When Déjà vu Happens on the Family Trip

Journal of Our Journeys, Chapter 12

Tennessee 

In 1972, someone decided to invite my oldest sister, her husband, and their two oldest children to join us on our family vacation. They all packed into a two-door Road Runner, towing a pop-up camping trailer behind.

The plan was to travel together to Tennessee, see Nashville and Chattanooga, then split up. Judy and company would drive on to Florida to visit a friend while the rest of us would swing through Virginia to see relatives there again.

The Country Western Music Hall of Fame must not have done much for me, because I don’t remember any of it. All I can see is the photograph of my niece and nephew outside the building in matching outfits, the girl in pink, of course, and the boy in blue. It was reminiscent of how Mom had dressed Pat and me not too many years before. 

The Wax Museum of Country Stars scared me; the figures looked so life-like. Either Pat or Dad kept saying, “Look! That figure just moved!”

Chattanooga was much more interesting. Ruby Falls and descending hundreds of feet below the ground to get to it was awesome. The falls were a torrent of water, causing the heart to pound and the stone floor to shake.

Rock City, acres of rock gardens through wooded paths and narrow passages of solid rock, had been the dream of Frieda and Garnet Carter.  They also invented Tom Thumb golf, which would one day be known as Miniature Golf. Rock City also had Lover’s Leap, a rock outcropping several hundred feet above the valley floor. 

To get to it, a person had the choice of crossing a solid rock bridge or a Swing-Along bridge held up by cable. Naturally, Pat charged across the swinging bridge, Dad swinging it all the way. I plodded across the rock bridge, scared enough by the chasm below that I certainly didn’t want to feel as if I would be tipped right off of it.

Following the beauty of the outdoors, the trail went indoors to Mother Goose Village, a cave-like place with cubby holes filled with figurines lit by Black Light. I was already old enough to think the characters were somewhat lame, but the black light was mesmerizing. We laughed at each other’s glow-in-the-dark teeth and any white on our clothes.

Shortly after Chattanooga, my oldest sister's family headed southeast while we drove due east to Virginia.

The first night without them, we camped in Cherokee, North Carolina. I don’t need the camper log to vividly recall that little town on an Indian Reservation. Sometime during the night, I woke up with a severe stomach ache. Soon, I was in the toilet with diarrhea – not a good thing in those close quarters. Next, I was throwing up. Mom says she wasn’t overly concerned until I started passing blood; then, it was time to pack up camp and find a hospital.

I don’t remember how we got there; all I remember is lying on a gurney in the Emergency Room. I slept on and off, while Mom sat at my side the entire night, and once when I was asleep, I dreamed about Cheerios. What in the world was up with that? And more importantly, why do I still remember that all these years later?

The Déjà vu thing is that over Spring Break in 2008, my mom, my daughter Val, and I drove to Virginia to visit those same relatives. By suppertime of the second day on the road, as we drove into Danville, Virginia, we decided to have dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken and then find a motel for the night.

The only problem with that was the sandwich that Val ordered. Hours after going to bed at the Super 8 on the other end of town, Val started vomiting. By three am, my mom and I decided that enough was enough, and we dragged my poor teenage daughter into the car to begin searching for the nearest ER.

The night clerk at the motel tried to be helpful, but in the dark of the night, her directions made no sense. We just started driving, hoping to run across a big blue H sign.  

The Danville Regional Medical Center is a nice, modern facility, and I recommend it if you are ever in the area with a crisis in your car. 

It didn’t take the doctor (was his name really Dr. Dan, or was I sleepwalking at the time?) long to diagnose food poisoning, and we had no qualms about accusing the Colonel. With IV fluids and Compazine running, Val was able to fall asleep in her hospital bed. Grandma and Mom, on the other hand, dozed fitfully in our hard plastic chairs, our heads bobbing and jerking, until they released Val at seven am.

Thankfully, there was no third ER visit on other trips to Virginia.  

Mom’s Mom and Dad, Weepy Wednesday, episode 1

It maybe doesn’t sound like I have the cheeriest series of blog posts planned, but you know I will throw in what humor I can. But I have lost so many family members in my lifetime, that I wanted to take time to pay tribute to them all. Hopefully I can find a funny story or two to share.

I never got to know my maternal grandparents. My mom’s dad died a few years before I was born, and her mom passed away when I was only two and a half.

Grandpa was born in Wisconsin in 1876. His parents had been born in what was part of the Germany Empire at the time, but is Poland now. They had nine children after they moved to the United States and settled in Wisconsin. After his first wife died in 1893, Great-grandpa remarried and had four more kids. Sadly, because child mortality was so high back then, three of those thirteen kids died before they reached adulthood.

