Started, finally!

We got out around ten on 2/14/2014. Valentines Day. We were headed for Bonne Terre Mine in Bonne Terre, MO so I could scuba dive with a group from Columbus Scuba. In Indiana it decided to snow four beautiful inches as we drove through there. No pictures, I was busy wielding the four wheel drive as I-70 closed down and we were routed onto Route 40. We went almost all the way into downtown Indianapolis. It was stop and go once were were back on 70. After struggling for eight hours to cross Indiana, we stopped for dinner in Terra Haute, it was cold and snowing and generally sucked since we were trying to leave all that behind. I noticed that the trailer running lights weren't on when I parked and after we ate, I looked at the trailer wiring cord going to the Tahoe. It had drug on the ground and scrapped a good section clean through. Three wires were no longer attached so I set about to splice them in the 5 degree cold plus windchill. By the time I had the wires wrapped up in duct tape, cause that was all my family could find in the trailer, my fingers were so numb I could barely feel or work them. Th

e lights didn't come on. So after some prayer, swearing, rechecking all the connections and then finally the fuse box in the Tahoe, we found a blown fuse. I was so cold that I said nuts to driving three more hours to Bonne Terre in the dark, miserable, cold and we got a hotel room.

My wiring bundle. I spliced three and folded the other three up to make this ball of duct tape.

 

 

 2/15 West on I-70 and then south on I-57 until it joined I-55, We crossed over where the Ohio joins the Mississippi and then rolled south toward Memphis. Had lunch in Uncle Joe's in Ina Illinois. Real fine bar-b-que if you get the chance to stop. Talked about seeing Graceland but not at $35 a person. Rolled on south to Senatobia, MS. 51 degrees when we rolled in to a motel and ate at the Waffle House, ugh, I always say never again and then I do it again. 
Saw Washington Monument Cellphone Tower in Ridgeland, MS just North of Jackson.

2/16 A five hour drive to Livingston, LA and Lakeside RV Park (LA). It was 70 when we arrived!! YES warm weather. Set up the trailer and got things hooked up. Ate our first supper out of it on the trip and then headed for bed.

A few more trailer tweaks

Lowes provided (yeah I paid) a 18x30 upper cabinet and a 12x36 upper. Above the 12, Patrick has his keyboard.

A 18x30 cabinet again.

Above the drawers was this padded piece of wood. I had an upholsterer put on some padding at the top so I wouldn't scrap my legs on it as I got out of bed. After a second trip to the upholsterer and that failed too, I should have gone to Hobby Lobby and bought my own foam and did the job. But it is there and looks nice anyways.

Big push to the finish/start?

Golly Ned! It is cold outside. Like the rest of the country we are cold. To the bone! I don't go outside much when the weather is this bad so I'm going stir crazy! Snow and wheelchairs don't mix that well especially the knee high drift in my driveway. Glad we have a plow on the ATV.
Hopefully all this clears up and warms up just a bit so that we can finish final preparations to get out of here and go someplace warmer. Becky was plowing the drive and I told her my next drive needed to have radiant heat so we didn't need to plow. She said our next driveway should be someplace warm! Agreed!
In the mean time, we are clearing out the house and trying to get rid of the myriad of stuff that we have collected in 37 years of life and 6 years in this house. Boy, its a lot but its been nice and freeing. I didn't need 57 hoses for attaching a regulator to a scuba tank. Sold on eBay! Giving stuff away, selling stuff and going wow! I remember when or that as we go through the memories.
All the reservations are made through Phoenix. From there I'm not sure where we will go. Patrick announced that if he couldn't be home for his birthday he wanted to be in LA. What? Why? "Cause" he said.
A little more work on the trailer.

Patrick tries the smuggler's den under his bed. He fit!

I built a bench/storage area under the passenger side picture window over the wheel well. That was wasted space anyways so now we have more storage. I put a bike rack on the front of the trailer over the propane tanks. It is an Arvika made in Canada.

