Explosion!!

In 1973 our Hancock family had a reunion planned for Barstow, California. We usually had a reunion close to our Dad's birthday which was July 1st. This year the 4th came on a Wednesday. The town usually celebrated on a week end. This year the parade was held on July 5th a Thurs and then the rest of the week-end was rodeos and other celebrations. We were living in Snowflake, Arizona at the time. We planned to go to the parade and then right afterwards leave for Barstow. On the way home from the parade in Taylor, the air-conditioner in our car quit working. We thought we just couldn't cross that hot desert without air-conditioning in the car. There was no place to rent another car, the train no longer stopped in Holbrook, there wasn't a bus service so we just didn't know what we should do. Our thought processes just weren't working. We had a stupor of thought. Finally about 2:30 in the afternoon we suddenly thought, well what is wrong with us. We have crossed that desert many times without air-conditioning. Let's just get in the car and go. The rest of the car works fine. This had delayed our departure about 3 hours. So we took off. About the time we got to Flagstaff we started listening to the radio. We heard terrifying news. There had been a terrible explosion at the RR crossing in Kingman in which 3 people were killed and 80 others burned or hurt. Had we followed our original agenda we would have been right at that RR crossing when the explosion occurred.