New Mexico

We spent the night outside of Oklahoma City at yet another WalMart.  I had seen severe storms, including tornadoes, predicted for the area before we ever left home, so I was a little concerned.  However, the weather was fine when we pulled in.  We all settled in for the best night of sleep I’ve had since we started.  Thankfully, the storms waited until about 4:00 or so to start.  Thank God, it was just more thunderstorms, but boy were they loud and strong.  The power to WalMart was knocked out, which was indeed a blessing since it took out the power to the parking lot lights and we were able to sleep in darkness.  We made it through the storms without any issues and said our morning prayers thanking God for our safety.

Charlie took the kids into WalMart just before we left to pick up a couple food items.  They came back with a beautiful card and white roses for me for Mother’s Day.  I spent the day sniffing those roses.  They smelled so pretty.  It was so wonderful to smell something truly beautiful when I had stinky feet sitting just behind me.  It is time for showers for this crew!

Windmills in Texas

As we drive through Texas and Oklahoma we see much flat land.  This is what I always envision when people speak of the flat areas of Kansas.  There are wind farms everywhere.  The sky is so blue.  Every once in a while you see a house in the middle of a field.  Everything appears so flat as you can see the horizon miles away from you, but we keep noticing that we are going up in elevation.  Driving in the panhandle of Texas we are at over 4000 feet elevation.  So many of the small communities around here appear to be dead.  We see many abandoned houses and businesses.  It is sad thinking about how much these homes and businesses meant to the people that built them.  The few trees that we do see here aren’t much in the way of trees, especially when you think of the trees that we know in South Carolina, the live oaks, magnolias, maples, etc.  Although this area of the country has a beauty of its own, it definitely causes me to be thankful for the trees that I love so much in my neck of the woods.

Because we weren’t seeing many trees, Nathanael keeps asking, “When will we be in the desert?”  I told him so many times that I wasn’t sure.  The last time he asked, I told him that we would be in the desert when we began seeing cacti.  When we entered New Mexico, we stopped at the rest area.  We walked around for a while, and I went and asked one of the ladies that was working there when we would reach the desert.  She told me that we were actually already in the desert.  It is called the high desert because it is located in a high altitude.  They still get little enough rain to be classified as a desert.

High desert of New Mexico

We didn’t get nearly as far as I had hoped we would while on the road today.  Ryon needed to spend some time writing a paper for his history class, so we spent a couple hours roaming around a welcome center while Ryon used their WiFi.  Charlie made us a delicious lunch of chicken quesadillas.

Charlie and I both keep commenting on how totally amazed we are at such different landscapes than we are accustomed to in the Southeast.  What a beautiful country we live in.  We are so truly blessed!

Blessings to you all,

Rebecca

Flooding in Oklahoma

Today is Day 3 of our trip, and none of us has lost our temper with anyone yet!  I know my mother would tell me to “Knock on Wood,” but I am going to choose to say that as a celebration of how well we are doing so far.  Yay!  The only grumpiness that we have really had is AnaClaire getting tired of sitting in her seat.  She also hasn’t been getting her typical beauty sleep.  She has been waking up at 7:00a.m. with the rest of us instead of sleeping until 11:00a.m. like she usually does.  Of course, she has plenty of opportunity to sleep in the car when we are spending the majority of the day in the car, but I am sure she will get used to it at some point.

We made it all the way across Tennessee yesterday and part of the way through Arkansas, the state of my birth and a great deal of family heritage.  The kids all seemed to think that because we were going to be in Arkansas that we would be able to stop and get some Spudnuts.  (For those of you not familiar with spudnuts, they are a doughnut made of potato flour that we were able to indulge in anytime we went to visit family in El Dorado, Arkansas.)  Well, they were really let down when I explained to them that we were hours away from El Dorado, and that they didn’t have spudnuts in the other areas of Arkansas that we were driving through.  I guess we will have to make do with the homemade spudnuts Ryon has attempted for us, but that is definitely not a cooking experience for the camper.

Damien sleeping in the van.

We spent the night in a WalMart parking lot in Lonoke, Arkansas.  Fortunately the storms waited until we were all settled in bed to come through.  Charlie and I woke to some terrible thunderstorms this morning, enough to knock out power to the WalMart – another blessing: the parking lot lights went out so we were able to sleep in darkness!

After we passed through Little Rock, Charlie and I both looked at each other thinking about how we were finally on new highway that we had never travelled.  Growing up, I used to spend all of our family trips with my nose in a book.  As an adult, I can’t stop looking out the window to witness the beauty of this world that God created.  We are so blessed to live in this country.  However, I spent most of our drive from Little Rock to Oklahoma experimenting with blogging.

We stopped at the Oklahoma Welcome Center for lunch and were able to talk with a wonderfully knowledgeable woman about the Cherokee Indians and The Trail of Tears. The kids and I were just doing a study on the Cherokee not too long ago, so it was very interesting for us to see where they were forcibly relocated.

