The Edge [of all] Journeys

Well, we made it! We’re in Winnipeg! (12km west of the perimeter on #1, anyway, but that counts!) We’re settled in our cozy warm trailer (heat cranked as it’s down to 35F / almost 0C outside now, and judging from the ice on the ground around our water hook-ups it might get even colder yet tonight). Hmmmmm….

We wanted to call you all  (yes even you strangers who might happen across the blog), but we haven’t figured out how to get our cell phones switched over to Canada roaming yet [Verizon gave us an access code to use once we got here but it didn’t work and we don’t have a cell phone signal to speak of at the campground]… BUT our handy dandy AutoNet Mobile router has 40% signal to some other cell network and that’s enough to get this post out as a close second and regrettably impersonal alternate option.

Thank you for all the comments! I wish I could respond to them all in depth. They’re so fun to read and it’s encouraging knowing others are traveling with us.

Long day… We hit the road at 8:30am and had several stops along the way, but we rolled into the campground right around 9pm after an hour or so of  driving through the flooded southern plains of central Manitoba, which was actually a perfect backdrop for contemplating an upcoming post that will probably be titled something like “Death by Bureaucracy: Archetypes of the Hidden Worldwide Slave State that permeates everything and can be found in something as simple as trying to legitimately cross the longest undefended border in the world…” It will ramble on about how we’re all slaves to a system that controls us far more than we realize until little moments give us glimpses, but then the glimpses pass and we forget again… about how – even with the level of freedom we seek to attain in our travels – there is yet a strong opposition in the world to anything that resembles true freedom (not freedom of “choice” to do whatever one wants, but true freedom)… about how there is a spiritual freedom that should be impervious to such encroachment – that certainly goes far deeper than any physical freedom to do or say – but how even that can be stifled if the mind gets in the way… about how odd it is that so many people can’t fathom or process or even contemplate that some crazy folks (like us) would actually NOT want to live in one place all the time… (the simple question, “Where do you live?” in fact belies how narrow minded people can be)… and, how foolish it is that every modern societal construct in our fancy western culture is wired to the fundamental assumption that one must have a home address (not merely a mailing address mind you) where they can be found most of the time… how silly would the Bedouins or other ancient and modern nomadic peoples think you were if you asked them “Where do you live? … Where is your home?” …….. After today I can completely relate, and I’m sure none of the 3 border crossing guards at each of the 3 levels of redundant-question-asking-security (2 of which were completely new to me in crossing) had any idea how silly I thought their questions were. Ah…. it was once such a simple thing to cross the border. I did it every weekend for a year (give or take a few weekends and most of those when I was in Mississipi) when Renee and I were engaged and I was stationed at Minot, ND. And as long as you seem “normal” and they can measure you and quantify you and rely on you to act predictably (like pretty much everyone else) you can slide right through no problem. Well, no such simplicity here. HOWEVER, we did get through, and YHWH can certainly provide crossings in even more impossible scenarios in the future.

There, now I don’t even need to write that post after all.

So, after a cruise around the campground and an hour and a half setup (connect electric, off the hitch, level front to rear, slide-out, stabilize and level side-to-side, connect sewer line, connect water line, etc etc) while Renee got the kids tucked away in their beds it will finally feel like we’re here after a couple “normal” nights’ sleep that aren’t followed by driving days. YEA! See some of you soon! Although we are thinking that we might just lay low this weekend and get some rest, recover from travel, settle in, tend to some loose ends (like showers and laundry), that kind of thing… if we can get away with it 🙂 We’ll see how it goes.

Since I’m posting this, we do / should have normal email access, which might be the best way of contact until we get the cell service figured out… ok… supper and then bed!

