The Slow Start...

Our Journey has been a long time in coming. When we first got married my hubby promised to take me out west one day to see the Redwoods...but instead we headed south to Belize for a couple decades! When the Father first inspired this plan to record and share Psalms against some of our Countries most stunning vistas, I saw it as a way to fulfill that long held dream while glorifying the Father with the Hebrew Psalms! I am a hopeless optimist so despite the many obvious hurdles I believed with absolute faith we could do it, maybe ina week or two. That was back in July.....

I hoped to pack up, sell our extra chickens, automate their coop so our neighbors could do a 1x per week feeding and freshening of the sleeping coop, and automate the feeding of the fish and cats. I figured it couldn't take that long to button things up.....well it took about two weeks...and then came the hang ups. We bought a fire rescue ambulance about two years ago when we came and spent 8 months here during the recovery from Forest's spinal surgery. It is the prepper mobile every prepper dreams of. A 1986 Chevy chassis equipped with a hulking steel box on duallys with a winch in front, a 12 volt electrical system, PTO outlet, an Onan generator, and enough compartments to store a kid in each one (just kidding, but there are a lot of outer compartments!)

At the time it made a perfect Utz Chips delivery truck and we faithfully stocked all the shelves in Boone, NC with chips having been convinced by our boss it was a honey job....it was anything but....50 hour weeks no days off (other than Shabbat and that always put us behind) and we never cleared the 1500 a week he promised we would make easily....and that was with three of us working those hours! We decided when we quit we would turn it into a camper stocked with a Full mobile camp we could take anywhere....Anyway, fast forward to a month ago and it seemed like we would finally be able to do it! Then we realized it had sat in storage for a year while we were in Belize and because of the way the laws are in the US, it's vin number was flagged and could not be insured, all because we didn't return the stupid license plate! It was going to take 30 days after surrendering the plates to be able to relicense it...in retrospect that is what we should have done but hindsight is 20/20 so, what we did instead is bought a 1983 Chevy Tioga camper planning to gut it out and reupholster and panel the inside. Piece of cake! Ha, it took weeks and when it was finally ready to hit the road (we thought) we decided to change the brakes just in case....first Forest tried to do it himself, but the hoses were seized on so then we tried to hire someone....which was a mistake, he broke the caliper pin on the caliper Forest had changed...but in the end we successfully changed the front pads, calipers, and hoses ourselves (having never messed with brake pads in our lives! An RV guy assured us the electrical and propane systems were in great shape (after removing the back wired extension cord with two plug ends). A mechanic changed the oil, checked the fluids and told us it was mechanically in great shape! We finally took to the open road on August 27th. The trip had a few setbacks but we were rolling. It all went relatively well...and then we hit our first traffic jam near Defuniak Springs it was a LOOOONG TRAFFIC JAM...several hours later we were on the open road once again but realized we wouldn't be able to make it to Fountainebleau State Park on Lake Ponchatrain, but we figured maybe we would be able to at least cross state lines into Mississippi...but YHVH had other plans.....