The Edge [of all] Journeys

Thanks for all the comments on the last post. I realized a few hours after posting that I probably did the adventure a cursory injustice. In my haste to get it posted while I had a connection I left out the emphasis that all your comments made up for: it was a truly blessed trip! And even with the tire explosion and all, it was awesome. It defined why we’re doing this. It sounds crazy but I love flat tires! Not necessarily the specific inconvenience of having to change a flat in a potentially dangerous situation – but the general archetype of the Flat Tire! The unexpected! The Challenge! The reliance – the adventure of discovering how YHWH is going to get us out of that one. 🙂

And He did – all the provision was in place, and my praise to Him for the journey was grossly lacking from the last post. Sure I had to sweat a little and work a little, and I was tired when we arrived, and I hope I don’t have any other blow-outs as long as we travel, but I DID love it anyway. And YES – we are protected. Protection doesn’t mean we won’t have to deal with anything hard. But it means that if we put all of ourselves into LIFE and trust the outcome to YHWH then He will prove faithful every time.

So, yes, we definitely had fun that day. And we love and miss all of you reading too! Sorry we don’t have more time to say so personally, individually, but hopefully Father will give us time together down the road… literally… 🙂

Here are some excerpts from the overall trip from Winnipeg to the West Coast, including several of the mentionable moments I referred to in the last post:

This is a giant turtle made entirely out of old wheel hubs. It’s in Dunsieth, ND and was fun to see – I used to drive past it almost every weekend going from Minot, ND to Winnipeg to visit Renee when we were engaged back in 2000.

This was the view from our camp site at the KOA just a mile a way from the East Entrance to Glacier National Park.

Here we are in Glacier national Park. It was so amazingly breathtaking.

The only way to really try to capture it somewhat was to put some panoramic photos together. I did about 10 of them overall, and they turned out quite well. Some of them had as many as 20 individual images in them. Here’s one below composed from about 8 images. The original versions are well over a giga-pixel each. That is snow in the bottom of the frame. We found out later from other campers that just a week before we got there, the road through Glacier was still closed because of the snow. It had only started melting in earnest shortly before we visited. What a blessing that it was open when we were there!

These mountain goats came right up to me and asked if I’d be willing to do a photo shoot with them. They got really close… I probably took 200 shots of them all together. What a treat!

And here’s that crazy hail storm that ran into us on our first day of travel after we left the KOA and Glacier.

Check out the grape-size hail stones! Biggest I’ve ever seen. These pelted us for a good 10 minutes. It was intense, and a fantastically awesome thing to experience.

And of course – the tire incident. I wasn’t kidding – it literally exploded.

There! That’s better… It was a long hard journey from Winnipeg to the West Coast. By the time we got here, late, tired, and road-weary part of me was ready to be done driving for a long while, and I wasn’t looking forward to thinking about the next leg(s) of the journey. But then… we finally went to bed after setting up the trailer… and I woke up to this:

This is our site right on the river. I stepped out the next morning to the sound of baby birds chirping in a birdhouse mounted on that tree right outside our door. The sounds of the river. The smell of the ocean and the evergreen hills. And all the travel-weariness slipped away in an instant. We’ve been having adventures all up and down the coast, and our time at this site is drawing to a close. In a couple more days we’ll join my parents and brother, and sister and her family just up the coast at a beach house for the week.

And I have a ton of coast pictures to share… and a crazy adventure that I went on this morning… but that’s all I’ll say about that – you know, have to keep some suspense to keep the readers coming back.