Greetings and salutation from the highways and roads of North Carolina! Who knows when this will be posted, as always. I’ve been near DSL for a day and a half, but it’s always hard to collect my thoughts with a flurry of activity distracting me.

I’ll start our weekend story on Saturday when we visited the nursing home last minute in Raleigh, NC. The Lord brings me such blessing and encouragement through these elderly folks. I thoroughly enjoying singing for them! No one is quite sure what to expect from us and by the time we’re done they want to lock the doors, which is quite funny since most of the doors out are locked already. :-D

Sunday morning was interesting! We visited a family integrated church. All the children stay for the service and they don’t have youth group or Sunday school. We led a few hymns for them and had lunch with them after. The concert was after lunch.

I do believe we have groupies. Some of you aren’t shocked, I’m sure. But, can you imagine waking up at 4:00am (on the day you spring ahead?!) and driving 4 hours just to hear us sing? That is exactly what the T family did! I hope some of them were able to sleep a little on the way home!



The Lord bless you guys!

There were lots of families at this church, many with young children . We had a BIG line outside the bus waiting for the 10 cent tour after the concert!

The H family said they read a little of our blogs before we came.





The J family invited us home for supper and fellowship afterward. We arrived at their house and we were concerned about their narrow driveway with culverts on either side, a mail box and trees. Oooo. I don’t like digging and tow trucks. *cough* We did make it in and we’re so glad! We enjoyed food, fellowship, games, and conversation on Sunday afternoon, Monday and Tuesday morning!

Oh and we went shopping. : ) Have you ever had your picture taken in the produce department? You should try it sometime! I like the pictures their camera takes so I decided to blog their copy.



Peter tried on Caleb’s armor and crusader costume…





We taught them Dutch Blitz, showed them our commercial collection. :-D And, of course, we introduced them to Pat Hetic. ;-)

We watched Left Behind 3 with them. There was more violence in this one but I thought it was good anyway. The line ‘that’s not humanly possible, is it?’ was great! Yes, the enemy is powerful but ‘greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.’ It’s true the Lord has allows persecution of the saints, but he also miraculously protected and preserved the lives of those who serve him. As I’ve heard from two places recently, (paraphrased), ‘you’re immortal till God calls your number.’ The movie also reminded me that America will to play the very small role in the world wide scheme of things when it’s a global community. Yes, it’s coming but not a pleasant thing to think about. The encouraging thing is our security is not in America’s borders or being an American, but trusting in God.

Bonnie said I might post pictures of our little tire adventure….



You can see Vincent has already bent the fender back in this picture. PTL for his protection!

And, another little amazing incident I should tell you all about…..God sure knows where we are and what He’s doing. He indeed guides our steps and stops!

We’re driving along on the highway and dad asks mom if she wants to stop at Wal-Mart off the next exit.

‘Sure’, she says half heartedly, ‘let’s live it up’.

Lol. It wasn’t like we were all excited about this stop and it wasn’t planned. Though we do stop at Wal-Marts frequently.

We arrive and Mom goes in. Bonnie, Hannah, and I are getting ready to go in. We’re still waiting on Hannah to put on her socks when Papa exits the bus and starts walking around it. All of a sudden I catch a glimpse from the bus window of a white haired elderly woman throwing her arms around my grandfather as she exclaims, “I know you! You’re from my home town!!!!”

It took me about 2 seconds to figure out who this affectionate woman was!

Before we left on this trip Mrs. C wanted us to go visit Mrs. G in Florida. She’s the mother of our former neighbor and mutual friend of Mrs. C. We had lost touch with her but Mrs. C hadn’t and Mrs. C thought she knew what town she lived in. Turns out the town Mrs. C gave us was not on the map and we giving up visiting Mrs. G. Kinda hard to visit someone in a non-existent town!

‘Mrs. G is outside!’ I exclaimed to the rest of the family who had missed the hugging episode.

The community she lives in just happens to shop at Wal-Mart on Wednesday mornings, she just happened to see our bus in the parking lot, and we just happened to be in the parking lot! Of course, we know there are no coincidences!! The Lord knew she needed our encouragement and he guided our steps.

She was just THRILLED to see us. She said we ’spoke her language!’ lol We gave her a cd and Lord willing we’re going to sing for her retirement home next year. Isn’t it cool how the Lord works? : )

Mrs. G, Mom and Yours Truly.



Also, while we stopped Vincent saw some homeless guys and he and Peter talked with them and gave them Bibles. May the Lord bless the seeds that are planted on this trip.

Our time in Jacksonville, FL was great! The church had wifi. : D That was nice. This update wasn’t written, hence I didn’t post.

We got to spend a little time with our friends, the D family.



