Stock Family Trip : Life is what happens to you...

After nearly 500 entries in our blog, this is our first post, not in sequential order. This entry marks a stark transition in our U.S. road trip to find a new city to live. Since coming back to the states three months ago we have felt, for the lack of a better word, homeless. The purpose of this road trip was two fold, find a new community to call home and a business that we would like to run.

We have driven far and wide, covering many thousands of miles over the last 3 months. We had the awesome pleasure of combining sightseeing along the way, to break up the drive. Still, we didn't have a home, and still most of the places didn't fit. Do you remember what it was like to date? Right person, wrong time, or visa versa or something just didn't click. Imagine dating family-style, where each person is giving input? Though it has been tough on us at times, we are getting closer to the perfect match, where everyone gets something that they want. Once we started to coalesce on an area, our drive then focused on narrow belt in New Mexico and Colorado

While driving east on interstate 10, in New Mexico, a fast moving dark cloud approached the highway. Vehicles pulled over and parked or, like us, were in the process of parking. Golf ball size rain drops started pummeling us and in quick order hail, the size of pepper corns started to ping on the windows our roof. Darkness came quickly and then it was impossible to see anything outside of our windows. Our visibility was 100% gone, we couldn't even see the reflection of our headlights on the clouds. The truck started to shake violently, and my daughters and wife screamed as loud as they could in total panic. We felt weightless for a moment and then a sudden jerking pull on the truck. The girls were screaming and talking so fast with each other about what just happened. Elise shouted, "The trailer flipped" though we still could not see anything outside.

The blackness quickly broke and the sky turned into the normal dark and grey rainy day that we all know. We had no idea that our truck was still suspended in the air by our load stabilizing bar and chain, which was still connected to the trailer. We were all stunned and my wife and girls were sobbing. The rain was pouring, and through the drops we saw that another RV had been thrown 20 feet off the road and had flipped. I jumped out of my dangling truck to see if the occupants were all right. Many good people joined in the effort to free the two trapped older people and their son. The rain continued to come down in buckets. Once we freed the passengers in the RV, I started to get hypothermia and had to climb back up into my dangling truck and turn on the heater. The kids and Elise were going between frantic rapid talking and deeply emotional crying. They stayed in the truck because of the rain and the fact that we were blocking half of the interstate.

Once the rain stopped my family hopped out of the truck so that we could assess our damages a little better. Our trailer's back end was picked up by the wind and moved 25 to 30 feet and crashed on it's side. Since we were still connected to the trailer our eastbound facing truck was yanked and ended up pointing northward after it was all over. The police and other first responders said this was the best accident they saw all year, citing how most end with major injuries or worse. In fact, it was the highway accident unit, officer that let us know that both vehicles were lifted and fell over and gave us the measurements. The other RV was a class C and weighed 25,000 lbs. and is also a total loss.

We are so fortunate that we had all of our animals in our truck at the time of the accident. As luck would have it, we brought the cats into the truck in Tucson, AZ. because the heat was getting to a point where the cats would be uncomfortable in the trailer, without AC. That simple act probably saved our cats lives. Otherwise this would have been a devastating outcome for my kids and a heart wrenching post to write about losing best friends. Life is so much more precious and irreplaceable and we mustn't ever forget that.

Moments like this serve as punctuation points in life.

Good Samaritans helping trapped people.

That queasy floating feeling.

We blocked interstate 10 for more than 2 hours.

After the rain stopped the kids got out of the truck to inspect the damage.

As John Lennon aptly wrote in his song, Beautiful Boy, "Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans." As a family, we are intently and earnestly trying to find a place where all can be happy. Who can predict that this would happen? However, happen it can and it did.

We are an extremely close family where all is out on the table all of the time. I know my daughters benefit from seeing unfiltered reality but sometimes it cuts too close to the bone. My daughters have given up so many favorites and yet are still happy. Favorite toys, favorite shirts, and favorite friends have all been lost. As parents, Elise and I feel guilty about their sacrifices and yet our daughters are thriving, proving that there is a mismatch between our expectations and what truly makes children happy. We have come to realize that kids need love and attention above all, period. Thankfully, we can give that to them in abundance.

Tragedy can strike any household but the response to it is what starts the healing process or delays it. For us, sadly, we are all too familiar with loss after losing our home to wildfires in 2011, and after that leaving our relatively new belongings in 2015 for a chance at living a dream, in Latin America. Honestly speaking, loss is loss, whether it burns or floods or deemed a total loss due to an accident, it's gone and the contents deeply missed.

Learning to let go is crucial to a happy life and though we don't want to admit it, everything is temporal. Loss is the most important lesson I want my daughters to learn after love. Loss can teach us so much about what is really important, that is, if we listen to our hearts. My children have taken losing their home, yet again, with stride and acceptance, though it has been tough.

For you parents out there, imagine going into your child's room with a big bucket of sewage water and splash it at random (computer is not off limits). Just splash the bucket of dirty water in your child's room and then say with conviction, that they can only keep half of what they own and only have an hour to decide. My daughters were given that same ultimatum, not because we don't love them, but because their world shrunk from a 250 square foot mobile tiny house on wheels to a 32 square foot truck bed. Some of the stuff was filthy yet contained such sentimental value that we had to salvage it. Items that were financially valuable but not sentimental were separated in the "Maybe, if we have enough room" pile. Perfectly good items and food were rejected because we did not have enough space to move them. We did not even consider a U-Haul trailer because we have no home to move the stuff to. Where do we haul this stuff? The freedom of our situation sometimes bears a weight that is too difficult to describe.

Zoe said, "Dad, I don't want all of this stuff to go to the dump, we should donate it!" In our time of tremendous loss and uncertainty my daughter thought of others. I was so touched, because moving on initially starts in the form of letting go. She offered us a bridge, a bridge of common sense. To us, the kitchen supplies, bicycles, toys, and countless personal objects still meant something to us, so giving them away was both emotional and cathartic. Our items that we gave away were less than 3 months old and were bought with intention, after all we are settling down again.

Our truck loads of donations were eventually made to a transitional living non profit that helps integrate people back to self sufficiency. I am certain that the circle of life has our happy faces somewhere on that big sphere of love. Either, way we were happy to help because as Zoe said, "It's the right thing to do."

What remains for us are precious items that we brought from Nicaragua, mementos from a simpler time. As we embark on this journey for a new home we laugh plenty, are bewildered often, and cry both tears of sorrow and joy frequently. We are living without walls, without stuff and without regret. We just want a place to call home, a place that means something to our souls. Is that too much to ask?

We are lucky we did not end up like the car next to us. Though the damage does not look horrible from afar, when you get close the damage is unending.

Everything flew and leaked inside the RV.

Cleaning out the RV at the salvage yard the next day.

Sierra and Zoe tried gathering their most prized processions. It was heartbreaking listening to them explain the sentimental value of each object that was damaged by the rain or sewage.