Part 1 "That Day"

Recently Diane and I were given two large gifts. These gifts allowed us to escape from work, from our day to day routines, to recover from disappointment and hurt, to be refreshed. These gifts allowed us to spend time with many friends, including our closest ones, to learn new things, and to have a whole lot of fun in the process.

These two gifts were tied together by time, distance, and a long black ribbon.

Sometimes a black ribbon is a sign of mourning.

On December thirty first of this last year, Diane and I signed an agreement to provide an exclusive option to sell my business. We set a cash price for the purchase and a date for that option to be exercised.

We agreed that I would spend the next six months training the buyer’s personnel to look after my customers and their equipment.

So for the next six months we took very few trips in our coach. We had a couple of weekend campouts with our FMCA chapter and in May we took a weeklong trip to the Blue Ridge for a Parker Family Reunion. By this time all looked well for me to retire and the new company to take over. Diane and I promised to travel to Florida to see our daughter and to pick up the grand boys for a few days so she and her husband could take a cruise together. We also made other travel plans as well.

I guess you could say that with only a couple of weeks to go before the closing that we could now start to count our chickens….we could look forward to retiring after twenty three years of being self-employed.

We planned to sell the house and live full time in our coach. We started downsizing, making plans to sell some things, and give lots of things away.

The day before the closing, actually about eleven hours before, the other company killed the deal. They did not want to spend the cash, they would only purchase if I loaned them the money at terms totally acceptable to them.

I refused to do that. I had no other choice. I could not loan them my financial future.

Just like that our dream for retirement vanished.

Diane said it felt like she was a bride left standing at the altar.

That analogy seemed to sum it up pretty well.

We mourned for the life that we thought was about to start.

I was not devastated, not completely anyway, because being the pessimist that I am, I told myself right from the beginning that something could happen that might stop this deal and I should have a backup plan. I needed a way to keep going even though I was tired and worn out from the long term responsibility of running my own business.

The first thing I did after the air came out of the balloon, was to contact my customers and inform them I was not retiring, which they had no problem with. One of the ladies I work with when hearing the news said "Thank God! I was praying you wouldn't leave us."

I suppose I could have responded with "well, at least God answered someone's prayer." But I didn't.

Actually contacting my customers was the second thing I did.

The first was I prayed to God to give me the wisdom and the courage to keep going for as long as I needed to.

God answered two prayers.

I wisely rebuilt my company website. I also created a company Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus Page. I updated my oldest field test and office equipment. I attended out of town training classes in order to be certified to sell and service Vertical's new telephone equipment. I did things that the other company should have done in order to become successful at their new venture.

In essence I sold my company to myself.

I rebooted and it worked. I received plenty of work. I did not take a day off, except for a couple of Sundays, for the next two months.

Just after Labor Day, things began to slow down. That was a good thing because that gave Diane and I time to plan to take the one trip that we refused to cancel after “that day”, as she and I refer to it, happened.

We were not going to miss the GEAR rally in Asheville, North Carolina. We had not attended a GEAR rally in three or four years. This one looked so good that six months earlier we had paid for the trip. We planned on arriving early as volunteers and extending our visit to Asheville by a few days simply because we love the area so much.

The trip to Asheville became present number one.

On a sunny, pretty Friday in late September, Diane and I loaded up the coach for what we hoped would be a quiet two week trip to the gentle Blue Ridge Mountains. It was one of those unseasonably warm days that can fool you into thinking short sleeves is all you need, but we knew better so we carried clothes out to the coach that covered three seasons. I find that golfing shirts work well for all occasions.

We left the next morning around ten thirty with the intent to drive to a point mid-way between Portsmouth and Asheville. Our target was the appropriately named Mid-Way campground and RV Park located just off I-40 near Statesville, NC. We planned to stay there for two nights and do absolutely nothing for the only full day we were there.

Our trip down was uneventful other than the fact that I could not get our generator to start when parked for lunch. Diane wanted to use the microwave and I flooded the genny when I held the starter down for too long. Diane settled for a cold tuna fish sandwich instead of the hot chicken patty she had hoped to eat.

We arrived at Mid-Way just after three. The office parked us parallel between a hill and a, what you could call a small lake or large duck pond. There was a fountain in the middle to keep the water moving and a lot of baby ducks were floating along like one of those carnival duck games. It was very peaceful and quiet. The phone never rang once the whole time we were on the road, well if it did it was family calling, not customers.

It was easy to park the coach on our spot. It was not so easy to level it. I used about twenty of my many Lynx blocks under the wheels and the jacks to get it level, but in the end I prevailed.

I tested the generator and it started without a hitch. That was a relief.

Saturday I washed the coach roof after climbing up there to see if a limb that fell off the oak tree we were parked under had done any damage. It had not, but my new slide out toppers were filthy from pine needles and road dirt. We were not supposed to use a large amount of water but I could not let it go, so I carried a few five gallon buckets of water, one at a time of course, to the roof to wash it.