B . I o balls if orien . Us dr is X is Drive xrng .th roogh Wisconsin trying to write witln left fingers nails on pocket pc. Letter lreccogn.izer.while focus on drive …:

Had to mentioned this mfolrnings adventure breakfast while we waiting for camping world’s repair on trailer still having to replaced converter myself as .they don’t have thenn in sto.re. .The converter is what’s cavsing external GFI to trip even tho its putting out right voltage + amps. Prol..y losing volts on some tiny internal short …
.
So anyway about breakfast because that’s what this is really about ..: Pine Cone Restaurant in De Forest , WI jvst off of I-94 & 51… Oh mamma ! Imagine a giant cinnamon roll sliced horizontally from the bottom up and then cooked like french toast with butter & syrup drizzled on top! Oh yeah thats wh.at I .had.

Lovinj Wisconsin I-94 : 60 mph @ 700 pyro / 1800 rpm most of the way..:
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Jvst .passed mile 106 on 94W. 4:30pm 5/13/09 – 120 miles to St. Paul.

Episode 1 of Journeys – a serial, rough-cut documentary composed of Motion Snapshots from our life on the road. In this episode we go from our house near Washington, DC to Pennsylvania to a campground north of Chicago on our way north.

We are surviving our first bout of hard-core travel and campgrounding, but it hasn’t been without … um … “events” shall we say? I think I have previously lamented the fact that there are not enough nanoseconds in the day to do these tales justice with the flowing, detailed narrative they deserve. But let me recap the last few days of adventure in bullet form lest current events overtake the record and press it with their own need to be captured.

Day 25 (Wed, 5/6/09):

• Intended day of departure from PA… slow going with all the final preparations even though we had done most of it the day before…
• 3:00pm, still planning to leave and make some progress, final checks on the truck… needed oil change badly… likely not going to get on the road after all…
• 3:30pm, Jaiden (age 2) falls in the creek and gashes the back of his head open, Reayah (age 5) was right with him when it happened, watching him like we’d asked her too; she got Bennah (age 7) right away because he was close by; Bennah pulls Jaiden out of the creek and stays with him (he’s soaked head to toe, his head is bleeding, and he’s screaming from the shock; knowing Bennah is with him, then Reayah runs to the the trailer (just a few hundred feet away) to get us; I run down there, scoop up my little brave soaking wet explorer and hustle him back to the trailer; Renee cleans him up, and we get ice on his head; he shows initial symptoms of a mild concussion; we pray for him, battle our fear, and the symptoms clear… at that point we were obviously not going anywhere that day… wanted to watch him closely and make sure he would be alright.
• Jaiden was quiet for a bit but was his old giggly self before too long and the delay worked out to let us go visit some other dear friends about an hour away who we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Day 26 (Thurs, 5/7/09):

• On the way to get some errands done in the morning (one of which was getting the oil changed) I got stuck behind some SLOW traffic with no passing lane. There were alternate routes I could have taken into town, but I was keenly aware of YHWH saying that the situation was an example to me: He is slowing us down, every part of our lives… our previous life was lived in such servitude to schedules and TIME… always trying to get things done in a rush or having to be somewhere quickly… we are learning to slow down and become more aware of the NOW.
• Of course, that approach leads to things like 2pm departures. But we were finally on our way.
• And our first real mountain driving across I-80… what another example of slowing down… pulling 17,000 lbs total up some climbs brought us down to 30 mph in a couple spots to keep all the gauges in the mostly happy zones. Average maybe 45-50 mph. 60 mph on the downhill. Slowing down like that was HARD (for me because I much prefer the speed limit +5 rule of thumb). But I learned how to ride my gears on the auto tranny based on the precise position of the pedal and the current RPMs, speed, and incline of the road.
• How do I know we were pulling 17,000 lbs? Because we finally found a scale that worked. For $5 I found out that:
  • my front axle was carrying 3140 lbs (GAWR 4250)
  • my rear axle was carrying 5380 lbs (GAWR 6000)
  • my trailer axles were carrying 8760 lbs (GAWR > 8800)
• What a relief – we were under ALL our limits, which up until then was actually quite doubtful. We are pulling more than the overall recommended weight for the stock make / model / year, but we’re not driving a stock vehicle… and we can always sacrifice speed to make sure we don’t overwork the engine.
• We rolled into a Wal-mart in Ohio at 10:30pm only to discover we had NO power from the trailer battery. I knew I needed to replace it, but it had never been totally drained before. This meant no tongue jack (to relieve some weight off the truck for the night and stabilize a bit) and no slide-out (which means the kids room is barely accessible and the bathroom is inaccessible – except to Jaiden and Zach who can squeeze through). Then, after getting the kids to bed doubled up on the pull-out couch and fold-down dinette, some initial checks on the wiring suggested that the trailer outlet on the truck wasn’t wired right and maybe hadn’t been charging the trailer battery during travel. It was a project for the morning, but it was going to mean a LATE departure.

