Our last TRAVEL POST

In the process of preparing Hope Church for a new pastor the leadership repeatedly told itself and the congregation that THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE.  Don't fear it- prepare to adapt with constant prayer.

We've been praying lately, and especially today.

This is our last travel post.

Why?  Because as of 5 pm today we stopped traveling, at least by coach.

No, Bob Simcox, I did NOT wreck it, drive it into an alligator lagoon or into the Everglades.  We have just driven it until our budget for major maintenance repairs almost ran out. Today.

We had considered an extended warranty on FROG when we bought her but in our entire year of ownership have never seen one that looked good enough to buy.  So we self insured.

We put $20,000.00 back to cover any on road major expenses after we hit the road June 8.  You do the math.  We've been on the road seven months and have about $4,000.00 left after buying our 10 new batteries today and another new water pump (labor not covered in the new last month pump warranty), TV antenna repair.

And the $20,000 was to last not one, but at least two years.

This has been a hard day. I have learned the hard way that unless you have more ready cash than we had, or are able to do most of the labor on your RV yourself, as the former owner could, this life will empty your wallet.  And that kind of 'living the dream', as Mona recently said, can become 'living the nightmare'.

 A year ago we thought we'd done our home work to a T, but at an average of one $2,000 shop visit a month, in addition to regular oil changes and service, we just can't continue this adventure on the road.

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You may remember we had decided last week to look for a HOME BASE here in Alva.  Next Monday we have an appointment to look at a HOME.

We will still travel.  But only as we can use our Marriott Hotel Reward Points and timeshare program.  Unless Mona lets me buy us an umbrella tent so we can revisit the good old days!









Thank the Lord, we are so glad we found Alva before we found only $4,000 left in the repair fund. The community, the church, and the people.  Who of course ARE the community and the church.

And then there is the long, easily boated Caloosahatchee Waterway/River with the marina  at the foot of our mobile home park.  The turquoise water Captiva Island beaches an hour away. And did I mention the people of Alva?

Anyway, we have begun the process of researching local coach consignors.  There are two biggies right next to each other just 20 miles from Alva.  The two largest in Florida.  So while we will take a loss on the coach, it should be much less than if we tried to sell it ourselves, and
                                                                                    it should sell much faster.

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We want to thank you all for joining us on this fascinating trip across a small part of this amazing land called America.

And to so many of you we did not get to visit yet, who knows.  Our future home, and our future travel, are all in God's hands.  And so far He has not disappointed!

Happy New Year!

-Ken

Hanging around Alva a little bit longer

This is post number 248 to this blog, almost 200 of them posted once every day of our journey since we left Douglassville, Pa on Sunday June 8, 2014.  This will be the last post which will be religiously sent each day.  We will continue to post, but only as we come across easy to access free WIFI on the road. 

Today we dropped our Verizon Broadband package from 30 gigs to 15 a month, saving almost $125.00 a month in the process. But to stay under 15 gigs we can’t keep using Verizon cell towers to post to the blog every night.

Never fear, we will still post to Facebook all of the pictures we feel our followers might be interested in, and we will post blog articles in more detail when free WIFI is available.

However we have not seen enough response to the Book Blog which we’ve been posting just as regularly so that will close now.

Let us know if you will miss it and if enough folks want it, perhaps Mona will bring it back.

The impetus to make this change is today’s decision to actively pursue a possible contract to purchase a mobile home in Oak Park, less than a mile from Alva UMC. We can’t discuss any details or show pictures of the home at this time as the owner is very unsure about selling it at all.  But they have set a price, so they are that sure at least.

I can say the home is a triple wide with spacious neatly trimmed tree shaded lawns on all sides. The interior has had many upgrades and the large Lanai/Florida Room faces considerable open space. If it comes on the market it will be sold with all furnishings as is, possibly including the CLUB golf cart now in use by the owner, and definitely including the large flat screen HD TV & Surround Sound system (ahhhhhhh).