They came early to visit and stayed for the concert. And, speaking of the concert, it went very well! We’ve been there three times in the past three years.



Before we started the pastor said,

“I’m sure they will be telling you more about their trip”

and I’m thinking uh oh, now I’m gong to have say more than I planned! I ended up telling the septic tank and the Wal-Mart lady story. They were quite kind and knew when to laugh! Phew. That’s nice instead of dead silence!



Peter and Vincent outside looking for the connection last night. It was intermittent and kinda slow. I gain a new appreciation for being home with a constant wireless connection on every trip. I’m also seeing how nice life is without a constant connection! The net can be such a time waster and I’ve wasted more then my share.:(
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Hey, looks like we’re singing at a nursing home this afternoon. Last minute and sure beats sitting at the Wal-Mart parking lot!

A day late comes an update for all my faithful readers! Yeah, the WiFi at the rest area in Sunday was a non-event. Apparently the rest area vaporized and we never saw it because if we had seen it we would have stopped! We are in Mississppi, btw. After 6 weeks headed away from home we’re on the road back…it’s lovely to see us going the direction north and east. :-)

Ok, enough preliminaries.


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Place: Padre Island
Time: 8:03 PM [2003]
Date: March 1, 2007
Listening to: The Bach Album (Kathleen Battle and Itzhak Perlman)

Tonight the MacDonald family is resting comfortably on an island. I can’t say I expected to be here. : D I’d better back up just a little before I finish with today’s update.

First, remember I said nothing noteworthy happened in Houston the rest of the week that I needed to report? Well, Carol did a boo boo! :( Peter got a new mandolin! It’s sweet instrument and he’ll get much playing out of it. He passed his Kentucky to Matthew and Matthew passed his Kentucky to Nathan. I think we have happy campers all around. ;) We’re finally *cough cough* retiring the Fender with the pick up. YAY!!!!

Peter and his A9 just out of the store!



And, I mentioned we tried out a Nikon D80 in my last post. Peter and Vincent are now of the opinion my Minolta should be classified under ‘throw away camera.’ : p




We fooled around for about an hour and took 300 pictures. : D Yep. It’s pretty easy to do damage like that with it. Thankfully, you will only have to see a handful of them. ; )





I’m quoting Pat Hetic here. Kiwi is the word. : D
(If you have no clue what I’m talking about see Bonnie’s previous post.)


Mom and Dad.



Is that Peter taking MY picture!!?

Ok…I could go on for, um, a very long time with shots from that day but, I shall restrain myself due several factors

a. I have limited online photo storage
b. my time is limited at the WiFi
c. it would look odd to post all 300 pictures
d. my dial-up readers would disown me
e. the moon might turn into cheddar cheese of a very sharp flavor

*clears throat*

Moving on.

The picture of Bonnie with her hollandaise sauce at the Bailey‘s house!



One night last week we sang with the Bailey’s at a nursing home.





Joshua is 16, Nathan is 14 and Susanna is 12. I don’t know how old their mom is. :P I really enjoyed listening to them play and sing. Vincent is going to lay down, perhaps tomorrow, some banjo tracks for their new instrumental CD featuring three of their boys playing mandolin, guitar and bass. Bonnie and I contributing in the photography and graphic design department. I’m learning more about Corel and thinking how nice Photoshop would be. *remembers that’s on the ’to buy’ list*

We had some rousing games of foosball….



Though foosball is interesting I still prefer air hockey and basically because, I’m more likely to win. ;D

Our days with the Bailey’s came to a close on Tuesday morning. We headed south for a after school program in the afternoon. From the after school program we started our trek into ‘the valley’. “The valley” is basically the place Texans and other snowbirds winter. They have tons of RV parks and lots of people to sing to, so we were told. Dad thought we should go down and do personal cold calling. Turns out we had a very productive time visiting pastors, church, and RV parks! We should be all set for contacts next year! We’re about 10 miles or less from Mexico and it’s warm! It hit 80 and we had the AC on. This bus heats up fast with all these black windows! One of the last pastors we talked to told us about this island and gave us a name of the RV park.

We arrived at the park right in time to check in and have been here all day. I would like to say we had a wonderful time down near the water and while we did have a good time it wouldn’t be entirely true. The red warning flags were up for dangerous currents and the wind was ferocious. I took the camera down to the water the first time and didn’t snap more than two three pictures. I was afraid the sand would sandblast my lens. Hannah said ’I’ve had enough’ after about 15-20 minutes fighting with the blowing sand! The boys stayed out during most of the wind digging pits and wading. In the afternoon it calmed down a little and a few of us went walking up the beach. We saw a jellyfish with a pink design but I had left the camera in the bus.

