Jan 15 2010

Day 279: Journey to Florida

by renee

We’ve arrived in Florida! Now, this isn’t the Orlando and Disney World part of Florida. This is wild boy country Florida. Where wild boars, rattlesnakes, coyotes, alligators and fire ants are all part of daily life. First day here and the kids are exhausted but happy after a very full day of playing golf, running, climbing, digging holes, swinging, petting a new horse and much more! We are parked for a couple weeks at an old friend’ s property. He and his lovely wife have three marvelous children who share the same excitement of life and hunger for adventure. Their home is in the country. The nearest town is just over 1,000 people. There is lots of room to run around and endless things to explore. We’re looking forward to many adventures and just time to chill and catch up.

Our trip here was easy and restful. The kids were amazing travelers and didn’t complain about wanting a break to run around. We took 8 days and drove through 5 states to get here (New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Missippi, and Alabama). Our first day traveling was 11 hours altogether! The consecutive days were 7 and 8 hours in the truck. The kids were pretty much content to hang out in the truck. We did school, watched movies and enjoyed the ever changing views and discoveries out our windows.

Most of the drive through Texas was acres and acres of cotton fields, wind turbines and oil rigs. I have never seen so many wind turbines in one place in my life. Hundreds of them. The cotton fields turned into a great school lesson. We pulled over and Andrew got out and grabbed a big handful of cotton from the side of the road that had blown around during the harvest. The kids each got a piece to play with while they watched some really awesome cotton harvesting videos on YouTube! I love the internet! After we saw how they made cotton bales, we started to see real cotton bales covered with tarps, waiting to be loaded on trucks. The kids were pretty amazed and I was very satisfied with a productive homeschool day.

On day 3 (Saturday), we stopped in San Antonio for three nights. We met up with an old friend there who showed us the famous Alamo, and other sites in San Antonio. The next day Andrew and I worked most of day while the kids played and enjoyed the campground and the break from traveling. We left the campground tuesday morning (day 6) and then met up in Louisiana with some good friends of ours who are nomads like us. After spending a night camping side by side in a Walmart parking lot, we went to visit an alligator house together and all the kids had a chance to hold baby alligators. Later on that day, we stopped for gas and saw a live tiger exhibit set up by the gas station!

We stopped for the night on day 7 at a campground in Marianna, Fl to clean out our tanks and get cleaned up ourselves. We arrived the next day around 3:30 pm with plenty of time to play and visit.

It’s Shabbat now and we are resting! It’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow so it might be a nice down day after all the excitement today.


Jan 14 2010

Episode 6: San Antonio +

by andrew

Episode 6 of Journeys – a serial, rough-cut documentary composed of Motion Snapshots from our life on the road. Jan 2010: In this episode we travel through Texas to San Antonio, ride scooters and motor scooters, explore the Alamo and the river walk, and hold baby alligators in Louisiana


Jan 7 2010

Day 271: First day back on the road

by renee

First day back on the road and it’d been great. It’s wonderful to be on the road again. Jaiden is serenading Reayah, Zach is asleep on my shoulders, Joy is chewing on a carrot, Bennah is playing my ipod and I am getting some design work done! 7 Hours ago we pulled away from Andrew’s parent’s home in 4 inches of snow with frozen water and gray tanks. It’s been a peaceful day. We are now driving through New Mexico and got to see some incredible scenery before the sun completely disappeared. We’ll be driving late tonight to the next Walmart (they are few and far between on this stretch of our route) where we’ll spend the night in below freezing temperatures. We’ll be bundling up tonight in the trailer and keeping the thermostat on a low temperature to save on propane. That’s the plan anyway. We’ll see how it goes. It’s 6 degrees F already and will keep dropping through the night.


Jan 6 2010

Day 270: Here we go again

by andrew

I was hoping to have several other projects wrapped up so that I could include them with this post. Suffice to say (for now) that there are some exciting things in the pipeline that will be a new step in our travel journaling and sharing.

Some selected tid-bits of News:

  • The article about me in Videography Magazine was published:
    Print Version: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/vdy_200912/#/28
    Web Version: http://www.videography.com/article/90596
  • Jaiden turned 3.
  • I turned 33.
  • Our awesome family-friend-cousins were here from Winnipegosis, MB for a week and a half of adventures
  • Renee and I had a fun date watching Avatar at the new local theater with premium seating and dinner served right to our seats before the show
  • I took a basic pistol class in the mountains and spent a day in the classroom and a day on the range shooting a 380, .40, .45, and a shotgun. What a blast!

This post will be uncharacteristically short. We’re in the throes of uprooting from our longest stay of anywhere that we’ve been so far – nearly 4 months here in Colorado. And what an amazing time it has been. It’s easy to think of all the things that didn’t happen… how I never made it to the slopes, how we didn’t get back up to the cabin to fix the woodpiles we stacked but later fell over, how it never panned out to make it down to Glenwood Springs, how we didn’t even really get the thorough home cleaning / purging that we intended to with all this “time” in one spot, etc.

But it’s even easier to think of all the amazing adventures we DID have and all the incredible experiences and work and fun and family time and dates and hanging out and business and exploring and fellowship and new friends and on and on and on that characterized our time here. Those should have all been documented much better, but time has been insanely scarce. We’re very much looking forward to the vacation of the road.

Tomorrow we leave. We are flying south for winter. There is more to catch up on at some point, but for now there remains a lot to do to get ready.


Jan 6 2010

Episode 5: Denver Departure

by andrew

Episode 5 of Journeys – a serial, rough-cut documentary composed of Motion Snapshots from our life on the road. Jan 2010: In this episode we shoot shotguns, watch a pile of gravel get delivered, and leave Denver after an amazing few months (the longest we stayed in a single place all year).


Jan 5 2010

Episode 4: Colorado

by andrew

Episode 4 of Journeys – a serial, rough-cut documentary composed of Motion Snapshots from our life on the road. Sep-Dec 2009: In this episode we explore Colorado in all it’s mountain and snow glory.