Day 27 (Fri, 5/8/09):

• Renee entertained the kids in Wal-Mart the next morning while I discovered that positive cable connector had completely snapped off the terminal (hence, no juice). Battery also needed replacement. Not satisfied that the trailer plug on the bumper was resolved, but it could wait; new battery and cable rewired, we pulled out around 1:30pm, gassed up and hit the interstate once more.
• We entered Sabbath with an Indiana sunset and a spectacular visual reminder of what we love so much about traveling.
• For whatever reason, I was determined to get to Chicago that night, and be done with it. But wondering if we shouldn’t heed the lessons of slowing down I tried to stop at a Flying J around 10:oopm but it seemed to be rigged only for trucks (or cars) but there didn’t seem to be anywhere for RVs to park… which was very strange… but we pressed on…
• YIKES. 90/94 W through Chicago at 10:30pm on a Friday night… talk about some serious prayerful towing driving… that is an experience I’d rather not have to repeat… ever…
• 11:01pm pull into Wal-mart on the other side of Chicago and join the ranks of a couple trucks and a couple motorhomes.
• Stabilized on the tongue jack but still not using the slide-out after confirming that the new battery did not charge during the day of travel.
• Settled in for a crazy night of some of the most insane wind we’ve half-slept through ever. The Windy City’s way of greeting us I suppose. The trailer rocked and shook like a dingy tossed around at sea, and that next morning Wal-Mart’s array of plants outside the Garden Center in the parking lot had suffered the damages of a tornado through a trailer park on a botanical scale.

Day 28 (Sabbath, 5/9/09):

• 9:00am on the way to our final intended resting spot for the area – Illinois Beach State Park – another hour north.
• 10:00am pulled in, found a site, set-up, registered, Jonathan (my brother who lives in the Chicago area) arrived, and we thought to ourselves – smooth sailing from here!!!!
• or not
• Discovered that the fridge wasn’t on and wouldn’t turn on.
• Zach (age 4) found a small bead the exact size of a 4-year-old ear canal and he had not been previously, properly trained about what things (i.e. everything) should NOT be inserted an inch or so into one’s ear.
• Between Zach lying on his side on the couch, ear hanging over and down, Jonathan holding his head level, me underneath looking up from the floor with a headlamp shining like some sort of mechanic pulling his ear down and forward while squirting water into it with a syringe while Renee consulted her mom (a nurse) on the phone regarding the correct angle to pull a child’s ear when it has become the container for a foreign object… and MUCH prayer… we finally got the crazy thing out. I’m not kidding, initially you couldn’t even see the bead without pulling the ear back first and shining some light.
• I finally found the access panel (on the OUTSIDE of the trailer) to check if the fridge was even plugged in… which it was not (shaken unplugged in our travels) and that was working again so we could finally explore the campground a bit.
• Came back and headed to Jonathan’s (an hour a way) for an awesome home-cooked meal (thank you Jonathan!)
• Back to the trailer after that only to discover NO power – AGAIN! Even though we were plugged into the campground 30 amp service. No matter what I did, every time I plugged in, I tripped the 30 amp GFCI breaker….