The WiFi here is not the greatest. It’s extremely intermittent and you have to be on the sidewalk to make it work and even then it’s iffy and sometimes VERY slow, like 1.0 and 2.0 mbps slow. So, this won’t get posted until we get to somewhere a little more stable.

And, lol, I almost forgot…pictures!

Daniel got buried later in the afternoon.



Washing off…and uh, swimming?



I took this picture from the from window in the bus early in the afternoon.



I know it’s hard to see but isn’t that a cool ship!?



Da beach.

The sand was soft, when it wasn’t being blown by the wind and the water was actually warm later in the afternoon. I think dad said it was 68 degrees f, much warmer then it ever gets in the north!

So in case anyone is wondering where this island is it’s pretty much the most southern tip of Texas. I checked a map and we’re almost the same latitude as the Keys. 8-) The water is so pretty, a beautiful aqua color in spots and a nice blue shade in the deeper areas. I was on the sidewalk getting WiFi on and off and enjoying seeing the sun set behind the palms and the gulf on the other side. God’s creation is marvelous!


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We’re at the studio right now. It’s a little building with ac. Yep, isn’t warm enough for ac. J

Vincent and Josh warming up respectively.





The CD will be done sometime in the next few months, we hope. We’re getting an autographed copy.
:-D
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Time: Sunday afternoon
Place: A road in Texas head northeast
Listening to: Bonnie picking and road noise (bumps in the road!)

We left the Bailey’s house for yet another year this morning. We spent Saturday at their house and Bonnie made pizza! We haven’t made pizza since we left 6 weeks ago. It sure tasted good.



Hannah and Susanna’s new puppy, Alex, got along quite well. We took it on a walk and ended up carrying her around. : p But, she was sooo cute, when she wasn’t biting us. LOL


The Baileys.

We sang this morning and now we’re headed outta Texas!! Looks like the WiFi I thought we might have this afternoon isn’t going to materialize! I’ll post this when I can.

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And that brings us to today. It’s lovely weather again and home is just three weeks away! Those four letters sound so sweet.

I was taking a look at my counter this morning. It says I had 73 hits on Friday, 35 on Saturday and 15 on Monday. If I keep up my current updating habits I might lose my readership completely!!! : D BTW, xanga is blocked from this computer and that’s why I’m not updating there as well. I’m on a dial-up connection so we don’t have time for pictures today. : ( Sorry!

We’re in Texas, still. We have one more week before our commitments here are fulfilled. I don’t want to hurt feelings but, the weather has been gorgeous! I mean really, really nice. It feels like June!

We sang twice yesterday. YAY! It’s good to be singing again. Sometimes the Lord uses your music to minister to others and sometimes YOU end up with the blessing. This happened Sunday morning for me. Sure, I get blessed singing but this was unlike any other time I can remember. I was overwhelmed at God’s graciousness to me and the precious gift of His Son. “I once was blind, but now I see.” Even through tears it’s not hard to see the most important things.

The Bailey family has been hosting us here in Victoria. The boys (and girls!) have had sooo much fun playing foosball, picking, playing games and hanging out with the Bailey children. We are going to MISS them! We (Bonnie and I) made Eggs Benedict complete with hollandaise sauce this morning for 14 people. Bonnie was self-appointed sauce maker and she did a GREAT job. Mr. F couldn’t have done it better. ; ) I have pics and stuff and there is more to the story…including a broken thermometer!! But, Bonnie did ‘right good’ as they might say here in Texas. : )

Yeah, and in the rest of last week not much happened that has to be posted ASAP. (I was able to try a Nikon D80. *faints* BUT, that's another blog for another time. ;)) We left the hanger and dropped our hosts off at the airport. *sniff* I hope they are having a great trip.

Anyway, sorry about the reeeally late post. Sometime on Sunday we should be near a WiFi spot if everything goes as planned. Maybe some pictures then? Hopefully.

I must have started this post 4 or 5 times. Nothing sounded good for an opening statement. : P

I’ll start with Thursday night…. (That sounds SO orginal...*rolleyes*)

We had the Pederson’s over….you can find some of there blogs here, here, and here. :-) We had a nice time of fellowship over spaghetti and meatballs. Afterward we had a jam. And, it had nothing to do with traffic though in the house it was slightly crowded with 21 people. ;-)

Katie, Anna, and Bonnie.



We had fun being with you guys! Thanks for coming!

On Friday night we went to a play, a musical actually. Now, I had been to one other musical play in the recent past and it wasn’t good. Bonnie and I had to stifle laugher almost constantly. This play was MUCH better. It was fun to see some of the people we knew in the ‘star’ roles. ;-) Mom had a really bad headache, which she’d been struggling all day with, but she managed to come with us anyway.



