West Coast Tour: Oregon

After the Rainbow Gathering, a few of us (5 to be exact plus the cat) piled into our mini-van and headed to Oregon. We were on our way to visit my friend Sarah from college, in Salem and ended up camping out behind our friend Heather’s house for a night, which was a lot of fun to see her!


After that we finally made it to Sarah’s house. It had been 2 years since I had seen Sarah, so it was wonderful to see her again! She let us all camp out in her house and spoiled us to death with food and kindness. We were truly blessed by Sarah and her husband Troy. While we were visiting Sarah we stopped by her parent’s house to say hello and low and behold, there was Wanda (Sarah’s mom) making me a beautiful rug on her loom. I was amazed and we all got to try our hand at the loom…what a wonderful way to work on getting your aggression out as you bang on the loom! No, really, it was great you, should try it sometime!


After Sarah’s we drove around all of Oregon. Not really but it felt like it. We headed towards the beach, where we spent a couple days camped out and enjoyed Oregon’s rocky shoreline. Then we headed inland and spent a few days at some lake in the mountains, where Ben and I went canoeing and I thought to myself…I have never been canoeing and looking at snow capped mountains at the same time before. Spectacular!


The next day was our friend Angela’s birthday; she was one of the five traveling with us. So we drove up to Crater Lake, gazed at the beauty up there. Then, we headed towards a little fancy cheese shop and a chocolate shop. Of course we had to eat at Taco Bell (yuck) because it is Angela’s favorite (made the sacrifice for her!!).

West Coast Tour: The Rainbow Gathering

Our team finally arrived in Montana and met up with us. It was so wonderful to see them. Didn’t realize how much we had missed everyone taking off early. We spent a couple of days getting ourselves ready to head into the Gathering, and then we hopped in the bus and took off for South-Western Washington, where the Gathering was held this summer.

It was a very interesting year. Well, actually, it was a hard year for me. Ha! It started off with hiking in later in the day (we usually hike into the Gathering in the morning) and then on top of that…it rained! This was my 10th national Gathering and I have never had to hike into a Gathering in the rain. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it just been rain…but there were still snow banks taller than me all around…so the rain was COLD!! Needless to say we tried to hike in as fast as we could and get all our tents set up and our personal stuff brought in but by that time we were all soaked and our stuff was soaked and the sun was going down. BURR!! I attempted to make dinner for our team that night, but we had forgotten all the cooking utensils, so I made pasta with a tent pole…interesting.

We had a hard time getting ourselves together after that first day. We normally go into the National Gathering with almost 30 people on our team and this year we had 20. We normally have our kitchen set up and running by the afternoon of our 2nd day at the Gathering, and this year we were limping along and not completely set up by the 4th day that we were there. A few of us took turns being in charge of the cooking in the kitchen…which we normally do, but this year it was 10 straight hours of cooking in one day for each of us. I would try to have at least two meals cooking, beans in the pressure cooker cooking and two meals being prepared to cook with each meal serving at least 150 people. Not to mention having to make sure to get beans, lentils and rice soaking so that they would cook faster. Praise the Lord that we each had “Kitchen Monkey’s” (someone to help us do all the cooking for the day…thanks Michaela!!!!) this year! Usually by 2:30ish I would get delirious and not really know what I was doing…it truly was the grace of God that any food got made at all! Ha! This year I also learn how to use a saw and cut wood for our bonfires, yep, in 10 years I had never pick up a saw and I didn’t even cut any fingers off!

All this to say, I really learned that in our weakness God is strong! I learned that God can still move regardless of me. Praise the Lord because He is SO good! So even though I think it was a tough gathering and I really can’t remember all of the details because of delirium, I do know that God moved, people got to see Jesus in us and we got to love on the Rainbow Family!


Picture: Me cooking away in the Jesus Kitchen

West Coast Tour: Side Trip

The next part of our trip we had planned on going to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons. However, since our trip to Devil’s Tower resulted in us having a broken tent, we needed to get that fixed. Thankfully we had gotten our tent at REI and we have a membership, so that means lifetime warranty on anything we purchase from them! We were in the middle of nowhere, pretty much, and the nearest REI was 6 hours away…in the wrong direction from Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. So, we made some adjustments and headed towards Bozeman, Montana.