[historical background digression]: there is a story here. When we first got the trailer, I discovered that the ground pin on the main 30 amp shoreline cable was broken. Now I suspect that this was done by the previous owners intentionally after having some frustrating electrical issues with GFCI circuits at campgrounds, but at the time I was thinking… this is not right, it needs to be fixed. So, I cut off the old broken plug and wired in a spiffy new 3-prong 30 amp plug… and I immediately started tripping the breaker in the garage that I had previously been plugged into without any problems. Safety = Pain in the Bum. Just like in the programming world. (Security = Pain in the Bum). In fact, the overkill in both arenas of Safety and Security largely result from the moronic behavior of a few individuals who make life much more complicated for the rest of the human race. My solution a few months ago – plug into a different outlet in the garage that was not GFCI protected, and forget about the whole thing.

• Ah… the GFCI incident came back to haunt me didn’t it, here months later, in the up-until-2-am-with-a-multimeter-and-internet-forums kind of way. Current theory: electrical systems in RVs can be a Pain in the Bum. Solution so that we could have heat, keep the battery charged, and I could go to bed: break the ground prong off of an extra 30 > 15 amp adapter and plug into the 15 amp service (also GFCI) for now. [THIS IS NOT SAFE. DON’T DO THIS. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED…. but if it comes down to survival… ;)]

Day 29 (Sun, 5/10/09):

• Renee and the kids out for a walk while I narrowed down the electrical issue at least to a specific circuit in the trailer… the one that has most of the receptacles (outlets) and the converter (which converts the AC to DC for charging the battery and running the DC appliances). Now if I can just dig up a little more electrical know-how than I currently possess I might not have to pay someone to fix the whole mess for me. I get the feeling that it could get involved. Especially if most or all of the outlets on that circuit were wired with the ground and neutral bonded. Ugh.
• Met Jonathan for a tasty lunch, because life must go on.
• Got some grocery shopping done and other errands.
• Including a couple outlet testers from Home Depot that ended up telling me nothing I didn’t already know (they say all the outlets check out just fine, so the mystery continues).
• Took the kids to an amazing playground. There will be photos of it posted somewhere eventually.
• Brought them home, fed them, got them to bed.
• And here I am typing this.

Congratulations, you have passed the very useful course: Reading Andrew’s Long Winded Posts (Even When They’re Written in Bullet Format) 301.

For further entertainment:
– Updated Trip data
– Updated Map

I also have a bunch of photos queued for upload (and more that I have to sort and queue) but I have to wait for a decent hard connection to get the upload done.

This desk project has been such an ordeal that I’m tempted to write a book about it all unto itself: how the main design goal was to achieve practical, maximum productivity – to have a place where I could stash my computer, laptop, card reader, external hard drives, firewire for video connections, and so on all connected and ready for getting work done in whatever bite-sized chunks are available throughout the day; how the design constraints included fitting this all into a corner somewhere in such away that it didn’t unduly impose on the living space of our trailer while still being a comfortable and usable work area for programming, photo editing, and video production; how various ideas came and went, multiple trips to the local Lowes (30 minutes away), redesigning it on the fly in my head while shopping when certain parts weren’t available, trying workarounds only to realize they were impossible and finally breaking down and ordering what I should have just ordered online in the first place and then waiting for it to get delivered; and of course how all the little unanticipated implications and challenges cropped up and forced reckonings (usually later than my brain was completely up to the task, but my fingers were still willing to drill and screw things together anyway): the legs that had to be longer than the space that they had to fit inside, the shelf that wouldn’t fit because I didn’t factor in space lost from other pieces, the fact that it fit nice and snug against the wall empty but not so when the computer was mounted and bumping the power strip plug in the outlet, the way one leg initially blocked my sliding shelf from sliding and everything underneath had to be remounted an inch over (and the dern leg still sticks out under the edge a bit)… oh the list could go on.

