It’s true.  We made it home safe and sound and happy to be here.  Read the kids’ reactions to coming home below.  And thanks for keeping up with us while we journeyed.  Your comments were enjoyed and your prayers were felt and appreciated.  But we missed you, so give us a call.  We’d love to visit.          Karl & Julia

Although I can’t complain much about our beachfront location, the reason for our being here is a little unhappy.  We pulled out of our overnight accomodation (a truck stop) this morning and the brake light came on, indicating we had a brake problem.  We immediately pulled over and Karl saw that we were low on brake fluid, so he added the little bit that he had and we turned into town to find a brake shop.  Fortunately we were near a fairly large town and found a Midas shop easily.  The one hour inspection took nearly two and we were told we had a ruptured brake line  (steel) and would need a new one fabricated (the local GM dealership doesn’t even carry it).  So we kicked our BCAA coverage into gear to get our trailer towed to a campsite and rent a minivan so we can still get around.   It turned into one of those, pay now and hope they reimburse you later situations.  Whether they will or not is dicey since they are willing to tow your trailer if they also have to tow your motor vehicle, but since we drove it to the mechanic ourselves . . .who knows for sure.  I did point out to them that we saved them a tow bill, but nevertheless, we are a little on pins & needles about it.  The rental car & camping fee should be covered since we have trip interruption coverage, but those little loopholes drive me nuts.  And are the main reason which I prefer to avoid insurance unless necessary.  In this case, since we regularly lock our keys in the car, leave the dome lights on or run out of gas, BCAA is necessary for us. 

But while researching our BCAA coverage (thanks for the help, Hester), I realized that our travel medical insurance for this trip ran out at the end of November.  Oops.  In order to get it extended after it expired, we have to get special approval and then endure a 48 hour waiting period, by which time we’ll be home, so until we get home we are without medical coverage!  EEK!  So please pray for us that nothing terrible happens and we arrive home without any incidents which would require medical treatment.

Oh and, later this afternoon, the mechanic called and said that the other brake line is about to go so he has to replace both.  Better now than discover it while driving!  God has been very good in making sure we discover problems before they become endangering, so we need to be thankful for that.  The bill for the brake lines is much smaller than we anticipated we might spend if we dropped an engine or transmission on this trip, so thats something to be thankful for as well. 

At this point, now, though, we are eager to get home.  We have nothing much planned for the next 3 days except to drive, so we just kind of want to get it over with.  So hopefully we’ll be on our way tomorrow.

We’re in Las Vegas right now. Staying in an RV Park right on the strip. This morning we’re recovering from walking 3 or 4 miles last night to see all the free shows at all the casinos and that was only half the strip! Unfortunately the best one, a pirate show, is not running again till the new year, so the kids were a little disappointed about that. Also, the one real show I wanted to see, Bette Midler, is also not running right now. Oh well, more money available to spend on the kid’s entertainment! The shopping is fun here too, we bought Jamie-Lynn some real old fashioned rollerskates at FAO Schwartz for $10!! marked down from $65. I figure I can sell them on Craigslist for more than I paid!
Karl & the three kids are going to do an indoor ride park today in the Circus Circus casino while Sarah & I shop. Mostly window shopping, of course. Jamie-Lynn and William are also writing a newspaper article about the Grand Canyon, so keep checking back for that!

PS: Sorry this post should be last, after the grand canyon & hoover dam posts.  We wrote all of these posts from here in Las Vegas and have little control over the ordering of them.  Julia

We’re stopped for the night in the middle of almost nowhere. This is the only town on our route with anything more than a gas station for about 400 kms in each direction. But that means campgrounds are cheap, cause they’re in the desert. So we get to dump our tanks, take showers (much needed!) and watch Dancing with the Stars. Don’t tell us what happened this week!! (We watch on the internet.) We stopped on Wednesday just south of Houston to see the circus. I’ll let the kids tell you more about that, cause all you’d here from me is why you shouldn’t go to the circus, at least not that one. On the way here, driving through nothing, I thought of that movie where the couple is on a road trip and the car dies, so he walks to the next town to get gas or something while the wife waits by the car and when he comes back, she’s gone without a trace. Really creepy. Thats partly why we stopped. Karl wanted to drive another 400 kms to Flagstaff, AZ tonight, but I was afraid he’d get sleepy and we’d have nowhere to stop. So, this is better. Tomorrow we’ll get to Flagstaff nice and early and then gothe next day to the Grand Canyon. By the way, the forecast is for highs of 0 degrees at the rim of the Canyon. Brrrr. I’m not sure I can handle it after all this sun, but at least I’ll be happy to get to California after that. Time to get organized for dinner. Ciao!

St Bernard Parish is the county near New Orleans where we are staying and working.  We worked today priming a house with 3 other guys and got it completed which is a great feeling. 

St Bernard Parish is next to the Lower Ninth Ward which is the area I remember hearing about on the news.  Water levels were between 4 and 20 feet after Katrina and took 2-4 weeks to recede. The owner of the project office building saw the water rise from his ankle to mid thigh in the 45 minutes that he was trying to gather his stuff and animals to get out of the area.  A boat picked him up and dropped him off on a local church roof where he sat for 7 days with 100 other people waiting to be rescued.  The first rescuers to come through and pick people up were the Canadian Mounties.

