KEEPING TRACK OF ERWIN & GAIL: March 2015

OK, now you are way far behind. It seems to be quite a long time since you have heard from me. I could say that I have been very busy but that wouldn’t be absolutely true. In all reality we have just found that rest thing, that time that was to be a big part of this furlough. Except for hooking and unhooking the camper to and from the truck, I haven’t lifted my hand to any form of physical labour since we left Dinuba CA. at the end of February. I must say that it has been good for my body, and the arm and shoulder that I complained to you about in the last blog, has improved greatly and there are even some hours of the day I hardly notice how totally useless it has become. We do take this resting thing seriously and often just sit around looking at one another, which is way easier for me than for Gail. But, alas, I have to say that there are times when I wish I could find a hammer and fix something or even break something. I find myself looking around the campgrounds at all the things that need fixing and thinking “I could just fix that, they wouldn’t really notice, would they?” But with great effort I refrain.

Well, let me catch you up with some of the places we have been and the things we have done and seen since we last talked. There was a note to you from The Cascade Caverns RV Park in Bourne TX., from where we left the following day and headed to a RV park in Eunice, Louisiana. I’m not going to say the name of the park because I don’t want you to think it was a good place to go. It was our intent to stay for a week or so but, even though we were paying a low price for camping, we were not getting our monies worth and left after two days. We left there and headed to South Montgomery RV Park, just south of, you guessed it, Montgomery, Alabama and along the way we passed through Mississippi. We saw the welcome to Mississippi sign and not long after that the welcome to Alabama sign. We stayed in Montgomery for one week. We made a day trip to Selma, AL, where the civil rights movement was born out of great racial oppression. We drove across the bridge where incidents of, what became known as, Bloody Sunday started and a near massacre occurred throughout the town of Selma, 50 years ago. It all started because people decided to walk from Selma to Montgomery in protest of segregation. The march to Montgomery was completed, due to heavy media coverage, a couple of weeks later, and the famous “How Long, Not Long” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. was heard from the steps of the capital Building. We also made a day trip to Montgomery and saw the Capital Buildings, and went to the Museum of History. We also visited the first White House of the Confederate States where President Jefferson Davis and his family lived while the Capital was in Montgomery. Having heard about snow not too far north of where we were and seeing a truck covered with the dreaded stuff driving down the highway, we decided we were too far north and packed up and headed south. We spent the next nine days in Lake Park RV Park in Georgia, only five miles from the Florida border. From there we did a day trip to a plantation that dated back to the mid-1800s called The Pebble Hill Plantation. It was established by Thomas Jefferson in the 1800s but there was no remaining evidence of the slave history that would have existed at that time. In 1901,it had been converted to a high class hunting plantation and that era is what has been preserved and which we visited. We made another day trip into Valdosta, GA and toured the town where we saw many grand old Mansions. Some of them so old I wondered why WEC didn’t own them. We had decided to go to a Church on another plantation in Florida on Sunday, but, when we realized there had been a time change some time during the night we were too late. This plantation wasn’t much in comparison to Pebble Hill, so we just took a drive in Northern Florida, at one point being as close as 50 miles from Jacksonville FL before we headed back to Georgia. We drove through some swampland, where the road was straight and flat for longer than you would ever find a flat straight road in Saskatchewan. The rest of the nine days there we just rested and enjoyed each other’s company. Feeling a little confident that the snow had receded a bit we headed north toward Virginia, stopping for two days along the way at Fort Mill, South Carolina, where we visited with the staff at Rainbows of Hope Headquarters, a children in crises ministry with WEC. I had gone there in 2012 to look at and design a new roof for the building and was able to see the finished product while we were there. We made a road trip in to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we visited the Billy Graham Library, an absolute must see for anyone going anywhere near. We continued our trip to Suffolk, Virginia on Saturday and arrived at our daughter Kym’s and her husband Brian’s place late afternoon. We have officially abandoned the camper and moved into their home with them and our two grandsons. This is where we are now and will be for some time, just to give them a sample of what it will be like when the old folks move in for good. Each of the kids along the way will get a sample of that so they will have the chance to change their names and hide before it really happens.

I’ll post this and a few pictures after Gail has had a chance to make most of the words into real words because apparently spelling does still count.

God Bless. With love

Erwin & Gail