Visiting Family and Friends-Dakota Trip

Today is June 13, 2010, but before we left Potter Valley, California, the end of March, there were quite a few threads dangling. Since then, we’ve worked through the tangles and snipped off the knots. God is good.

The end of March seems a long time ago, not just a couple of months. We drove safely to our camp host position east of Salem, Oregon, but dodged rain storms to get here. We left Potter Valley ahead of one storm. Waited four hours for another to get ahead of us so that we weren’t driving in snow between Redding, CA and Eugene, OR. Then once we got to Fishermen’s Bend Campground we had to park in the main parking lot for two days while another storm blew threw. The BLM didn’t want us to be parked in our site because of the danger of falling trees. I don’t think we lost any sleep because of any of this. God is in control and we rest upon that. If we are to rest upon the Lord and trust in Him, that means just that.

The campground took a beating over the winter months and the newest storms just put another layer down over the rest. I’ve never seen so many pine branches & needles in wet piles. (I’d never seen such a moldy mess in the jeep before either. We’d left it at the campground over the winter while we went to Potter Valley.) While we cleaned the camp ground and worked on getting the jeep running, the storms kept coming through and the snow kept piling up through April in the upper Cascades and deep in the Rockies. We had to wait until Thursday, April 22nd to travel due to road conditions in the higher elevations. We left the 37 ft. Winnebago, the jeep and the tool trailer behind when we headed east with just the truck camper. We were going to the Hard Hats for Christ conference in Colorado and then onto South Dakota.

We drove with a powerful tail wind from Mill City, Oregon, east to Mountain Home, Idaho and stayed the night in a Wal-Mart. I slept like a baby but Lou told me in the morning that during the night, there were wind gusts that made him think we were going to blow over. We had parked with our tail to the wind, too.
The next day we made it to Rifle, WY and shared a Wal-Mart parking lot with many semi-trucks not willing to brave Vail Pass in a snow storm. There was blue sky in the morning and several cars along the interstate that the snow plows had pushed ridges of snow up to and around. That’s what happens when you can’t keep moving and the snow plows can during a snow storm.

We arrived at Camp Id-Ra-Ha-Je (I’d Rather Have Jesus) near Bailey, Colorado on Sunday afternoon with just one problem. We had stopped at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and relaxed for three hours in the large hot spring pool and I didn’t bother to put one drop of sun screen on me. Blue sky, no cloud cover (47 deg outside air temp) but I thought if I stayed in the water up to my chin that I didn’t have to worry about sunburn. Wrong. So we arrived at the Hard Hats for Christ conference safely but with the worst sunburn I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t give any hugs and I didn’t let too many hug me for two weeks.

The Hard Hats conference was filled with things to do from 7am to 9pm for the next week. The men worked on several projects. Lou’s part was helping with building a new snack shop next to the dining hall in Mountain Village. The gals plunged into sewing ten 10 foot long banners, quilted with batting, in five different colors. These were needed as noise dampeners in one of the auditoriums. It was a lot of sewing. I have to say I had fun helping do it. I’ve posted a web album with pictures of that conference if you’d like to see the action. Click here: Picasa Web Albums - Kathy - HH4C April Conf

The day after the conference was over; we attended a banquet in Golden, Colorado, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Hard Hats for Christ. There are pictures posted of that gathering online at:Picasa Web Albums - Kathy - Hard Hats Ban...

Jim Hodges founded this organization in 1970. So much has been accomplished through those years and so many volunteers have been a part of it that it required two banquets so that all that wanted to, could attend. The 2nd banquet will be October 2, 2010 in Longview, Washington. If you are interested and want more information, simply email information@hh4c.org.

We received sad news while we were in Colorado that two of my first cousins had their husbands pass away within 24 hours of one another. Two different nursing homes in two different towns but both in South Dakota. We were able to attend the funeral for Marvin Oligmeuller in Miller, South Dakota, on Tuesday, May 4th. It was a gathering to celebrate Marvin’s life and that enabled us to visit many other relatives we would not have been able to see otherwise.

We planned on being in South Dakota before we learned of the funeral. One of the main reasons for this trip was to renew our South Dakota driver’s licenses there. We didn’t realize that we’d need more documents to qualify for the SD license now than we would need to get passports. At least for me, that was true. To get a passport I just needed a current driver’s license, non-laminated social security card, a state certified original birth certificate, passport photo and about $100. BUT to get a SD DL, I needed my social security card and either a passport or a state certified birth certificate (showing my maiden name) and a state certified marriage certificate FOR EACH time I was married in order to prove my name from birth to present.