When the authorities came through, they declared all but 2 of the 27,000 houses in St Bernard Parish uninhabitable.  Before Katrina 67,000 people lived in St Bernard Parish.  4 years later, about 33,000 have returned but not all are back in their homes.  Many still live in government trailers, some of which have been removed because people were getting sick due to the condition of the trailers.   Some families are living split up across the area or state.  Many residents were also victims of contractor fraud.  They would hire someone to fix up their homes and give them their government aid cheque and never hear from them again.

Many business have not returned.  The local Walmart is still closed.  There are very few grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations.  We wanted to take the kids to a local pool after working today, but the nearest one is 40 miles away.  So we thought maybe we’d just get some ice cream.  Nope, can’t find that either.

Many of us have heard of the Make It Right foundation which Brad Pitt is the spokesman for.  Mike Holmes built a house for them as well.  They’ve completed 8 homes in the lower ninth ward, which they have built up on stilts and supposedly to withstand any hurricane God can throw at them.  Its kind of the Extreme Home Makeover approach to solving this problem.  The St Bernard Project is refurbishing homes – gutting and renovating the interiors.  They’ve completed almost 250 homes in 3 years.  I suppose there is room for both organizations and philosophies in this situation.  But it seems to me, we just need to get people home.

These are two of the Make It Right homes.

This is an example of the type of house we’re helping to refurbish.  There are a lot of empty concrete slabs around, because many homes just floated down the street.

This is what a lot of storefronts look like.  The signs are there, but nobody’s home.

The need for volunteers is so great, that there is very little red tape involved.  We walked into the project office Thursday morning and said, “Put us to work.”   The coordinator said, “Come back tomorrow we’ll put you somewhere.”  We were also given a house to park our trailer on, which is set aside for volunteers.  It has bunk beds for 20 people.  There is a nominal charge for using the house, but we were told not to worry about it even though we’re using the water and electric and doing laundry.  They’ll get a donation anyway.  But they are just so happy that people come and pitch in.  Even if it is just for a day or 2.  Cause every little bit helps to get these houses done.

Yes, we’re fine.  We chose to drive North for a couple days to avoid the heavy wind associated with the hurricane that was headed for the gulf coast.  Right now we’re in a little town just south of Jackson, Mississippi waiting it out.  By Wednesday we should be able to head back to the coast.

It might have been ok to stick around, but high winds and a travel trailer don’t really go together well, so we decided not to push God’s providence too far.  He’s been good to us so far, why push it?  Hopefully we’ll be in New Orleans by Wednesday night and maybe be able to help out a little.  We have word of a project we’re looking into.  Pray that we can be of help to some people and learn something in the meantime.

So don’t worry about us when you hear the news.  We’re fine, safe and having a ball.

Julia

Just so you know we really suffered from the no-see-ems.  Every one of us looks like this all over our arms & legs & feet (except William).  We told William its because he doesn’t wash enough that the bugs don’t like his skin.

Unfortunately the sores don’t show up right away, so we really didn’t know how bad we were bitten until it was too late.  And we left the location where they were bad on Monday and we’re still itchy on Friday!  Feel sorry for us now?

We’ve been in Florida for over a week now and boy, is it hard to leave!  We spent both weekends at the beach and did 5 days of Disneyworld in between.   Disney was exhausting to say the least.  We had 4 theme parks to visit, so we did one a day and the extra day we split up and went back to whatever park we enjoyed the most.  So, of course Sam & Karl went where the craziest rides were and the rest of us went back to Magic Kingdom, mostly to do rides. We also spent the afternoon at the pool and the kids watched an outdoor movie in the evening, while Karl and I did Downtown Disney to shop. Downtown Disney has mostly Disney stores all with different merchandise plus a few stores you don’t see just anywhere, like the Lego store.  It also has restaurants (Planet Hollywood, good cheesecake!) and a 24 screen movie theatre.  But every night the kids were up late and we got up early, trying to make the most of our time there, so this last beach weekend was also an extra sleep weekend.  Karl & Sam also rented surfboards and gave that a go, but its a steep learning curve.  They are going to need some more practice.  Maybe in California.  Anyway, I’ll let the kids tell you more about Disney, today its back to the beach (on the Gulf coast, this time) and then try and drag ourselves North.  Its ranged from 25-30 degrees every day, so its hard to leave!  Although we also had to deal with a no-see-em bug overpopulation this weekend.  Those bites stay itchy for a long time!

We’ve spent the last week in Charleston.  We took the opportunity to get the trailer brakes & bearings looked at as well as a tune-up for the truck.  In between we got a glimpse of Charleston’s history, beaches & present day lifestyle.

I have to say, Charleston did not live up to any of my pre-conceived notions.  The movies paint an unrealistic vision of the deep south.  They are very polite, which I expected, but with a true sincerity that I did not expect.  The staff in the stores even refer to each other with “Miss” in front of their names!