The kids at The National Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague.

We had quite a wonderful experience when we made an unplanned stop at the National Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague in Prague, Oklahoma.  www.shrineofinfantjesus.com  We went in for a quick visit and saw that they were having Confirmation at 5:00.  As we were walking out, retired Archbishop Beltran walked in.  He stopped and visited with the children and then urged us to stay for the Confirmation.  How can you say no to an Archbishop?  The Mass and Sacraments were beautiful, and we thoroughly enjoyed visiting with some of the congregation afterwards.  The people were wonderful, inviting us to the reception, and even giving us a place to throw away our trash and do our dishes. It was a great way to ride out the extensive rain storms in the area.

Happy Mothers’ Day to all mothers out there, especially my mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, and grandmother-in-law!

Rebecca

Nathanael in front of the Empress tree.

Today has been a great first full day of our trip of blessings.  That is what we know this trip will be for our family – blessings all the way around.  Surely there will be difficulties, but we feel so blessed to have this opportunity to travel the country with our entire family.  Even the difficulties will bring us blessings by giving us opportunities to draw closer to our Lord through our sufferings.

One thing I just have to mention from yesterday was our attempt to leave.  As soon we got to the end of the driveway, I remembered to double check that everyone had a pair of shoes in the van with us.  (I can’t tell you the number of times that we have made it all the way to a destination and discovered that someone didn’t have shoes.)  The plan had been that we would all wear our waterproof sandals on the way out because we had already packed our sturdy tennis shoes in the camper.  So, of course, we discovered that Damien (aged 2 1/2) had no shoes on his feet or in the van.  Back to the house I went.  A very typical experience in our family.  God was so good to remind me to check!  One pair of shoes would have been soaking wet very quickly with that little boy.

One of our first priorities is to make this trip educational, which is why you will see posts from Ryon – aka Cpt. America (as day 1 post was) and probably some of the other children too.  We also have children keeping track of our mileage, gas, miles/gallon, and other expenditures.  Journaling is also a goal on this trip, for all of us.

We camped at a WalMart last night in Knoxville, TN.  We got going well this morning but decided we will definitely have to modify our routine so that we can get up and out much more quickly.  We drove a couple hours and stopped at The Hermitage in Nashville.  This is Andrew Jackson’s famous home, and because we have been studying American History and have spent time on General Jackson, we thought this would be a good mid-day stop.  We had a great audio tour, movie, tour of the mansion, and walk around the garden.  I decided that audio tours are definitely not very easy for older children and adults with younger children around.  Even Dominic at 4 years old wanted an audio tour controller (of course he does – it has buttons to push), so I spent lots of time helping littles with their audio tours.  And when they tired of those, I got to carry them in the hopes that we wouldn’t lose them along the way.  Anyway, we had a great time and learned something too.

Our family in front of The Hermitage

One of the things I really enjoyed about The Hermitage was seeing the wide variety of trees planted there. Many of them were labeled, which thrilled me because I love learning to identify trees that are new to me.  One such tree that amazed me was the Empress Tree.  It was HUGE.  I spoke with a tour guide about it, and she told me that it was only 80 years old.  I also learned that it is a tree species from China and that it has beautiful flowers.  This is definitely a tree I will have to look into growing myself.  Nathanael was also enthralled with it because we could see at the bottom of the tree that it was mostly hollow on the inside.

What a wonderful time we are having.  Hopefully, I’m going to get this blogging thing down so that I can stare out the window a little more.  Thank you for all your prayers!

Rebecca

Wow, what a day. After much hard work we finally got on the road. We have had a lot of fun getting ready for this trip. Everyone has worked like a mule. Even AnaClaire has helped by staying out of the way for the most part. Please pray for our safety and for extra patience.

After we got on the road it didn’t take long for things to start happening. When we had hardly been on the road for 20min we all heard quite the story to explain why we should always pay attention. On Tuesday Mom had bought a taillight and then lost it. She was looking for it all evening. She spent much time and lost much sleep on trying to figure out where it was. Well what she didn’t know was that Dad had already put it on and had spent all night with Mom and the rest of us and he didn’t even know what we were looking for. Then today somehow or another this topic came up and when Dad heard that the taillight was what had caused Mom to lose so much sleep he told her abit of irritation and rolling of eyes from Mom. Dad could do nothing but just laugh at the fact that he had not even been paying attention to Mom that night. Later we all stopped and enjoyed a good fresh dinner at Cracker Barrel and some great classic checker games.

The four older children all got Kindles for our trip. It has been quite the learning experience for us as we all try to figure out how to download e-books off Moms computer. All the children also got some new workbooks to work on in the van. We also thank all of you reading this blog who gave books, their time, and money. We really appreciate it. Thank you. ☺

.This is us heading out.

Look at how well she is behaving.

This is all of us on the road.