No rush for us. As each day passes we are more sure this is where we will soon call home base, and if not in this house, then in another.

After beginning this possible purchase process we relaxed ourselves by going once more to one of the nicest Laundromats we’ve been anywhere in these contiguous United States.  Then a really delicious pizza and bruschetta lunch was enjoyed by all next door to the pretty laundry.  Next we discovered Franklin Lock, on the Caloosahatchee Waterway, about eight miles down stream from Alva and Oak Park’s marina.

Here the US  Corps of Engineers maintains a truly pristine campground, nature park, and lock system for all water traffic across the state of Florida and a white sand beach.

Today we saw turtles in the water (stay clear, they snap) and Mona thought she saw a manatee.  They sometimes come up river even east of Alva.

We saw only small recreational craft use the locks, in both directions, today, but they were fun to watch go through as we sat and read on the beach.

We will be hanging here at Alva UMC  a bit longer still.  We now need to purchase 8 new high capacity coach batteries and 2 new commercial starter batteries for the engine & genny.

We’ll get the sporadic cycling of the water pump in order then, and the TV antenna fixed, as well.

There’s a Camping World nearby that offers a 10% discount to Good Sam folk. I’m a good Ken, most of the time, but I always carry a Good Sam Card.

Stay tuned!

-Ken

Home base? Really??

We were almost late for church this morning! Too much early morning Facebooking to finish I think. But we made it just in time for the 8:30 am traditional service.

Martha opened and led the service for Ralph, who was finally feeling well enough to travel and flew north yesterday to Pittsburg to see his kids. She preached a powerful message of personal testimony concerning the value of heart knowledge over head knowledge of Jesus.  They are a both/and thing.

Between services Pastor Joey lay at the feet of all who attended welcoming them to the House of the Lord.

Sunday School followed the overloaded refreshment table between services and today Buddy led the class.  Mitch and Myrna could not make it as Myrna was busy all night at the Fort Worth ER.  Her blood pressure was spiking.  But she came home and was resting today.

The children’s bell choir led us in a rousing carol during the offering at the second service.  They have these cool colored bells and follow a very simple set of color coded cards to ring the right ones.  Beautiful!

In the first service Martha asked me to lead the offering and pastoral prayer time for her.  At the second contemporary service, which without the Praise Team this morning was pretty traditional itself, she allowed me to lead the church in gathering around a dear young woman who was rededicating herself to Christ after hearing Martha’s message. What a time!

 

Such a beautiful day did not go unnoticed by Mona who posed for a pic between the Christian Ed and Worship Buildings at Alva UMC.

Well, we have been en-tranced.  The lovely and well laid out manufactured home community called Oak Park about half a mile out of town attracted us today to have a more than cursory look about. Its location on the river and its neat and well spaced homes are part of the attraction.  Its seclusion from any major highways yet easy access to them via the drawbridge in Alva is another.

These are homes we now know we can afford, as opposed to the homes in the Hilton Head area.  And buying one could allow us to retain the coach for long trips of exploration away from a new Alva home base.

While visiting homes for sale, all of which are only for sale by owner (these homes sell off the MLS grid to friends and family so there are no agent fees then, either) we met a couple who just got married Christmas Eve.  In fact, Bonnie and Pat attended the Christmas Eve service and Ralph introduced us to them just before he began their private service.

We were looking at a home and next door out popped Bonnie and Pat with a new sign they were putting up in front of what had been her home.  So they allowed us to photo them and make them famous.

We saw several homes for sale that might have worked and two that are good possible, but we aren’t ready to sign on the dotted line just yet.  We’ll be talking to a local broker who is a member at Alva UMC tomorrow so that we can determine just how we should proceed if one of these homes come up that God sends us to look at.

When we arrived back at Alva UMC there was a tiny backpacker’s tent pitched under a tree near Pearl Street.  We heard the church youth group having fun around the area so assumed the tent was theirs.  Not so.

