There are many many stories by way of which I ought to bring this record up to date. And I hope to, but this day stands alone. And I will not (yet) even attempt to add paltry detail in words, for they would distract you from what the pictures have to say:
Life is a river filled with self-reflexive microcosms. The Road.
Mostly it is a constant rushing, a blur of events carrying us incessantly forward, inexorably onward. Time.
But there are moments. An eddy in the currant snags the shore and strands time’s gaze. The river doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow, but the inertia temporarily presses perspective into a recline between the water and the sky, and it feels like floating inside a transparent womb. There is no up or down, east, west, north or south.
There is no movement but constant motion surrounds. Weightless.
And then time’s tyranny takes account, finds a subject stranded, re-asserts its impatient decree. The womb shatters. And for a fraction of perception everything stops: motion, sound, pulse, vision… every gaze is frozen, pure, unfiltered, and collides into a choice: cling to jagged womb fragments or PLUNGE.
Such chatic contentions consume themselves before they even exist – time reverses upon itself for a span too short to measure and the decision is made before the choice has even penetrated the mind. Falling.
Down.
Then forward, into a vague familiar rushing. Momentums match and fuse. The shore fades away. It’s almost as if nothing changed yet something feels different… there is a dull throbbing.
Several shards of womb removed leave vivid scars of joy. Memories.
Older scars fade slightly.
The rushing intensifies and there is only the river. The Road.
And where did May go I might ask you? Well, at least that wasn’t quite so bad as I was expecting. It seems like 3 months have disappeared, but it has only been 1 + a bit since last post… of course, it HAS practically been months if you don’t count the latest posts which haven’t had a whole lot to do with what we’ve actually been up to here in Pennsylvania. And now the clock is already winding down to another departure probably by July… less than another month away. Yikes.
So, here’s the highlight reel. Another crazy thing is that I’ve hardly touched my cameras (relatively speaking), though I do have enough great video clips to cut a few more episodes of Joureys… like so many noble projects collecting dust on the back burners. But here are some of the things that have been filling our days here in PA (besides the work we do in our virtual worlds):
There are some amazing storms that blow through from time to time.
We've been feasting on strawberries. Renee and the kids have helped weed and pick, and every couple of days we get a new big bowl-full from the garden. This was an actual, single strawberry that Reayah found.
Our friends set their pool up over a week ago, and it was added to our daily routine.
Ever since our friends got three new cows, Joy has been smitten. Every single day, several times, we here the familiar refrain: "go see cows? i like cows!"
And of course there's all the farm stuff: I made an attempt at seeding a bit of pasture with grass, and Renee has been having a ball doing all kinds of planting and weeding and picking. Of course the kids are pitching in too.
No country farm would be complete without a creek. Even with the pool set up, this is still pretty much a daily necessity. The creek is so versatile it has hosted forts (under the bridge), dam-making, snake killing, rope swinging, splashing, wading, falling in, and so many other things over the weeks.
Flying down the long driveway hill on scooters is also nearly a daily event. The most common question (the younger boys have to ask first): "can I go down the hill 2 times?"
For more pics of our adventures here over the last couple months, check out my latest smugmug galleries, which I am once again finally getting caught up with (there’s roughly 35 pics in each, and they are still uploading, so if they’re not done when you check, you can always check back again later):
As far as other news… everything is new. We were planning to have left from here a long time ago, but this place has been so fantastic for getting work done (the kids are incredibly content having so much to do outside all the time), and there have been important things that YHWH has kept us around for. It has been a real blessing to have the nearly constant community and fellowship with our friends here.
There is still quite a bit of uncertainty about what will unfold day-to-day, but we’re planning to hit a garlic harvest in July and meet up with some of our dear Colorado friends there, and then head back and still make a run at heading up the East Coast after that. We’ll see… as we’ve discovered, everything is subject to change 🙂
What a amazing week… well and a bit I guess. We had an amazing Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread for the last week here in PA, met some incredible people, lots of fellowship, meals, sharing, learning together etc. Still managed to put in nearly 40 hours on projects even with 3 Sabbaths in there. Don’t know how I pulle d . adf firgh Zzzzzz….
wha … What? what was I saying? Oh right, anyway. This will all be more cursory than it should be because I am in the process of digging out of a 3-month photographic hole. I have 2 down and 1 to go and will share in a second. So back to updates: the kids are in wild country mode: scraping knees, swinging on rope swings, playing in the creek, cutting bare feet, flying down the hill on scooters, running around with friends, that sort of thing.
Other highlights: Reayah got to be be a flower girl in her first wedding experience, I just spent three hours with Bennah “organizing” his bed (a bio hazmat operation I can assure you)… actually that might not make much sense to you unless I also provide the additional detail that the kids keep all their personal things / toys / collections at the foot of their beds, Joy is both participating in and resisting potty training at the same time quite nicely, Zach and Jaiden are quite the buddies now and while Zach is convinced we are going to build a flying car together this summer – one that actually flies – Jaiden just wants to make sure that he is doing whatever his brothers are doing.
It’s raining gently outside… such a soothing thing… totally different experience than from inside a house. I got two new drain spouts attached to the rain channel today (I knocked them off a couple months ago when a branch reached out across an otherwise reasonable turn radius and scraped a few little holes in our rubber roof that we discovered a few weeks later during a massive downpour in the form of extra water we didn’t need in the kids room). I patched the holes up earlier in the week.
