On Tuesday, Kylie and I went on a road trip to Kirksville, Missouri to visit Truman State University. It’s one of the colleges on her short list of small to mid-size schools that have excellent math programs and are within driving distance of home. It’s just over three hours from our house, so we set our appointment for 1:00 to give us time to get there and back. Since Kylie hasn’t had much highway driving experience, I let her drive! We managed to manuever through downtown Kansas City and made a pit stop in Cameron, MO. Then we missed our turn to go north on Highway 11 which was the last leg of our trip to get to Kirksville. As we got turned around, Kylie looked down and saw the gas light had come on! I checked for gas stations along Highway 11, and THERE WERE NONE. Had we made that turn, we would have run out of gas for sure as it was still 47 miles to Kirksville! I have no doubt the Lord was looking after us!

So I mapped us to the nearest gas station and it took us a little bit out of the way. It was in a small town called New Cambria, and as we approached the pumps, I was feeling a bit suspicious that perhaps they were out of service, because they looked like this:

Fortunately, Kylie spotted the kiosk between the pumps that would take a credit card (although even that looked like it was at least 30 years old), and we were actually able to fill up!

We made it to Kirksville and I had found a highly rated Mexican restaurant to call ahead and have our lunch ready for pick-up when we got there. Everything else was smooth sailing! We met with an admissions counselor and had a personal campus tour with a student ambassador where we discovered that the Truman campus is quite compact and has some really beautiful buildings. They have a unique liberal arts and sciences approach that has students taking a wide variety of classes during their freshman year that could include classes from their major as well. Undergrad enrollment is close to 5000 students. The largest class size is about 60, and average is 24 – which is pretty close to what Kylie experiences in high school. This college is definitely still on her list, and we’ll be working on her college applications tomorrow. Prayers appreciated for wisdom to know which school she should attend next year!

Yesterday I had another echocardiogram. It was supposed to be a “light version” to check my ejection fracture only. The tech said he could tell by looking at the pictures that it was fine, but since I’m still in treatment, they needed to get other views to take actual measurements and that’s where we ran into a bit of a snag. My silcone implant was reflecting off the ultrasound and preventing him from getting those other views. He had to call in a nurse who could access my port and they injected a contrast dye (he called it micro bubbles) that would show up on the ultrasound. So it took a little longer than expected, but they got what they needed. I’m grateful that my heart still looks good, which means I’m still on track to finish up my last two antibody treatments.