It was definitely one of those projects that grabs you and doesn’t let go – it was fun and frustrating at the same time. I could have done without a couple of those 3/4am nights. And in the end I think I’m pretty much exactly 83.15% happy with the final outcome. I had to knock some points off for the following annoyances:

• It really is too high over all. I went with a prefab cabinet with shelves as a starting point since the width and the depth were almost identical to my original design ideas and I thought I could save time and money by getting most of the materials and hardware cheaper that way than buying everything separately and then having to cut stuff up etc . I thought the extra height would translate into extra storage space and that I could compensate by dropping the sliding shelf lower. I was sadly mistaken. Stupid geometry.
• It is extremely heavy. Every compensation for a particular limitation ended up resulting in more hardware. It added up fast. I need to reinforce the main door hinges with additional support hinges. It certainly adds more overall weight to the trailer. At one point I considered tearing off the main door and all the heavy stuff and just throwing everything in the cabinet and using my lap for part of the desk – after all, it already folds pretty well and I can take it wherever I go. But I think I’ll just take down all the bedroom doors in the trailer and toss those out instead.
• One leg pokes out a bit from underneath like I mentioned. Arg. Otherwise the shelf wouldn’t slide out.
• It’s too heavy.
• The external hard drives aren’t quite as accessible as I’d like them to be if I have to grab one and take it with me somewhere.
• Did I mention that it’s too heavy?
• I almost wrecked the legs adding the hinges to make my own expandable leg design since the holes in the hinges were to close to the edge of the wood and I started to split it… grrr. But so far it’s still standing.
• Oh, and it’s also too heavy.

Other than that, it’s PERFECT. Which is why I’m going to have to completely rebuild it from scratch at some point in the not too distant future. Here I am enjoying the prototype fruits of my labors:

Everything you see stays in the desk all the time. It all folds up into the corner and looks (from the outside) pretty much like the original ClosetMaid product:

ClosetMaid Cabinet

And here’s a gallery of the PROCESS and the DETAILS for the uber-curious. [There should be 24 photos there, but I’m having uploading issues on these silly wireless connections. Oh for the days of residential broadband… those days are gone. Anyway, keep checking. There are photos of the transformation stages in there too.]

Renee thinks I should fine-tune the design and start selling them to earn us a fortune. Sure, honey, I’ll just pull a few more weeks per day out of my back pocket and we’ll be in business 🙂 She’s so awesome. You should have tasted crock-pot roast she cooked up tonight, and seen the hard red winter wheat she vacuum sealed, and looked at the logos she drafted, and witnessed the dozen other things she juggled and got done today.

You may think this title a little ironic – aren’t we supposed to be on a Family Life adventure or something? Why need a Family Day? Well, yesterday… actually it built up to yesterday, but we’ve seen cracks forming in our children’s behavior pretty much since we got here. It just took one good, epic Walmart session to shake the cracks into chasms and inspire a good bit of frustration in all of us. By the way, I hate shopping at Walmart. I’m not sure what it is, but I almost always come out of there worked up. Maybe it’s all the people, maybe its the fact that Walmart is a pretty good poster child for the materialism that I’d just as soon escape completely, maybe it’s something else. But4 hours is more than I can take, and I can understand how it would demand more than the best behaved child’s capacity. But we had a LOT of decisions to make as we continue the Revolution of Organization in our tiny home, and that takes time.

Putting them to bed, reflecting on some of the disobedience that surfaced (and our own shortcomings as parents who are still learning patience and all that good stuff) we concluded that we needed a Family Day:

1. YHWH first – give Him the day
2. Each other second – Love > Respect > Serve each other ALL day
3. Whatever else happened to work out.

It was a great, full day. I let Renee sleep in because she almost always lets me sleep in (hey – she’s the morning person in the couple), I whipped up some semblance (impostor) version of the homemade granola she spoils us with, we had Scripture Study and prayer, then we hit the chores: Zach did dishes, Reayah cleaned everything off the floor so Bennah could vacuum, I mounted a baby bouncing seat thing in the trailer so that Renee could free her arms up a little more often (this project took a bit of improvisation since RVs typically don’t have the kind of door frames those are designed to take advantage of), Renee got the kids bunk room in order with all the Walmart supplies, then she made Fruit Salad for lunch, then I went rollerblading with Bennah (he was riding Zach’s scooter) down “the lane,” then back in the creek with everyone, then we borrowed a sprinkler for the kids to run around in and invited the friends over…