Dan is a Physics instructor at a boarding school in Boca Raton, and is taking a school holiday while his children are not (they are in a Hebrew School. No Christmas holiday). His wife is working all week as well so he’s bicycling out to Pine Island, etc, for four days.  He’s camping here at Alva Church for a reason similar to ours.  He was attracted to the little town across the river from the major highway, and it’s church lawn.

Tomorrow is laundry day, and we’ll also be visiting the Oak Park office to ask some questions we could not get answered today about the community. And to see if any of the benefits we saw for a home base today were imagined by our desires to become a part of this very interesting community.

We never imagined, beyond an agreement that if our budget tight enough we could live in a manufactured home, that we would ever be looking seriously at manufactured homes.

We never imagined we’d be looking at South Florida as a home base. Isn’t Florida all Disney, gator-ramas, and crowds?

But this weather!  And we are only 8 hours drive from Hilton Head, and we know a church up there that has invited us to come back and dry camp with them any time. And only 20 hours from Pennsy (plus sleep time!).

If this is a God-thing, then He will show us the way.

-Ken

Bunche Beach

Another Saturday night on the journey but this one finds us at the same church as last Sunday.  We are still here partly because its Christmas-New Years Weekend and its nice not to be on the road too much. Yes, everything they say about snow bird driver habits seems to be true.  Yes, even the things they have said about this snow bird as well.

So this morning I walked to the Alva post office to mail a bill payment and take a short walkabout Alva.  The post office was closed.  But this is a small town, and the post master was working out back getting caught up from Christmas and she happily took my mail and posted it. I missed getting her name.  But if we received one more mail packet from daughter Jenn through this post office I imagine we’d become fast friends.

I walked a bit, and photoed a bit. Here’s an interesting front yard.  Who says Nederland, Colorado has the market sown up on ‘hippy’.

 

Here’s a place I’d like you to place prayers around.  I won’t tell you the woman’s name who lives here, to maintain her privacy. But Alva UMC is doing all it can to keep her safe in a home that probably should be immediately condemned.

At any rate, you know the church is desperate to help her when Pastor Ralph turns to me yesterday and says, “Ken, are you at all handy? We are trying to get some work done so she can at least use her bathroom.”  I told him I’d sweep, and mop, and clean up behind gifted handy persons, but me, handy???  Just ask Mona.

We leave Monday or Tuesday, at this point, so we won’t be around to even help with that.

This afternoon we drove around the Riverside at Alva and the Orange Harbor at Fort Worth Shores 55 and over doublewide home developments.  Just checking, we told ourselves. Alva has Orange Harbor beat hands down for us.  So quiet, larger lots and very well landscaped and maintained.  Also it offers a community wide riverside park and small marina, not only private sites with docks on the river. No manatee here as we are above the Caloosahatchee Waterway Frankford Lock, but good fishing and smooth boating right out into the gulf twenty miles west.

We were going to spend the afternoon and sunset at the beach on Lover’s Key on the gulf down near Bonita Springs.  However there was a nine mile long traffic crawl from Fort Myers Beach to Bonita so we turned off east toward Bunche Beach.

This is a small, natural and pretty clean stretch of thin beach and mangrove surrounded boardwalks and kayak/canoe streams that face the lower tip of Sanibel Island.

This beach was the first public beach people of color could bathe at in the Fort Myers area. Dedicated in 1949, it was named for Ralph Bunche, who was the African American who was the primary negotiator in the United Nations ceasefire that ended the first Arab-Israeli war.  It is no accident that this was the furthest public beach from Fort Myers at the time.

 

We enjoyed the warm air (85 at 3 pm) and water (about 72) and the soft wavelets splashing on the shell strewn sand.  We read, and we slept, and we picnicked, and we watched the sun go down.

Sanibel light had started rotating before dusk and winked a good night to us as we got in the car and headed back home to Alva.

Church tomorrow!  First service at 8:30.

-Ken

There's an Alligator!!!!!