Just as I was about to finish, Diane said “how are you going to rinse all the soap off?”

Just then it started to rain.

“I think God is taking care of that for me!” was my response.

Sunday morning I climbed up on the roof again to remove the many acorns that were laying on the toppers. I didn’t want them jamming up the works when I retracted the slide outs back in. We soon pulled out and had some excitement when making a very tight turn uphill between trees on the left and a drainage ditch on the right. It can be fun taking a forty foot coach around a thirty foot curve.

Diane kept saying I was getting too close to the edge and I told her hang on because I had to get the tailpipe past a tree, which I did successfully.

In just a few minutes we were back on I-40 heading west. It was only a couple of hours later that the mountains started getting larger and larger in the front window. We stopped for gas and filled the tank. We added the weight of a full gas tank to the weight of a full water tank. The hardest climb was still ahead of us…so much for getting good gas mileage. I was confident that our UFO coach would make it up the mountain regardless of all our liquid cargo.

About noon we arrived at the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center. Now this is the only time when things went a bit array. We took the wrong turn at a fork in the road so to speak. We turned left when we should have gone straight. We ended up on a very twisty one and a half lane road with no place to make a u turn. Diane is on the phone with Andy our chapter president, who was already at the venue, and he is telling us to turn around, Diane is relaying this message and I am saying, none too kindly, that I cannot do it…..yet. My fear was that I might not be able to do it at all. I hate being lost, especially when driving the coach. I wasn't actually lost but you know what I mean.

We finally came out of the woods to a major intersection and I found a place to reverse our route. We made it to gate seven and with a little guidance from Andy and a couple of other chapter members we parked our coach. I needed to use quite a few Lynx blocks again but I had no trouble with that considering the rehearsal I had a couple of days earlier.

Our good friends Gary and Janis, who should have arrived after us, were already parked due to the fact that Gary did not make the same wrong turn that I did. I was not the only one who made that mistake however.

The next day there were volunteers directing traffic. Good thing too.

It was absolutely beautiful in Asheville. Being parked on a large parking lot was not bad at all. We had full hookups which included fifty amp service. Gary and I shared a sewer connection but that presented no problem at all. The only question was what to do with all the water I was hauling and no longer needed. I figured at some point during the coming week I would just use the water pump and dump it down the sewer.

That first afternoon we registered our coach, one of some four hundred that would attend the rally, plus vendors, and we made some plans for later that day.

Gary, Janis, Diane and our good friend Jerry, decided to make, what for us is a pilgrimage, to the Moose Café. This great eatery is located next to the Asheville farmer’s market just around the corner from the Biltmore Estate. We left around four thirty for what should have been a half hour drive. Due to an accident, which was flashing on my Verizon GPS, it took an hour and a half. I told our three companions, who had never eaten at the Moose Café that it was worth the longer drive. It was.

Most of us had the smoked pork chops, which came with the largest buttermilk biscuits you have ever seen. They have great country side dishes, all freshly made from ingredients that come from the farmer’s market next door. The meal was really good. I finished mine off with fresh blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of that warm sticky berry stuff.

We covered a lot of subjects during dinner. We talked about the upcoming rally, the vendors and seminars we hoped to see and what we would do during our down time. We also talked about our non- retirement and I told them more details about what happened back in July.

Most of our friends and family already knew about it falling apart and many gave us their initial response of “It must be for the best”, or “It will work out for good”, or “it just isn't the right time.”

All of those responses are absolutely true, but I didn't always want to hear any of them. It just seemed like too simple a thing to say.

Our friend Jerry lost his wife almost the same day we lost our dream and that really put things into perspective for me. I watched him stay upbeat and cheerful with his friends even though he had lost Charlotte, his best friend in life. I figured that going into some dark place just because I couldn't retire and travel “right now” really wasn't the thing to do.

I still had a good life to live with my wife and best friend so I best get on living it.

We decided to do just that and while In Asheville we were going to have some fun.

Diane told everyone we planned on taking a white water trip while there. Gary and Janis had never done that before. Jerry had done it quite a few times. We asked ourselves, why not book a trip for the very next morning?

We found some flyers in the information stand in front of the café and later that night, after a stop at Wal-Mart for tooth paste and other things I needed, I hopped online and started looking to book five people for a trip down the French Broad River early in the morning.

I didn't have much luck. The season was over for most of the rafting companies and some sites would not take a booking our size. I would have to wait until morning and make some calls.

The next morning at eight ten am, I contacted the Blue Heron Rafting Company. I asked them if they could squeeze in five people and they say sure, if we could be there around nine fifteen. Wow, that did not give us a lot of time to make our way forty-five miles the other side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, but we said we would get there. They said they would wait for us as long as they could.

We quickly packed changes of clothes, water, snacks and people in Gary’s car and took off like a bat out of you know where.