Anyway, back to Grandpa. He worked at a logging camp in northern Wisconsin, and that’s where he met my grandma. He was seventeen years older than her, which wasn’t an unheard-of age spread for the time.  

Along with her younger sister, Grandma was a cook at the logging camp, where Grandpa worked. They were married in 1912, when she was only nineteen, and worked at the logging camp for at least another five or six years, because this picture shows them with my uncle who was born in 1916.

Anyway, the way my mom described it, Grandpa died from congestive heart failure at the age of 82. This picture was taken three years before he died.

Besides raising three kids and working on their farm, Grandma continued cooking and baking for anyone who wanted to eat. After her husband died, my dad turned the porch on the side of their house into a separate bakery, so she could sell her baked goods. I sure wish I could remember how they tasted, or it would have been nice to have inherited her talent in the kitchen.

By the fall of 1963, she had lost a lot of weight. She attributed it to having worked so hard all summer in her bakery, but Mom finally convinced her to go to the doctor. He found what sounded like a uterine mass, and he got her connected with a specialist in Madison.

My mom shared this story many times over the years. They were in a hotel room across from the hospital in Madison on November 22, when they heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. I picture them huddled around the small screen of the black and white TV, watching in disbelief. 

Grandma hung on until the following June. Everyone seems to have loved her, and her pies, pastries, and breads remain legendary. I wish I would have known her.

Okay, sorry, I didn’t have much of a funny story this time. I’ll work on it for next week.

Speaking of Hope . . .

Can you guess which book of the Bible has the word “hope” in it the most times?

I think anyone who is familiar with the Bible, might guess Psalms, which shares that word 33 times (in the New Living Translation anyway). It is somewhat of a book about hope.

But what about the book in second place? This does depend on which version of the Bible you are looking at. But of the four different versions I checked, Psalms always came out on top and another book was next.

Let its morning stars remain dark. Let it hope for light, but in vain; may it never see the morning light. (chapter 3, verse 9)

Doesn’t your reverence for God give you confidence? Doesn’t your life of integrity give you hope? (4:6)

And so at last the poor have hope, and the snapping jaws of the wicked are shut. (5:16)

Having hope will give you courage. You will be protected and will rest in safety. (11:18)

Give up? It’s the book where God allows Satan to subject this righteous man to everything imaginable. He loses his animals, his servants, his income, and his children. He is struck with physical afflictions. This was all done to test this man’s faith, and even though he admitted how miserable he was, he never once blamed his misfortune on God.

Of course, we all know this was the Old Testament book of Job, with the main character being Job himself.

Reading his story needs to be a constant reminder to us to never give up hope. God is always with us, and no matter what we go through, God will hold onto us.

Where is Summer when you need it

 It's been so long since I shared an excerpt from "The Journal of Our Journeys", that I'm not totally sure this is where I left off. I decided to just jump in. With the wonderfully awful winter weather we are having, I thought I should look back on some of those summer vacations, when the sun was hot and our shorts were short. 

Journal of Our Journeys 

Chapter 11 - South Dakota I

How can I remember so much about some trips and so little about others? It seems every trip has had something memorable, something that needs to be passed down through the generations. A story that would make the headlines if there were a news channel dedicated to just our family. Or that at least would haunt my social media in this century. There was no such story from our first trip to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota.

But by now, you realize that I won’t leave it at that. If there is no story, I will have to create one.

In 1971, we went out west again, but this time, our destination was the southwest corner of South Dakota, where yet another tourist mecca lies, the Black Hills.

The Needles Highway is incredible, with its hairpin curves, fascinating rock outcroppings, and narrow road. Where the highway went through the solid granite mountain, Mom would get out and film Dad driving the camper through. If we had stuck our hands out the camper windows, we would have been able to touch the sides of the mountain.

It was fun at the time, but I think now that it contributed to my growing claustrophobia. Those first seeds of my mortal fear started in kindergarten when, for some reason, one of our activities was crawling through a tunnel made of a gigantic Slinky covered in plastic. Then, a few years later, Pat dared me to crawl into a safe, and she shut the door on me. So many stories! So much trauma!

But back to South Dakota.

Custer State Park has an impressive herd of American bison (I hate that we all call them “buffalo”) and a band of friendly burros on its wide-open prairies. I’m pretty sure we fed those burros out of the truck window, while Mom kept an eye out for the bison, which had gotten a lot of bad press for attacking people who were stupid enough to walk up to them. (And that continues to happen to this day.)