I had never been to Montana and I was quickly taken in by the beauty that can be found there! We spent the night in Bozeman and got our tent replaced the next day with one that can stand up to wind! We had fun setting up all kinds of tents in the store to see what would work best for us, since the last tent obviously didn’t really work so well!

Later that day we took off towards Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. We stopped at a campground on the side of the road that night, which was a little strange but beautiful. Then the next morning we packed up and made it to Coeur d’ Alene and found a campsite towards the south end of the lake were we camped for 3 nights. It was so nice being here because we definitely needed some rest before meeting up with the Jesus Kitchen team and heading into the Gathering. This time was great because it was a little cold and rainy which made staying in the tent and sleeping really nice!


After our time at Lake Coeur d’ Alene, we heading back to Missoula, Montana to wait for someone from our team to arrive at the airport. Once she flew in we headed two hours north to a little town called Lakeside, where the YWAM Montana base is. We set up camp and waited for the rest of our team to arrive. While we waited we found a cheap place to get our kitty (we have now named her Gypsy) neutered, which was awesome because we didn’t want her going into heat at the Gathering! And while we waited we took a quick tour of Glacier National Park. Amazing! I wish we had had more time…days actually…to spend there. It was so beautiful. Words and pictures cannot describe the beauty of God’s creation in that place! Still as glass lakes, wild rivers gushing, mountains so tall that the tops were engulfed in foggy clouds, far away waterfalls cascading down the mountainsides and glaciers tucked into crevasses way up in the mountains…just to describe a few things. What can be more beautiful than all of those things in one place? It was a very magical place and I would love to return there someday.

West Coast Tour: Microburst, Anyone?

Do you know what a microburst is? According to Google it is: “A sudden, powerful, localized air current, esp. a downdraft.” Have you ever been stuck in one? Well, let me tell you I have never been in a scarier storm then being stuck in the middle of a microburst.

Here’s what happened: Ben and I were stuck in our pattern of camping one night in a place and moving on the next day and it had ended us up in Wyoming at Devil’s Tower. We were going to just stop by and see it but it was getting later in the day and decided to camp out in the park’s campground. We were walking around trying to find the site we wanted to set up in and we read a sign that said to be careful where you set your tent up because the large old trees that were there where known to fall over. The only thing was that the “large old trees” were everywhere and one could not set up anywhere and not be in a place that a tree could potentially land on if it were to fall over. So we picked a spot and I made sure to look up and not be directly under any leaning tree. As we began to set up, you could see that a storm was coming and that we should get set up quickly so that we wouldn’t have to do it in the rain. We were able to get our tent set up and all of our stuff in the tent just as the rain started to come. I am not sure on all the details of what happened next. I do know that it started to lightning and thunder very loud and I headed for the van. Then all of a sudden it started hailing and getting windy. The next thing I know, it’s very windy and Ben is still outside trying to make sure that our tent would be okay. Suddenly leaves and branches are going all over and the hail and rain is going through the air sideways. I see Ben start running for the van and he hopes in just as I see one of those “large old tree” fall over right in front of us. And then our pop-up tent gets ripped from the ground and is heading across the campground and then there goes our new tent, it crumpled then rolled into a ball and started to get blown away. I think at this time I was probably screaming and I assumed the very well known tornado drill position you learn all your life growing up in Minnesota. Our van was being rocked like crazy and a big branch came crashing down on the back of the van and Ben started up the engine and through it into reverse and we jumped over the branch and went zooming backwards till we were in the clear. This all took place in about 5-10 minutes. Then everything cleared up and the sun came out.

Crazy!

Our van plastered with leaves.


The tree that fell over. The pile of branches in the forground was where our van was.

Well we survived the microburst but our poor little pop-up tent was a crumpled mess of metal and canvas and our new tent that we had only used four times was also a mess. It turned out that because we had put a tarp inside of our tent, when our tent went rolling, everything got rolled up into the tarp, which kept all of our stuff dry. The tent itself, however, had a very bent pole. Bummer. Ben did the best he could, and worked at straitening our pole back out and we were able to get it functioning for the night. But this did end up sending us on a 6 hour detour to Montana to get our tent replaced. Thank the Lord we had gotten it at REI and had a lifetime warranty on it.