Not our camper (I thought I had taken a picture) this is what it looks like installed and with bikes on it. I bought new bolts because I didn't think that some of them were long enough but I like it and think it will work fine for Becky and Patrick's bikes. Mine will just ride in the trailer and sit outside. I've got a bike three wheel handcycle so it doesn't really fit anywhere.
   More cabinets to install and then we can load up. 17 days on my countdown ap.

Leaving....in a Tahoe, don't know when I'll be back again

We decided to head out on Feb 14. I made plans to go dive Bonne Terre Mine with Columbus Scuba. Then from there we would set off on our grand adventure. Becky wants to see the NASCAR race in Phoenix, AZ for our anniversary. The race falls on March 2nd and our anniversary is on the 5th. Nine wonderful years!  This leaves two weeks to go from St. Louis area to Phoenix. Our route looks like this.

Trailer Remodeling

Gosh, I love a good project and getting ready to go travel has been fun. I tried my hand at cabinet building and really enjoyed it! So here's so pics of what I've done around the camper.

My printer cabinet. Hope we never get a bigger printer because the clearances are pretty tight. The fold down front has enough room to set the laptop. The lower picture shows the divisions in the lower cabinet.

Under Patrick's bunk, I made permanent storage. A place to smuggle my goods :-)

 Under the bed, there was originally a large storage space that could be accessed from under the bed or from the outside and this is where the spare tire was carried. I built drawers and enclosed the space to make them separate. I think that the drawers will be much more useful than a bunch of open space. In the last pic you can see a large storage space. The level was good for holding the mattress up out of my way.

I made this tool board to hold tools out of the way so they weren't sliding all over the place in the storage space. It is reserved for chocks, leveling blocks, water hoses and whatever else we need to shove in there. Yes, I'm taking the drill and impact driver!

Catching up on some history

  Okay, I need to go back a little bit and catch up on a few posts from 2010 and 2011. We concentrated on doing the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover and really it works and it was working for us. I had to make some tough decisions regarding some rental properties and I ended up allowing two of them to go back to the bank. While I worked with the bank to try to avoid foreclosure and do a short sale or a deed in lou of foreclosure, not all has worked out. The details haven't been finalized and so they are still in flux. So my credit is trashed because I quit making payments on them. But it was the right thing to do and it made the properties that I am keeping profitable.A poor credit score means little in the terms of eternity.
   I finished up college and graduated from Kaplan University with a degree in business management. While I wanted to get a job, I got sick in early 2012 and fought with an infection in a pressure sore on my right hip. I got a second pressure sore on my left hip and that too got infected. I spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals from August on. The infection had reached my femur and although we thought that it was all gone, it came back rather quickly. After a misdiagnosis as to where the infection was at in my body, God led us to an incredible surgeon named Stacy Stevenson at the University of Toledo hospital. She did several surgeries on my left hip in January and February of 2013. Then I was admitted for a surgery where they removed my left femur head and part of the socket then moved muscle around to fill the big hole where hip bone had been and to fill the hole where the pressure sore was at. I spent four weeks in a sand bed flat on my back waiting for the muscles and the surgical wounds to heal. Then I was moved to another bed for a final two weeks before being allowed to go home. I did grow a rather nice beard in the hospital.

    I still have a wound on my right hip but it is slowly closing and the infection has left my body. We found an amazing nutritionalist named Michelle Simons at Simons' Family Chiropractic in Findlay, Ohio. She has helped my body get back in balance and defeat the infection naturally. I also spent six weeks going to a hyperbaric chamber to help kill the chronic osteomyelitis (bone infection). The chamber was hard on my ears and I didn't really enjoy it.

 All the time I was in the hospital I thought about remodeling an apartment in one of my rental properties and finishing it up so that it would bring in extra money and not be sitting empty. So when I felt strong enough I call my man, Don Gregory, and we started working on the apartment again. It went from being torn all way down to the studs and having the floor ripped up,

To this......