The Badlands area, by contrast, is stark and moody. Throughout a single day, the weather can change from warm to cold, from sunny to rainy, and the rainbow-colored hills go through a wide range of hues with every change.

One of the prominent tourist attractions of the Black Hills is, of course, Mount Rushmore. The giant heads of four of our most adored leaders are stunning. It is so hard to believe someone could carve that out of the side of a mountain.

Well, okay, that a crew of 400 could carve it still seems unreal. Mount Rushmore was a finished work when we first saw it. It was built between 1927 and 1941 for just under one million dollars, with at least half of the cost funded by the government.

Another carving is a little further down the road, but sometimes it’s hard to compare the two. Dad was always fascinated by Crazy Horse. Work on the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1947 and has accepted no government funds. It is being built strictly on donations and admissions to the grounds. I haven’t found any cost estimates, and no one knows precisely when it will be finished.

We stopped there for the first time on our way to Yellowstone in 1969. Two years later, no one could tell that any work had been done on it. We traveled through the area again in 1976, and I still couldn’t see any advances. But they were there. What appeared as a small fragment from 1,500 feet away amounted to several tons of rock.

The whole story of Crazy Horse is fascinating; I can see what Dad saw in it. I would recount it all here, but you can find it on the web just as easily as I can, with pictures, too. 

Unfortunately, we had to stop at yet another tourist trap on the way home. Everyone stops at Wall Drug, and I don’t think anyone knows why. Advertising free ice water since the 1930s, the small drug store grew and grew and now encompasses most of downtown Wall, a small town with a population of less than a thousand.

So, we stopped, wandered around, looked at all the cheesy souvenirs for sale, had our pictures taken on the bucking bronco statue, and got our free ice water. If I remember correctly, the only time we ever spent money there was when Dad bought each of us a leather belt with Native American beadwork sewn into it.

Aren't I just too cute? 

More on Hope or Hoping for More

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13, New International Version)

On New Years Eve, I introduced you to my word of the year. I know it may seem hokey, but I’ve been choosing a word of the year for over ten years now, or sometimes the word chooses me. I find an appropriate Bible verse with that word and I put it on computer screen so I see it every time I sit down at my laptop. I try to keep it in my head and my heart all year. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. (Romans 12:12, NIV)

I usually find lots of other inspirational verses with that same word, so here are some of them.

We were given this hope when we were saved. If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently. (Romans 8:24-25, New Living Translation)

The picture above is from our Airbnb when we stayed at Diani Beach in Kenya three years ago. If you like the picture here, great. Share it if it calls to you. Or you can use one of the other verses about hope. Just something to think about.

Grateful for WPS

Two years ago, Public Service sent us a notification that they would be burying all the electric lines in our neighborhood. We were thrilled because our power had just been out for three days in zero-degree weather.

Well, they didn’t come last year, and it wasn’t looking like 2025 would be the year for it either. Then sometime in the summer, they started working their way down our road. It took them months, though.

Then finally, on August 28, when there was nothing else going on in my life, I came home to this.

They told Hubby that they would hook the line up to the house in January. Right? Coz that makes sense, in the dead of the winter, with frost in the ground and who knows how much snow.

Well, lo and behold, Public Service hooked us up on December 1, leaving me with this.

They once again talked to Hubby and told him they would be back in the spring to smooth out the dirt and plant grass seed. We will see.

But I’m not complaining, because this happened on Monday. 

And I am sure our power would have gone out.

Here's to a safe winter with plenty of warmth in our houses. 

A Hopeful New Year

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11, New International Version)

Last week, as I was thinking about what I wanted my word of the year to be, the word “hope” came to me. It’s been such a crummy couple of years for us. All I can do is hold onto the hope that God has a plan and that things will turn around.

I listened to a sermon about Christmas a few days ago where the pastor reminded us that the Jews were praying for the Messiah for two thousand years. They had their moments of faithlessness and gave up hope a lot of times, but God still answered their prayer after all those years, by coming to earth in the form of a tiny baby, Jesus.

I hope (there’s that word again!) I don’t have to wait that long.

I was thinking though that hope sounds a little like we don’t have faith. If I had total faith, I’d be saying “I know I don’t have to wait that long”. But then the verse above says that God will give us hope, and with that a future of prosperity.

So, I don’t know. I guess it’s good to have hope and to hold onto it in the very worst of circumstances, knowing that God does hear our prayers and our cries for help. If we didn’t have hope why pray to God at all.

And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love. (Romans 5:5, New Living Translation)