Lou has always had a City of Chicago original, certified, birth certificate but he has never bothered to get a State of Illinois original, certified, birth certificate. SD didn’t consider the City of Chicago original valid. They required a State of Illinois one. He didn’t have his social security card either (lost it as a teenager) and SD would not consider his Medicare card, voting card, 1099 or 1040 (all of which we had along) as documentation. That meant that we had a major problem.

Lou’s DL expired in March and he was driving on a one-time-only extension issued by the SD DMV that was going to expire May 15th. He couldn’t get a social security card at the Federal building in Huron, SD, without a CURRENT driver’s license. He couldn’t get a driver’s license without a social security card and he couldn’t get a birth certificate out of Illinois without a driver’s license. (I think I have that straight.)
He couldn’t get a birth certificate out of Illinois in less than two weeks anyway and today was May 4th. His license would expire on May 15th and South Dakota DMV wouldn’t give him another extension.

So we left the building without either of us getting a renewed SD DL. We had quite a bit to think about and I have to admit that we didn’t get much “rest”. We were back at it the next morning and our sole hope was to get Lou’s City of Chicago birth certificate acknowledged and accepted by the SD DMV. It took prayer before we presented our case. (We didn’t have one yesterday. We were too stunned.) This time the gal behind the counter faxed a copy of Lou’s City of Chicago birth certificate to her supervisor in Sioux Falls and he agreed to allow us to use it for the driver’s license. Prayer worked.

Now, all we needed was his social security number to be proved to them, without a social security card. We needed a 1099 with his full name, full social security number and the title “1099” all on one page. The 1099 we had along had ONLY the last four digits of his social security number showing (xxx-xx-1234). Believe it or not, we had to have a trusted friend back in Oregon get into our RV, find our tax folder and fax a document that had Lou’s full ssn showing on it, to us at the DMV. All for a driver’s license. Keep in mind that we had our 1040’s with us. 1040’s don’t count.

As for me and my certified marriage certificates… that was just a matter of sending for them and waiting for them to get mailed to me. Oh, and paying for them (with postage it ran appx $50 per document). South Dakota is not the only state doing this so you might want to gather your paperwork together now.
If you are like us, and need two documents at $50 each, you might as well just get a passport for $100.
Actually, we opted to send for all of it because we just didn’t know which would make it to us first.

We enjoyed staying at my nephew’s home and at our good friends, John & Ruth Bole, in Bismarck and visiting with family and friends for two wonderful weeks. We had not been back to ND since 2006 and the changes were an awakening that time does not stand still. Some of my nephews and nieces have kids in their teens now and those teens are driving cars!!! Shows you what four years can do. (Here's some pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/louiskathy327/BestOfNDTrip?authkey=Gv1sRgCICAhMTiwZrfeg&feat=directlink
I’m having a little fun with the younger ones: "Special Rocks"… here

We were able to spend a day with my aunt Pauline Sadler, who turned 100 years old May 25th. We pray that the good Lord will bless her remaining days. She’s in fairly good health but has out lived all of her five sons. She was in Orofino, Idaho, until Feb 2010 where her last living son passed away. She is in a retirement home in Baker, Montana, where her grand daughters look after her now.

It was go-go-go and we needed to slow down a little so on the way back we decided not to take I-84 through the Columbia Gorge to get home but instead we chose to drive south from Clarkston, WA on an innocent looking red line on the map known as Hwy 129. It becomes Hwy 3 once it crosses into Oregon. Map quest said both routes were 1100 miles but that I-84 was just two hours shorter. Wrong. We left Clarkston at 8:30am and by 4:30pm we arrived at Enterprise, Oregon. It took all day to do 86 miles. Beautiful drive but it was raining and every time we went above 3,000 ft elevation we were driving in snow trying to navigate 20mph curves zigzagging through canyons and hills. We had a blast!!

“We had a safe and healthy trip back to the Dakota’s.” That is the short version of the above. If you’ve skipped down to these last paragraphs, you’ve missed reading about our good time. If you skipped the photo album pics of the conference you missed out on the coldest temperature reading. It was 22 deg.

What lies ahead for us this fall? We don’t know but we’re positive that the Lord has it planned already.
There were several times we wondered about finances with the rising and falling of the markets and the necessary expenses to get to Colorado and South Dakota. Certainly, the Lord knows what we need and where it’s going to come from to get us to the Hard Hats project that HE wants us to be working on next. We’ve learned we can rest upon that, too. We’ll still be praying about it though, and thank you for your prayers, as well.

Don’t forget to email us when you get a chance. We really look forward to hearing from you.
Hugs
(His Utmost Gift is Salvation)
Kathy and Lou