Speaking of friends… I have a theory about one thing that contributed to the meltdowns (aside from, of course, the normal difficulty of adjusting to such a big life change, which we expected and knew it would throw things off balance for a period of time). We also realized that the kids have spent a LOT of time with their friends here – which has been great. But it isn’t “normal,” and despite the fact that we are now redefining “normal” for us as a family on a daily basis, it is at the very least not good if we aren’t balancing quality family time with quality friend time. We’ve been so busy getting settled and trying to stay on top of all the things that seem like they have to get done that perhaps we were just kicking back to be a family and have fun together as deeply as we should. Perhaps up until today (and I already had a tendency to do this anyway) we were subconsciously treating family time as just one more thing that had to get done during the day so that we could get onto the next chore.

Anyway, the whole point we’re doing this is to learn how to take our own personal expression of Family to a deeper level so that YHWH’s purposes in love for others can pour out of that. Today was certainly a neat milestone on that journey. There were still issues, but we were in a new place of strength to deal with them.

…so after all that (around 4pm) when the older friends got home from school and since it was so hot – all the sprinkler running and creek wading quickly deteriorated into massive water gun battles, pond throwing, and that sort of thing. We collected our children from the fun-tangle for dinner together as a family – one thing that we DO want to guard as “normal” – and feasted outside under the awning on grilled salmon (cooked over a new grill we are trying out that is a gift if we decide we can take it with us) and grilled asparagus (from our family friend here – she cut it from their garden today). After that: family movie time and popcorn in our cool A/C’ed mini-home and then bed time. Overall, a marvelous day together.

And we really needed it too – we are basically down to ONE week before we plan to pull up anchor and get underway again. Hopefully, this has recharged us a bit, as there’s lots to get done yet. I have to finish the desk project that I’ve been working on (wait till you see this thing!), we still have to get our overall weight down (we’re going to jettison the bedroom doors at least – replace them with curtains, ditch the blinds in the kids room – they just kick them all night in their sleep anyway, and anything else we can eliminate), replace the fresh water pump with a quieter model and keep the current one as a backup, make our reservations at campgrounds in Winnipeg and Oregon for the next few months, etc. etc. I could go on and on.

But I actually have to go take care of all that kind of stuff now… Some REALLY cool show-and-tell posts in the pipeline though… just taking longer to finish the projects that will inspire the posts. Renee and I are also trying to get $$$ work done somewhere in this all. This is really a lot of challenging fun!

Yesterday I helped dig a grave out in a field’s corner at the farm where we’re staying. That was a first for me, and a  very sobering and reflective endeavor on many levels. There we laid to rest the body of Barucha – a wise and strong spiritual grandmother to many – she didn’t need it any more. YHWH delivered her spirit from a three and a half year struggle with cancer, and she is now dancing in the Heavens once again.

As her husband shoveled the first few scoops of dirt onto the body in the grave, I put a rams horn to my lips and sounded a long steady blast that held strong until my breath collapsed. It was a wail of mourning and a victory shout all at once. The victory is this: she trusted and served her King – Yahushua the Messiah – faithfully until the end and will be raised incorruptible in the last Day.

My last memory of Barucha – the most vivid one – was etched in place on Day 9 (just 2 days before she passed away). She was lying there on her hospital bed in a lot of discomfort, holding my 6-month old daughter’s tiny little hands, delighting in baby Joy who was just sucking away on her finger. I remember feeling the profound weight of the differences and similarities colliding in such a small space between the two of them. Here were two Daughters of Tsyion that – by all physical appearances – were at completely opposite ends of life. And yet, they both had such a strong ember of life burning in each of their spirits that they could connect at precisely the same spot beyond human comprehension.

I have been very thankful that this was my children’s first firsthand exposure to death – as part of a bigger spiritual family in Barucha’s immediate family and others here who understand that death is part of life – that it is a transition, not an ending – that it is not something to be feared or avoided in conversation or treated as some strange thing.

I believe that death – as with anything in life – should be faced squarely, head on, dealt with as best anyone can, and then left behind. Barucha did this with all her might, and her family carries on in the same way.