It was about the life of Pocahontas, hence there were a lot of folks dressed up like, um, Indians! The lighting was horrible and I couldn’t use a flash. (Although, it went off accidentally once. Vincent who was sitting next to me nearly died of embarrassment, I almost did, too actually. :-P)
I fooled with the shutter speed and got very few keepers, but I thought this was a good learning experience anyway. Low lighting is hard.





The company (several families of 8) invited by our host family all canceled out for the Saturday cookout. : ( We had a good time anyway with Mrs. F’s people from work, who spoke Spanish (and English)! We did have quite a bit of leftover food though..:-P

I don’t have any pictures of Saturday since, um, well, I didn’t feel like taking any. I don’t know what’s come over me. My shutter bug disease must be in remission. :-P JK! Mrs. F got some, I haven’t asked her for them yet.

Sunday, oh wow, that’s today! We had a great time over in El Campo. One of the other groups had a sick person so they canceled. The other group was the BAILEY FAMILY! We’re so excited about spending a week and a half with them. They are super good at pickn’!



We did a full concert and it was taped. So, now we get to look at it and cringe over ourselves, at least I can. :-P LOL.





My favorite picture of Vincent…



We have just five weeks and possibly one day until we return home to the great white north, which we hope isn't so white when we return!

What have we been up to in Texas you might ask? Well, the short of it is, we’re not doing much, at least as far as singing goes. We’ve done one concert in 6 days and we don’t have another until Sunday. Some of us have mixed feelings about all this ‘down time’ but it might be just what we need to be refreshed for our next batch of concerts.

For those who are wondering, Victor (dad) is about the same. Thanks for all your prayers for him.

We took a great boat ride in the Houston Port on Saturday with our friends…


Bonnie’s at the very end with her silver video camera.



Hannah girl!

Matthew contemplating his life, or the ceiling.



It was loads of fun since we’ve never been on a boat ride like this! (Edit: I lied, some of us, not all of us, did ride a boat on the Wisconsin Dells. I was just about to turn 7 at the time.) Edit AGAIN: mom said I didn't lie, I just forgot and that this ride was different. *sigh*

After we returned we celebrated mom’s birthday…



Happy (late) Birthday Mom!

Papa’s birthday was just the day before…but I haven't uploaded the picture I wanted to post here! :( Anyway, Happy Belated Birthday Papa!

The concert went fine on Sunday…I did forget to bring the camera though!

Hannah, considering just how many faces she could get away with...
(I won’t show you the other ones she made!!)



Just about a year ago we sang in the same spot.



Sunday morning pictures are brought to you by our host family (who remembered to bring their camera!)

My neck was totally cramped from the night before and I sang some, uh, bad notes...*sigh* It was hilarious after the fact. LOL.

Here’s Bonnie Jean, the yodeling queen.



The clouds, until just yesterday, seemed to have taken permanent residence over our bus. It was sooo nice to see some blue sky this morning, even if it was brief. We’re back to partly cloudy…yay. Oh, wait, the sun is peaking out!! I shouldn't even mention the weather since I know people back home are dealing with snow, rain and soon to be frigid temps. I'd better stop talking now. :-D

Till next time. :-)

We have arrived in Texas! Yay! It’s cool and cloudy right now and we’re scheduled to go on a boat ride this afternoon. Can anyone say ‘bring your coat??’ : P

So, anyway, this post is about this past week starting on Tuesday….

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We visited Dinosaur Adventure Land (DAL, http://www.dinosauradventureland.com/) on Tuesday. They were closed but our friend Kevan came over to show us around.

Bonnie got timed on the ‘new’ trail, the Tri-Angle Tangle and broke a record!!!





She acquired some scrapes and bruises but it didn’t keep her from smiling about her victory!



Vincent’s record stood from last time. :-)



Keven told us the story he’s writing. It was really quite good. It takes fictional characters, characters from the Bible and interweaves dinosaurs with it. He’s a wonderful story teller! He does have a lot of puns though…lol. He knows so much history, and talked for hours with us about many famous and some not so famous people he keeps in his wallets. He must have at least three, all filled with pictures of people in history.

Anyway…here is Kevan holding the hairless rat, which is a mutation, btw.



John and his son came down to see us before we left.



Goodbye DAL, for now!

We crossed the state line and entered Alabama, the beautiful! (Yes, that is the state motto thingy.)

We arrived at the church Wednesday afternoon and promptly broke the cover to their septic tank. Umm..yeah. Not good!





Nathan, be careful!

The concert went fine. I was so relaxed it almost wasn’t funny. They had a very good turn out considering how last minute this was. Vincent decided he didn’t want to sing earlier that morning because his sore throat was so bad. Thankfully, Peter and Bonnie were able to help with his part and he ended up singing some anyway. ; )