We got a wonderful text today from Pastor Ralph of Alva UMC.  He had received an offer from a church member to pass on to the ‘retired Pennsylvania pastor’ who had helped him out Christmas Eve to join this afternoon’s Manatee Tour in Fort Worth Shores on the Caloosahatchee Waterway and Orange River. It just so happened the parishioner who called was none other than Captain Steve himself and it was his tour boat.

Ralph drove us to the marina about 8 miles west on the Caloosahatchee and assisted Captain Steve with the launch, then he went to his nearby ‘West side satellite office, Beef O’Brady’s, and did some church business from his office booth till our return two hours later.

There were several other families on the tour, including one from as far away as Naples, Florida. Of course others were FROM farther away but were staying closer to Fort Worth.

The day was dark and in the mid seventies instead of the predicted eighties and sunny, but we saw manatee, several kinds of birds, and an alligator.  

It was a small alligator, about 6 feet maybe.  But its our first wild gator since coming south at all, four months ago!

Captain Steve kept up a running commentary on the sights of nature we were observing, and did a pretty good job over the 30 minutes of screams of the three year old who wanted to go home pretty much as soon as she boarded the boat.

But the cute little sweetie settled down just fine once we began seeing manatee, and she loved taking over as driver of the boat as we were headed home.

I believe her parents and grandmother are still planning to take her to Disney World tomorrow, though she was threatened time and again with losing that trip if she didn’t behave. I think they already own their tickets.

Ralph took us home and we parted good friends as he prepares to fly north to see his kids in the Pittsburg, PA area tomorrow.  In fact, he once more told us folk were asking him to find a way to get us to stay.  And I must say, the river side homes we saw, where good fishing and manatee watching is off your front yard, and at a price we could afford, did look appealing as we floated by them.  And there’s a park on the waterway just half a mile from the church!

Then, as Ralph was getting in his car he turned to me and said, “We’ve got to expand the worship space as soon as we get our mortgage for the other properties we’ve bought recently down a bit.  And I’m going to need a good assistant pastor since we’ve grown now to over 200 attenders.” Wink, wink.

We closed up the coach and I drove it over to the UMC Riverside Retreat Camp to dump and fill while Mona drove around the Alva Oak Park Riverside modular home park to check out their pool (clean and heated to 85 degrees all year long), community building (getting ready for a community party), and the riverside homes.

I returned with the discouraging news that I had finally done what I hear all good RVers do. I had left the TV antenna up as I drove away and broke the ratchet on its drop mechanism.  I crawled to the roof of the coach while the water tank was filling and dropped the antenna manually. But another repair is not something that encourages Mona to live forever in an RV.

We stay here through Sunday and into Monday, believing we are called to explore further south.  But when we come back north in a few weeks, Ralph says, “Don’t even call ahead.  Just come into YOUR spot on the golf course and settle in.

Who knows.  We may just.

Facebook has all the pics from today!

-Ken

Our First Christmas Day Afar

Yes, Mona once wore faux hair. And I once forgot to zip.

In 1968 Mona and I met on Labor Day Weekend Saturday, and on our very first Christmas Eve we became engaged. That was 46 Christmas Eves ago. 

Tonight that’s 46 Christmases ago.  46 amazing and wonderful years.  Some of them I would call miraculous, for the struggles we had, and the ways God blessed us through them.

Today was our first Christmas away from family and a lifetime of friends.  And God blessed us through it well.  We pray those we missed seeing today prayed for Him to do the same for them.  For He answers prayer.  Amen!

At 10 am this morning Martha pulled her car up beside our coach and took us to join her in her Christmas Day traditions.  They began at 10:30 am at Christ Church of Lehigh Acres, Florida.  This was our first ever Christmas Day Church Service ever. And Pastor Ralph, of Alva UMC, was there as well.

Thank you Pastor Lia for welcoming us ‘home’.  And Thank You Pastor Tom (Lia’s husband, who serves a church in North Fort Myers) for your story and music leading.

Martha has directed the Riverside Retreat UMC Camp for 15 years and retires this April to Northwest Tennessee.

