need to go to get your name on the list.  (Come on, hit that button; what have you got to lose?)

In other news, it's our youngest son's Junior Parents Weekend at Notre Dame this weekend, and my husband and I were planning to fly out of Boston early on Friday.  But Old Man Winter was heading to town, due to dump a ton of snow on us throughout the day Thursday (as part of a weather event that they're calling "Snowmaggedon" down South), and it looked like all the flights on Friday were going to be filled up by passengers whose flights on Thursday were sure to be grounded by the storm.  We thought about flying out last night to get ahead of it all--but obviously everyone and his brother had the same great idea, because all the flights were overfull last night, too.

So we packed the car up and got on the road at about 9:00 p.m., spur-of-the-moment-like, and drove about six hours well west of the storm's path.  The only trouble was that after stopping for gas a few hours into the drive, the car started chugging and we started getting a blinking "check engine" light.  So at about 3:00 a.m., we pulled into a hotel in Syracuse, NY, and my husband is planning to head over to the Nissan dealer this morning (after the complimentary breakfast, which I wouldn't miss for the world) to see what's going on.

My uneducated guess is that we got some bad gas (gasoline, that is--what are you thinking, anyway?) or something, because the car started chugging a little and the light came on right after we stopped to fill up.

So...it's a typical Pearl road trip.  Our tales of breakdowns and hours spent sitting on the sides of highways waiting for AAA to come rescue us are somewhat legendary at this point.  But we expected this sort of thing when we had our big old red 15-seater Dodge Ram van money pit; we didn't expect it with the sleek little charcoal-gray Nissan Maxima we got when the old girl died.  (Et tu, Maxima?  Et tu?)

At least we have a couple of days to get things squared away, because back when we thought this was going to be a trip by plane that was going to go off without a hitch, we weren't planning to arrive in South Bend until Friday afternoon.

Okay, then, enough about our woes from the road.  By hook or by crook, we will make it to that JPW at Notre Dame!  How, I'm not sure.  But I'll keep you updated.