Monday morning we got up and hit the road to get from Baltimore to Virginia Beach- about 5 hours. Steve and I stopped at Staples to receive a fax, sign it and send it back (and apparently to also teach the girl behind the counter how to set the fax to receive a legal sized fax.) Have I mentioned that we closed on our house in Las Vegas? It’s officially sold. YAY! Anyway, we were traveling with my sister and her husband since they had two of our kids in the car with them. My brother and his wife stopped at Costco to pick up some last minute supplies. They called us to see where we were at when they left and they were about 20 minutes behind us.

We stopped at a McDonald’s to feed the 7 kids we had between us and called my brother to let them know and see if they wanted to let their 4 year old out to play. They were in charge of the reunion and were carrying most of the supplies- so they wanted to get down there to set up before everyone got there. As we were leaving McDonald’s my brother called and said they’d been in an accident. My first thought was that they’d had a fender bender. My first thought was wrong. The trailer had fishtailed and rolled- with the SUV pulling it. My brother, his wife, their kids (4 years old and 3 months old) and my sister Barbara were fine- relatively speaking. My sister in law Kim had the worst of it- she fractured a vertebrae, got a big cut in her head the required staples and had some nasty road rash on her arm. She ended up being taken to the hospital in the ambulance and was kept for just over 24 hours. My brother cut his arm and my sister had some ribs out of place and other damage that she’s seeing a chiropractor for. The kids were fine- not a scratch on them. Thank goodness for carseats being used correctly!

We got as close as we could to the accident before being stopped by traffic since the accident had spilled over all lanes of traffic. At that time my sister called wondering where we were and we asked her to ask the fireman who was with her if we could travel down the emergency lane to get up there. He asked what cars we were driving and told us that when we saw him we were to follow. So we did that and were nowhere near as close to the accident as we thought we were. When we drove up this is what we saw:

After rolling 5 times they ended up on their tires. The trailer was destroyed. As we drove past we could see just how much.

My uncle and cousins came up to help. We ended up taking the two kids and my sister back to camp with us and my brother stayed at the hospital with Kim. The majority of the camping supplies were in that trailer. Most of us had either flown in or driven with minimal space and were relying on their equipment. Plus they had all the food. My uncle and cousin were able to salvage most anything that was salvageable. It was odd what had survived and what hadn’t. There were two watermelons. One was splattered all over the inside of the car- the other we ate (and it was delicious) three days into camping. It sure put a damper on our reunion though to start off with such a tragedy- and to not have my brother and his wife there. They were able to join us a little bit at a time during the week and we did have their kids for the most part.

But we felt extremely blessed that no one was more hurt then they were. No other cars hit them. We feel very watched out for.