Goodbye Phoenix

24 Jan 2013

Kory’s smile is back!  Just temporarily though, as the dentist said he broke the base the tooth was attached to… which can only mean expensive options at this point.  He is babying his teeth as the glue may just hold for days, not weeks.  I guess when we are in Mexico next week we’ll see if we have any options there.  Of course the American dentist wants him to have a titanium implant which takes a total of three months to do, and since we don’t have any three month window of staying home for awhile, that option isn’t very doable right now.  Oi. We move forward with prayer.

It rained a bit this morning in Phoenix, which was fine with Kaleb since he had much school work to do.  He stayed in his PJs most of the day and just laid in bed and worked from his laptop.  Such decadence!  I think the sunshine would have been a distraction. 

I was up before dawn so I could have my morning cup of coffee and chat away with Barb.  We managed to talk non-stop until the time she took Kory to the dentist.  Funny how chats happens.

My friend Tracy, that we met up with in Northern California, had given us sacks of citrus, so while Kory was at the dentist I juiced four cups of lemons for lemonade and four cups of grapefruit juice for breakfast.  What a treat!  We’d already juiced the oranges and we’ve saved a few of each au natural to eat later.

Barb took us out to a very swanky vegetarian restaurant for lunch.  Boy was the food ever good, and they were able to modify their menu items for Kory’s dietary restrictions.  I want one of those restaurants in our town!  It’s called GREEN and most of the food was organic, too.  Such a treat it was.

Barb’s a collector of many fine things so I Googled some of her stuff to show her the current value of her possessions, but of course she has no interest in selling anything.  She’d be rich if she did.  Her place is like a museum.

We had a long hug goodbye and were sad our time together was so short but we did manage to get a lot of words crammed into that 24 hour period, so we might be good for a while.  We talk on the phone too, so we’ll always just be a phone call away.  Sniff sniff.  She’s a friend I met when I was living in Astoria, Oregon in the 1970s.  We sat together on May 18, 1980 and watched Mt. St. Helens blow from Amboy, Washington.  We have many memorable moments together, but nothing quite like that one.

The best thing to happen in Phoenix, besides visiting Barb, was that Kaleb’s camera and my bank card arrived in Barb’s mail while we were there!  Kaleb got a camera as a gift for Confirmation last year, which stopped working properly just before we left on the trip so I sent it in for repair and gave them Barb’s address to return it to.  Boy, that was cutting it close, but he was thrilled to now have a camera.  And I left one of my debit cards in Norway, which is the one I use for international travel, forgetting that we are going to Mexico and the Bahamas on this trip.  My friend in Norway sent it to me at Barb’s and it came just on time, also.  Incredible.  So that was two big worries that are off my plate and now can just be called blessings.

After lunch we headed south again just a little ways before we stopped off in Chandler to say hi to Ryan and Laura Starr.  Ryan is now worship pastor of a Covenant church in Chandler.  They just moved here last summer.  They were the young newlywed couple that housesat for us for the year we lived in Norway while Ryan was the worship intern at our home church.  They made one baby while living at our place but now have a second one just a month old, so it was nice to meet her, too.  We had a good long chat about church life and what they’ve been doing since the last time we saw them.  It was nice to see more familiar faces on our route across America.

Nogales, our stop for the night, is three hours south of Phoenix so we ended up driving half of that trip in the dark.  The Walmart parking lot awaited us as we spend our last night in America for awhile.  We detoured after dinner to the Home Depot next door as it seems our water pump for the RV part of the motorhome might be going out, so Kory had to check out our options there.  No luck in finding what we needed but he was able to buy some spider and scorpion repellant as I really don’t want to pick up any hitchikers while the RV sits for 10 days in the Mexican desert.  Home Depot also had a free wi-fi signal so that will keep us entertained til bedtime.

In the morning we are being met by Bob McDowell, who used to be the director of Warm Beach Christian Camp.  He’s escorting us to Rancho Betania, a Christain camp 90 minutes south of Nogales, where we will work for ten days.  After his wife died, Bob married Yvonne, the mother of a high school friend of mine.  I lived with her family after I turned 18, so this will be a special time for me to be with Yvonne again after all these years.  They are both in their 80s but make the trip down every winter to work at the camp.  No grass grows under their feet, that’s for sure.