Despite our crazy storm in at Devils Tower, the rest of our time there was awesome. It is such a strange sight to see this big old tower looming up over you. And it’s just there, nothing around it and it is beautiful! We spent the rest of our evening hiking around the Tower and watching the sunset reflecting upon it.

West Coast Tour: South Dakota

When Ben and I left Minnesota we had about 10 days before we would meet up with the rest of our team. And the first place we headed towards was South Dakota. I had never been to South Dakota…can’t say that I really ever had the desire to. But it was on our way to the west and I had heard that the west side of this state was pretty. I was pleasantly surprised once I got there. South Dakota is beautiful once you get into it a ways and it is true that the west side, the Badlands and the Black Hills are very pretty. We pulled into the Badlands and spent one night there and the next day we hiked around and were amazed at how cool the Badlands are.

The next night we headed into the Black Hills where we stopped to see Mt. Rushmore and then stopped in a little park called Windy Cave. We spent the next day touring one of the largest expanding caves in the States and went on a search for wild buffalo…but never did find them.

By this time in our trip I was trying to get used to living out of a van, which is not always the easiest of things. And we were getting into a not so great pattern of setting up a tent each day and then packing up again in the morning and then driving to a new location. We had not planned our trip at all and wanted to see everything along the way, however, we were on the way to exhaustion because of all of our moving, setting up and tearing down. Even so, it was still fun to be out on an adventure and seeing some of the amazing creations that God had made.

West Coast Tour: Beginnings

So I haven’t written in awhile but instead of dwelling on that fact I will just get into it. Ben and I have been doing a West Coast Tour this summer and it has been quite the adventure I must say. There is too much to tell all at one time, so I figure I will give a synopsis of our summer in shorter blog posts. This is the first of let say a few. : )

Beginnings:

We had spent the spring down south doing our regular tour of Gatherings and work. It was a very busy spring but we ended up back in Minneapolis for the month of May. It was also busy with work and visiting people. While we were out traveling our team was trying to decide if we would spend the summer on the west coast since the National Gathering was going to be in Washington. I felt like the Lord spoke to me and told me that Ben and I were to go west and to not worry about money. Ha! Easier said than done! So we worked a lot and very hard while we had the opportunity to and saved. We sold our little truck and bought a mini-van and on June 10th we packed it up and hit the road, just the two of us heading due west.

Traveling Companions:

Traveling companions are always nice to have…for awhile at least! While we were in Minneapolis our RV was parked at my parent’s house. A few days before we set out on our adventure I would walk outside at night to go to the RV and I would see a little cat go running across the yard and into the woods. I started putting food out for it, but it would only come around at night after dark. Finally, one day the cat came out during the day and stayed around. She was very dirty and kinda ragged. Ben and I had compassion on her and brought her in, gave her a bath, gave her a cat box to see if she would use it, then put her in the car the next day with us and headed west. It is interesting traveling with a cat. She is very loving and does okay in the car…however we were soon to discover that she does not play well with others…animals that is. She may be cute and somewhat cuddly with humans but once she is around other animals she turns into a killer. She has had three fights to date and we have had her for two months. And there’s no backing down for this cat…she is crazy! We haven’t really named our cat…it changes all of the time. Here are some of the options: Meow, Kitty-witty, Meowzerton, Kitty-meow, Stinky, Stinkerton, Skunkie, Missy Moo, Lola and Zuie. It is kind of like a choose your own adventure…but it’s with a name.

Before and After

This summer Ben and I did some revamping on our RV. We gutted out the inside and redid the floors, repainted the walls, added some tile work, created a new bench seat (with storage in it) and added some shelves and cupboards. It's soooo much better than it was and I wanted to show some before and after pictures.


Looking towards the back of the RV (notice the ugly carpet)...before...


....and after. Good-bye ugly carpet!!!


This is looking at the kitchen area...before...


...and after. The big cupboard that's above the stove was where our microwave used to be, but we pulled it out so we could use the space more practically.


Again...and after picture. Notice the tiling that Ben did on the wall : )


Looking towards the front of the RV...before...


...and after.


Our new bench couch. We have storage inside and put the old cushions on top to create a comfy seat.


One more to just show the new wall color in the living room/dining room.

It was a lot of work, but so worth it! We are still currently in Massachusetts. We are planning to leave this Friday and work our way slowly down to Alabama.

Much love,
Ben and Teresa