Dave and I have spent two glorious weeks in our majestic Bounder. I am using such wonderful adjectives, aren’t I? I just realized that. Anywhoo, These past two weeks have flown by and we’ve done a bunch, Bounder related and otherwise.
Our first week was spent in Falkland/Fountain NC. For those of you who might be geographically challenged like me, that’s right outside of Greenville. We have really good friends who gave us their driveway to park in and use their water and electricity. They’ve always been really hospitable people as long as I have known them. We did the majority of our Bounder maintenance this first week because it was a trial and error type of thing since we’ve never tried living in it before. When we went on our anniversary in New Bern, NC, we were spoiled by the 30 amp plug they had there. We thought we could get away with running whatever we wanted in the Bounder off of the 20 amp plug outside their house. Well, we were wrong. Three times. We tried running the A/C and the fridge at the same time and some how they would cancel each other out and we were poppin’ fuses like they were hot. Coming home to a very silent rv, no A/C running and no fridge running is a disheartening thing. We learned, eventually.
We really wanted to be able to run the fridge between trips so we wouldn’t have to put everything in our cooler every time we unplugged. Also, we didn’t want anything to spoil. So, earlier in the month we bought a solar panel large enough to charge a battery that we could hook up to the fridge and keep it going on solar power alone. Pretty exciting!! Dave spent a good amount of time on that this first week, but it was worth it.
The heat was looking like it was about to reach a level we weren’t very comfy with sleeping in this week. We bought a window unit for our room since it didn’t get any air flow from the big A/C in the living room. It was almost the best decision we’ve ever made. Sleeping in a cooled space is almost too good for words after a sweaty day. And we were sweaty... erry dang day. Dave worked his magic and used his ingenuity to fit the window unit into place. We wanted to be able to ride down the road without it falling out, so there were many a screw screwed in that day. It’s so good.
Dave’s last day as the music minister intern was approaching at the end of this week. As we were preparing for this day to come, we were feeling happy to move forward and sad to leave friends and such an awesome church family. The day came and it was a pretty great Sunday, like usual, but it was kind of a sad day.
They prayed for us and took up a love offering. Dave sang a song by himself and people hugged us before we left them. I almost cried and we both were so appreciative, so beyond appreciative that we were overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t express myself well that day, so I just hugged people and tried to treat it like any other day.
We ate lunch and went back to Falkland to pack up the ‘ol Road Whale and get moving to our next destination. This task was far greater than we could’ve imagined. I don’t know if you North Carolinians and Virginians remember, but we had a pretty intense storm come through July 1st. Dave was driving the Bounder, I was driving our Ford Focus, Dave’s dad was driving our Tracker and Dave’s mom was driving her car. Our fleet of vehicles was bombarded with first wind then sheets of rain and a lastly, a little bit of hail. This forced us to pull over. The normal cars made it to a gas station, but Dave had to stop a little further back because he went through the dump on the way out and once he saw the land spout he called it quits until it got a bit more calm. After about 30 to 40 minutes of waiting... waiting... waiting, we headed out. The main road we were taking closed down halfway because of power lines being down across the road. We were forced to use dun dun dun!... Backroads. We weaved through miles of limb and debris riddled road for around 25 minutes only to get about halfway and see that a tree was blocking the entire road. The kind folks that lived near this blockade told us we might as well turn back, so that’s what we did.
So, making our hour and a half journey into a two and a half hour journey, we made it. Finally.
Our second week was a bit action packed as well. Stay tuned for part 2!!
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