 
 I finished up my project and after long discussions with Becky about debt versus living life and how getting out of debt was a priority, we should focus on living our lives too. So we decided that even though I'd taken on debt to renovate that apartment, we were tired of waiting for someday and so, she came home with a dog.

Iris inspects her new home and her new masters.

The cats reaction to the dog. Duchess decided the higher it was the safer it was. Eventually the cats learned to get along with the dog but it was an uneasy peace.

Then we decided to go for the dream of seeing the US and bought the camper. We are working on cleaning out the house so we can sell it and move into the trailer full time to travel. It is scary for all of us leaving our 2000 sq foot home and all our possessions. Well most. There are things that each of will miss individually and as a collective but I hope and pray that all those things that we miss will be over ridden with terrific memories, adventurous tales and marvelous time spent with the family traveling, exploring, and seeing what God has laid out before us. I hope that you travel along with us.

First Outting

   We had our first adventure in the new camper and it was all very positive! We left on Thursday, October 24 for Martinsville, VA. It was about a seven and a half hour drive through Ohio, West Virginia and into Virginia. The camper pulled well and the Tahoe didn't have to many problems chugging the extra load up and down the hills. Close to Charleston, WV the low gas light flicked on and we found a gas station in the next two miles. Turns out the thing uses more fuel than I thought and I needed to keep a better eye on the gas gauge. Everything turned out okay and we continued on our way reliving past experiences of drives through the area to get to where our friends lived in Oak Hill, WV. We miss Tom and Cathy and Richie and Tara. Come home soon guys!
    After we arrived at the camp spot, we asked if they had any spots with electric as they did not when I made the reservation. The manager told us that he just had a cancellation and we were the first to ask about it and so we were able to have electric as well as water in our camper. It made the weekend much nicer!
   Turns out that the camp spot was a steep hill behind the realty office this guy owns. Spots had been leveled in the hillside and electric and water hook ups added for use by campers twice a year when the Nascar races come to town.

Patrick hides from the camera

 
    Several guys helped us get the camper level and get everything set up. We ended up going to Wal Mart for some thermals for Becky and Patrick and a longer water hose. We found a great little bar-b-que place called Dixie Pig. We had platters of shredded pork with vinegar already on it and slabs of cut brisket. The platters had meat, slaw, fries and hush puppies on them. Plus the lady who runs the place makes her own sweet tea. Heaven on earth boys and girls, heaven on earth!
   Friday, we got up to thick frost and a frozen water hose. It was 18 degrees outside! The sun came out and we had water about ten o'clock. We drove out to Lover's Leap on Highway 58.

Then we toured Fairystone State Park on Fairystone Lake in Stuart, VA. We agreed that we need to come back and camp there as it had a nice beach, beautiful views and nice camp sites. From there we meandered back towards the camper and on a whim turned towards Reynold's House. http://www.reynoldahouse.org/
Its in the middle of no where and I took a nap in the Tahoe while Becky and Patrick walked around looking at the historic buildings and grounds.
   Back to the camper for steaks, beers and marshmallows over the fire. Patrick made a friend named Cordell and they spent a good deal of time hanging out together.
   Saturday was the truck race and we saw plenty of action with Kevin Harvick beating and banging with Ty Dillon. Sunday was the Sprint Cup race and Jeff Gordon get his first win of the year and pulled himself into third place in the points race. He always races well at Martinsville Speedway Eight wins there in his career!

 

  Monday we loaded up and headed for home. We got home late and parked the truck and went to bed. The Tahoe burned two quarts of oil over the trip so it was into the shop for our little darling and we shall see what is wrong with her now.
   Plans are being laid to get out of here in the first part of the year and head south for warmer weather and start our travels. The house is for sale and we are cleaning and selling and giving away but we have so much stuff its like a never ending project. Some of the logistics are still in flux but they will work their way out and so many things already have!