  

She drove us to her camp, and home, just 5 miles east of Alva on route 78 from Alva to show us where we will take the coach to dump tanks and refill our fresh water tomorrow.

 

Then she showed us a bit of her camp.

Built along the quiet Caloosahatchee Waterway the camp offers all sorts of water craft and everything you’d expect from a well run Christian camp.

About 5 miles further east is Martha’s friend Patty’s home.  Patty attends Carlson Memorial UMC in LaBelle, Florida, maybe 5 miles further east on 78. Martha used to as well. Every year Patty invites friends, new and old, to a potluck dinner at her home. 

Every Thanksgiving Martha invites Patty and some of the same friends, and more new ones, to her home for Dinner.  These folks will dearly miss Martha when she heads for Tennessee come April.

 

This year Patty’s son’s family drove in from Omaha, Nebraska.  Their two boys and Maida’s children received Legos for Christmas from… who else?

Please keep Maida’s mother in prayer.  She has just suffered her third stroke and is in the South Miami Baptist Hospital. Maida is getting a ride to visit her tomorrow (Friday).

 

After the meal and the presents were handed out to the kids, Baby Jesus’ birthday cake was cut.  Followed by Patty’s reading of a special nativity story for the kid in each of us.

How my memories of Christmas Eve birthday parties returned as I remembered my own father’s reading each Christmas Eve from the big family King James Bible our daughter Jenn now has, of the Christmas Story. “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed…”

Martha drove us home and we promised to call her when we bring the coach over for our weekly chore.  The camp has a very nice RV park and all year long they have some who pay to camp here, and others who work-camp (exchange time and skill around the camp) for the hookups and space.

Martha tells us there are more work-campers now than ever before.  Mostly retired, but some not, who just need a rent free place to live, and are happy to work for it.

The sun set on our first Christmas Day as simply man and wife, mother and father, Grandad and Grammy. Wonderful phone calls had been made, or messages left, between the many we have missed seeing.

And with darkness, we watched the wonderful late 1970’s ‘Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ starring Loretta Swit through Youtube, 

and the DVD we carry with us of that 1983 classic, ‘A Matter of Principal’ starring Alan Arkin.

Memories of Christmases past came floating over us, and the loving bond we share through all of them with our kids, grandkids, relatives and friends.

God has blesses us, when we ask Him to, even when we can’t get together for Christmas, everyone (per Tiny Tim).

-Ken

Merry Christmas Eve in ALVA

Christmas Eve in Alva, Florida, AND Alva United Methodist Church leads her community in celebrating the birth of Christ. And for newbies to the south at Christmastime like us, we can’t get over the climate.

The temperature is in the mid eighties, and a bit unseasonably humid today. The Ibis’s, after feeding on all the ground bugs they care to eat perch high in the trees to get a cool breeze.

But the Alva UMC Drive By Live Nativity rocks on!

 

Today Mona played Mary in the stable with me. We had new angels also. Amy and her son Riley and her 1 1/2 year old daughter Hannah- the cow.  I called her Chick-fil-a.

But they got back at me when they caught me goofing between cars.  Mona says I’m a ringer for Marty Feldman as Igor (not Egor) in Young Frankenstein.

The Nativity ran from 1 until 3pm and we had over 30 cars go through. Over 60 went through on Saturday from 5-8 pm.

Then we went home to shower, rest, and prepare for the Christmas Eve service at 7 pm.  Pastor Ralph came over to let me review the part in the service he asked me to take. And Mona and I looked over our book map, reminiscing of the places we have been, and reviewing the places we may go.

Pastor Ralph told us over 125 persons came to Alva UMC tonight. But the church only seats 100, and I stopped counting people in folding chairs, steps and laps at 50.

What a blessing to be with these wonderful people, and especially to be allowed to serve at Christmas time once again. Ralph had me read the Scriptures for each section of the service.

How many other churches will we worship in, assist in, as God brings us together?

Seems like He’s our primary navigator on this journey. Seems like that’s the way it should always be.

-Ken