Welcome to the first official Behind The Scenes at Kram-A-Lot Inn blog post, celebrating the beginning of our nine-month RV trip. We’ve made it approximately 30 minutes from home, and already, issues abound…but more on that shortly.
So how did we land on an adventure of this magnitude? My parents sold our home in Apple Valley, MN last summer, planning to move to Iowa this summer. As they walked out of the office from closing, God gave both of them the same idea at the same time. It sounded something like this… “Hey! The house is sold and we are debt-free for the first time in our lives. Maybe we could do that year-long RV road trip with the kids that we’ve always wanted to do?” So… they moved us into a rental home, bought an RV, and began taking steps toward this grand adventure! In the meantime, they also had to consider where we would live in Iowa at the end of the trip, and should they buy a home prior to embarking on the trip or once we got back to the Midwest? In the end, God brought the perfect house for our family this past spring in a wonderful, small-town community of 10,000 people in NE Iowa. We took possession of the home on July 7 and have been crazy-busy making back and forth trips, packing and unpacking, etc…All the while also preparing for a 9 month-long road trip. It’s been a little intense, to say the least.
D-Day plans were to drive to MN this morning to spend the day with my Dad’s parents, but God decided otherwise, and the Kram-a-lot Inn’s AC crashed. The new AC unit was to arrive at the shop this morning, so we could get it fixed early and drive north to MN immediately after. As we were pulling out of our driveway, the shop called to say the AC unit hadn’t been shipped as scheduled and now wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow morning. Since we’d already shut down the house, we decided to head to the shop to deal with a few other maintenance tasks, then find a place to stay the night. The AC could be installed tomorrow morning and then we’d embark on our original plans – just a day later. While not ideal, it would work nicely…except it hasn’t proved as easy as we thought. On the 20-minute drive to the shop, we stopped to get groceries at Walmart. Just as we were ready to pull out of the parking lot, it was discovered that one of the back dually tires was flat, despite being checked this morning. Neither Walmart nor the next-door Farm Fleet’s tire services had a jack large enough for our rig. Thankfully, the nearby Discount Tire shop did, and they were able to fit us into their schedule. So, after a long wait in the hot sun, a new tire was put on and we are just now pulling into the A1 RV shop we were originally supposed to be at by 9:30am.
The plan now is to take care of a few things at the shop and then find a place to hang out for the night as we await the much-desired new AC unit… It’s quickly become obvious to our family, however, that plans can change moment to moment, so who knows where we’ll actually be by morning. “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Proverbs 16:9
Until next time, God bless.
(This blog post was written early this afternoon, but I couldn’t post it until now as we haven’t taken the time to set up our WiFi router.)
Glad to hear you’re getting your problems out of the way at the beginning of the trip”