The historic plantation we visited was in a state forest with lovely grounds infested with mosquitoes and no-see-ums.  The house itself was not terribly impressive partially because it hasn’t had any restoration work and partly because its not as large as I would have expected.  We are bringing home some gigantic pinecones, beautiful magnolia leaves (I hope they last!) and moss which hangs from most of the oak trees here.

The other house tour we did was of houses in downtown Charleston. We got to walk through 150-250 year old houses which are still lived in and have been restored beautifully.  Karl and I did this by ourselves as it was $45/head and we needed a date! Two of the homes are now b&bs.  All the furniture is original and got passed down with the house through the different owners, albeit with new upholstery.  A couple of houses were more like museums with their chandelier from italy and statues from whatever artist and every piece of furniture is worth 10s of thousands of dollars.  That doesn’t do much for me - too stuffy!  Some also thought that to maintain the historical character they had to paint with original colours, but the colours were so blech! Is that a word?  One place we saw only the garden, but the property took up an entire city block and apparently is right now listed for $23 million.  They have full time staff to take care of the house and garden (living in a separate house on the property), but the owners are only there occasionally.  One house we visited had no furnishing on the ground floor, apparently because the owner likes to entertain and seems to think furniture would get in the way of that. You’re not really inviting people into your home then, when you’re entertaining, are you??!  My favourite was the last house we saw.  She had had a professional designer come in and the main colour scheme for the house was the same as my living room except more white & silver, less brown.  But it was beautiful.  There were so many items I could have brought home and they would have fit in perfectly.  The design style complemented the architecture but wasn’t a slave to it.

Most of these houses were “Charleston single houses”.  They were built with one narrow side facing the street and what we would consider the front, facing the neighbour’s house.  The porches (usually about 10 feet deep) or piazzas as they are called here, run along the side (facing the neighbour) and so the door at the street opens onto the end of the piazza.  There is another door  in the middle of the piazza which leads into the main hall of the house.   Apparently this was done so the breeze off the ocean would run through the length of the house and you could sit or sleep (all night) on your porch in privacy. (The neighbours would be sleeping on their porch on the other side of their house.)  I quite like it. They were called single houses because they were a single room wide and two rooms deep (two storeys usually).  We did see some double houses as well, but they usually had a portico on the street with a front door in the middle.  Most of these houses were originally built with a kitchen house out the back where the slaves or servants would do the cooking.  Many have been updated by adding a room (a hyphen, they call it) inbetween and turning that into the new kitchen.  This was done around the mid 20th century for most.  In order to add modern bathrooms, many had to enclose the upstairs piazzas.  There was nowhere else for it. 

I don’t know if y’all find any of this interesting, but I was totally fascinated.  The desire to maintain the heritage, but still make it liveable for today is a worthwhile accomplishment.  And I was pleased to be able to see it from the inside, this time!

The lights go down, the curtain goes up, the orchestra begins. And the audience immediately is laughing. The production is the brand new Broadway show, “Bye, Bye, Birdie”. Its a musical, its a comedy and its a throwback. The setting is 1960, which means John Stamos is outfitted in a skinny suit, large glasses and slicked back hair – not the way a 40 year old woman is used to seeing John Stamos. But then, much of the show is not what I’m used to, and maybe thats becuase its been a long time since I’ve seen a Broadway show. Is it normal for the story to be a little on the thin side? Or for the costumes to be a little on the ridiculous side? If so, it was a smash hit. And it went over big with my children, as well. Jamie-Lynn says: “It was the best thing I’d ever seen!” Sarah says: “It makes me want to take ‘musical theatre’ dance again.” Sam says, “Now that I’ve been to a Broadway show, I understand why people would choose to live in New York.” William says: “It was well-played.”

Although the storyline was thin, the individual lines delivered by the actors, were pure gold. Particularly those written for “Mama”, and “Mr. Macafee”. Bill Irwin, “Mr. Macafee” definitely stole the show with his exuberant delivery of the father who is losing control over his household. “Mama” was also well portrayed as the typical “don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine, dying here all alone” drama queen mama we love to laugh at.

It is also interesting to note that the original Broadway production had Dick Van Dyke cast in the role of Birdie’s manager, now Stamos’ role. John Stamos is definitely stretching himself here. But it can’t be said that he’s out of his element. He just needs to stop worrying about losing his “cool guy” persona. If he truly threw himself into the number “Put on a Happy Face”, we’d all be crying “Give that man a Tony award!!”. But instead he looks as if he’s looking over his shoulder, to see if any of his friends are watching.

The portrayal of that time in history when women and children went “nuts” for hip-swinging pop singers was also true to life and really brought you back to that era. The frenzy that ensued over the likes of Elvis has not been repeated by later generations, probably due to the access we now have to performers through all forms of media. I’m not sure why the Roundabout Theatre felt the need to produce this particular show again, but I don’t mind since it was a “good, clean fun” choice for our younger children. Karl also appreciated the wholesomeness of the entertainment that is completely timeless. With a live production, the audience enjoys a personal connection with the cast which can never be replaced by movies or television.