Hal and I left on the morning of June 1, him celebrating his retirement and me finishing my Sabbatical.
Unable after his heart attack of 2012 to crank up our pop-up camper, and me unable to do it after my wrist surgery, we had sold it. When we had not received the major grant for which we had applied for the Sabbatical, he hand-built a ledge vardo on the bed of a utility trailer that we have owned since Nebraska. He had looked at ideas online but had come up with the design and played with it, changing things along the way. His daughter, Katherine, painted symbols of faith on the outside, and I got out my sewing machine for the first time in a long time and, flying by the seat of my pants, sewed curtains, and then I crocheted two afghans...finishing one along the way. With the help of a dear friend, he finished it
Oh, that vardo! We had more conversations along the road with people who came driving up to us in parking lots, rest stops, campgrounds. I had thought he was nuts (after all, folks, he married me, he couldn't have been all there), but have fallen in love with our tiny little home-away-from-home. In Kentucky, a mulejumper (more on that in another blog post) and his wife prayed with us in a parking lot. At a gas station, two ladies pulled up and asked if they could take a picture of our "chicken coop" - we both busted out laughing and explained it was a camper! We had a man in his 70's come up and offer to buy it in a Walmart parking lot in Wyoming - his grandchildren rode the rodeo circuit, and he was looking for something that exact size to take with him. People asked Hal for details and for instructions, and he always took the time to explain what he had done, what he had tried that didn't work, and patiently showed them what they asked to see.
We lost our first set of mattresses because the front window was not as waterproof as we had thought, and ended up leaving them in OK with a friend of mine (that I had not seen since fifth grade) for her to dispose of, and buying a new mattress in Wicheta, KS. Not a souvenir I had ever anticipated buying! And I'll admit it was a little unnerving the two times that someone pulled up alongside us and motioned to roll the windows down to tell us the back door was open - thankfully we had lost nothing either time. The house-door deadbolt lock had loosened from the vibrations (remember, utility trailer, no shocks or struts) so we ended up putting a hasp lock with a padlock on it, after which it never jiggled loose again.
We visited along the way, from PA to my sisters and their families in Mount Olive, NC - we celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary
From there, we went to a campground in Paducah, KY where we were serenaded by cicadas and bullfrogs. We accidentally crossed the Illinois border and turned around asap as we were carrying firearms - legally in most states but not IL - and did not realize that we were crossing the border until it was too late. Next was a campground in MO that advertised bathrooms and wifi and had neither, but did have a critter skittering across our roof in the middle of the night. Around the time the critter woke us, we heard a flush - of a toilet that was obviously NOT hooked up to the sewer hook-up right...and were very grateful to have annointing balm - which is good not only for healing annointing, but for annointing the upper lip and praying that the smell of the raw sewage would be alleviated by the soothing scents of the balm. This was where we discovered that the mattresses were "a little damp," but had no choice but to sleep on them. Well, that, or find a non-scary motel in the middle of nowhere (seriously, this campground was the stuff horror movies were made of and we were too tired to go on).