Today was laundry day. And grocery day. And pick up the new door latch from the RV dealer finally day.
I have to tell you about our main door latch. Ok. Proof positive that things are engineered to break – this was the most ridiculous design ever – back in Florida the tab that was responsible for making the entire handle and latch mechanism work broke clean off and we were stuck inside the trailer until I disassembled the whole thing. I tried everything to avoid having to buy another cheap replacement that would just cause another head ache later. I am not kidding – here are some of the random things I employed in various attempts to rig it (some of which lasted longer than others): aluminum from a beer can, JB weld (but it was too old to last) and a hex nut, a screw, a modified golf tee (still inside the spring to control handle travel distance), hockey tape by itself, and hockey tape with pop-sickle stick (which is actually working fairly well so far). But the moment of truth will come and I better get a proper replacement in there. It has been quite a thorn in my side.
Anyway, enough boring RV life drivel. Here are some pictures! Including some from the solar panel project that I added to the truck.
So, let the movie parties begin! I have finally come out of the video editing, rendering, and uploading mire bruised and scarred but victorious. After no less than 3 attempts on each, uploads and deletes, codec woes, and other sundry technology battles – Episodes 1-3 of Journeys (the quasi-documentary) are LIVE!
The best way to watch them is on the new page I created just for this purpose. I’m playing with a very sweet new tool by Apture, and I think you will find the viewing experience quite fun! – Go to The Movie (up in the top menu) to watch all the Journeys episodes. I will also update that page as I add episodes in the future.
Or, you can also watch them on my YouTube channel.
I’ve also updated The Map with the last legs of our travels.
We are getting ready to leave Georgia in a few short days and work our way back up to Pennsylvania for spring. We’re hoping to swing through Hampton Roads (VA) and Washington, DC along the way and drop in on some friends in our old stompin’ grounds.
Two months or so ago I was out driving around near Denver with my 4 year old boy Zach. He was having a rare turn up in the front seat, and looking out through the windshield towards the mountains he suddenly piped up with an epiphany: “Dad!!! I know how to get to the end of nowhere!” he exclaimed rather passionately.
How else can a father reply? “Oh yeah?” I said – not at all sardonically. “How’s that?”
To which Zach confidently replied, “You just keep driving that way and don’t stop!” while pointing straight ahead out the window.
Well, today I made good on my promise to take him to the end of nowhere some time. We spent the afternoon on the furthest SE point of the United States to which one can drive – the southern end of Hwy 1 – the edge of Key West, FL. We have literally driven the entire length of Florida now, entering about a month ago on the far western tip of the panhandle and driving first east and then south along the coast, and then cutting over through alligator alley along the Everglades, and then down Hwy 1 across all the keys. WOW.
What a beautiful place. 75 degrees F today and we played in the ocean in February. Crazy. I’d love to stay longer but it is Expensive with a capital E. Here are some shots from the day (keep reading below the gallery to get caught up on the rest of everything).
Our next plan is to head up for Georgia where it’s still not all that cold, but away from the majority of migratory retirees which improves the campground rates; hunker down for maybe a month and knock out a ton of work that is looming. Which reminds me I still need to hit some of the highlights from the last month in my typical, inadequate bullet fashion. Here are the primary memories:
And that was just northern FL. Then we headed south and landed in Bradenton for a couple days and were extremely well cared for by dear (new) friends – parents of friends that we had grown very close to in Colorado. In fact, if you love garlic, they grow a whole bunch up in Ohio every year and it is absolutely incomparable to what you can buy in the store: Charlie’s Gourmet Garlic! You can watch the video that I edited a while back to get an idea of what Charlie and his farm are like – it’s the 2nd one down on this page: http://doctorbeautiful.com/blog/?page_id=48 So, while we were with them, they gave us and helped us pickle about 2.5 quarts of garlic! In about 3 more weeks the heat will be gone, but all the yummy healthy goodness will be intact. Thanks again Charlie!!!
They also hang out in FL for a few months in the winter so we were parked in Bradenton near their home down there. The tricky thing was that it was just a parking lot designed for RV visitors, and fine for sleeping, but with no electric, water, or sewer not well suited for working or living very long. With some critical work that came up we had to relocate. Ironically, one of the absolute nicest campgrounds in the overall area was also the cheapest (although it wasn’t all that cheap). So, we headed back up north about 30 miles and ended up managing to stretch it out for a week at the Fort De Soto Park Campground. That’s where the last five photos from the previous post were taken. 5 of those days we had a beach-front site. Fabulous. During that time:
And I’m probably forgetting something else important, but then we headed down here on a mission to get to the End of Nowhere. And so here we are. Tomorrow we head north once again.
We have been having so many adventures in Florida – both with work and with play and with meeting some amazing new friends. One of these days here soon I am going to write about some of it (in theory). I should have gone to bed long ago as it is, and I’m going to try to wake up the kids in about an hour and a half to catch the space shuttle launch at 4:30am…
But, for now, here are some visuals. I know they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I could write at least a few thousand words about the stories weaving in and out of each of these pictures.
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:
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.
