Parking It
All adventures must end, or at least pause.
Ten months ago, we arrived in Muskogee, feeling led to return to the town we visited six months before. We had grown attached to the town and Muskogee First Church of the Nazarene, and Diana was taking over the Childrens Department.
We started to settle in, registering the vehicles (fun fact: most trailers don’t require tags here), getting Oklahoma drivers licenses and registering to vote.
But after about eight months, we noticed we were feeling a little cramped for space. Crossroads RV Park is a great place to stay. Craig Radick has done a terrific job turning an old mobile home park into a pleasant long-term RV site. And we love the RV, but when we realized we were going to be staying for a while, we decided to start looking for a house.
There were financial issues due to Ocwen’s poor handling of our accounts and the short sale of our Ohio house, but we found a nice place on the south edge of town, with five wooded acres, a pond, and a huge shop/garage. We closed July 25th, a Wednesday. Thursday, we gathered a few friends and moved everything from storage over to the new house. We moved the rig Friday. Saturday, I left for a week in Ohio, taking two kids to camp, and picking up Erica who’s spent the last 8 weeks working at the same camp. Erica left from the RV, but came home to the house, having not seen it, even though she was here when we first visited it. She decided not to come that day.
The first time we went through the house, Diana and I said “I wonder if they’re going to leave the porch swing,” and “It’d be nice if they left the baker’s rack,” and “I wouldn’t complain if they left the entertainment center.” When Diana contacted the sellers about something else, they asked if they could leave a few things behind, since they didn’t really need them or have a place for them. Things like the porch swing, the baker’s rack, the entertainment center, and an extra full-size bed. Go figure.
The kids who stayed with Diana while I went to camp did a great job of helping her deal with the new washer and dryer, and the new couches. A friend at church gave us a recliner and another bed. Owen is happy that he finally gets to mow the lawn, since he was just a little too small for us to allow him to do it at our old house in Ohio. Erica is trying to figure out where the pasture and feed lot will go. Diana is wondering when we can get a pair of goats. I’m looking forward to renovating my writing cave in the shop (a 7 by 12-ish office).
It’s more than a little odd to look at a living room that has almost as much square footage as our entire rig. When I pointed out the measurements to Diana (19 x 19 living room vs 42 x 11-ish RV), she stared at me for a minute before announcing “That’s not even funny.”
We’re keeping the RV, and we’ll keep using it. One thing we’ve learned during our adventure was how important it was to make time to take a real vacation every now and then. Maybe that’s all our trip was: a nineteen-month vacation prior to a move. We needed it though. Other than traveling for funerals and medical issues with Diana’s late mother, we haven’t taken a vacation of any kind since our honeymoon in 1994. We’ve got two trips planned later this year already: a family campout over Labor Day weekend, and a vacation trip in October to see my relatives in Texas and New Orleans.
There’s plenty left to do here. We don’t have internet service yet. I’ve got a to-do/project list over a page long, but I’ve already managed to cross two things off. So stay tuned. Don’t Stop Believing and Sad Girl are ready to go to an editor, and she’s waiting for me to send back the contracts and the manuscripts.
Maybe next post I’ll tell you what I found at my childhood home in Ohio.
#FOTR #FTRV #GreenCountry #lifeOnTheRoad #Oklahoma
