Back Home

Sorry for not doing a blog last week. Been so busy and nothing interesting to talk about with us getting ready and going home. We are there now on our boat.

It feels good to be Back Home.

If you use logic, we need to work more at making our little house out on the prairie our home. We are getting older, and age is a factor in our life now. These trips getting back here are getting harder with us getting older. Five-hour ride with our son taking us from our little house in Kansas to the airport. Getting through all that mess at the airport just to get on the plane. Layover for 3 hours in Florida to make the next flight. Getting into Guatemala City after midnight and the cab that was to take us to a hotel didn’t show up. Found another cab and got to our room to sleep some by 2AM. Next morning ate breakfast at McDonald’s and they got our order wrong. Not speaking Spanish that well just eat it and let it go. Now it’s getting to the bus station. Another cab. There the bus was late leaving, and the driver was terrible. Jerking to start off then slamming the brakes to stop. This is Semans Santa week (Easter Week) and this is when most people here in Guatemala take a vacation. The river her is a vacation spot.

Durind the weekend they parked cars and buses during the day. At night a helicopter landed in the boat yard and took off in the mornings to give tours over the Rio Dulce.

When we were young, we dreamed about this boat all the time. With no money and not knowing anyway to get any boat we would talk, and dream and I would draw boats not knowing what we really needed. When we finely got our first sailboat we were living on Lake Greenwood in a log cabin Pam, and I built from our own plans. We have always been talked about like we are not normal. Always. Running away when Pam was 15 getting married. I was 17 at the time. Had lied about my age and was working at a man job in a cotton mill at16. Against the law to be working at a public job at 16 when I met Pam. Had a hot rod car dress like the Fonz on Happy Days and her mother was not impressed. The big blow up happen at 15 and 17 with her mother telling me to never get near her again. She was going to put the law on me. When I saw Pam two weeks later by accident, she ask me to marry her and we made a plan and here we are married 61 years now. After we got our little sailboat after work we would go out in the lake sail dream and sleep on our little boat so much it had people talking about us again. Still drawing plans for our dream boat. Sold our log cabin and bought a nice modern sailboat the bank liked, and it took us a lot of places, but it wasn’t the sailboat we wanted. When we were working in a nuclear power plant in Southport, NC we sold that sailboat we had and decided to build the sailboat of our dreams. No idea how much it would cost or how long it would take to build it. Ten years from laying the keel to leaving on our first trip. Remember dreaming about building this boat for so many years and the money and time it took to leave the first time. Sailing around the Statue of Liberty on our way north Pam was crying and when I ask her what was wrong, she said, “Hush.” I felt it too. So, this is why we still call and feel like our sailboat is home. The boat needs some work, and we are doing it. We get it back together it should be better than ever and maybe if we bring it back to the US we will put it in boat shows. It is a fully rigged top-sail schooner with lot of antique stuff we have collected along the way boats don’t have any more. Named after Pam, “Schooner Pamela Ann” if we get her ready to go, we will leave her here in the boat yard till we are ready to leave. We need to go back to our little house out on the prairie and try to republish our book and hopefully get it to sale. Money is always our problem. Getting my art and the book to sale is a bird in a tree so when we go back there, we need to finish the 1951 Chevy truck we are restoring so we can work out of it going to farms out there upholstering those big farm tractors, combines and farm trucks. This is work but we can make some money this way to hopefully make this all this we are doing happen. Can we do this at our age? Win or lose our life has never been boring.

                                                                     The Adventure of Life Goes On

This is what we are working for. Out there sailing and going places.

More Projects in Kansas

Last week our blog was a bout Pam and I marring at 15 and 17 and us not finishing high school. One year and one month after we were married Pam had a baby boy at 16. Our only child that lives out here in Kansas and the main reason we bought this house out here. We “did not” have sex before we married like it was the driving force in what we did, and people seem to always go there. Teenagers with a baby out of school to most people this was awful. Now here today with us getting older still together as I have said 61 years later, we still have dreams of adventures ahead of us, we hope. What, we are working on out here is a business dream of becoming a writer and a artist. Just think what we could do with just a little money coming in with us doing all this and with our home-built sailboat we still call home and the places we have not been yet. I know the odds of it happening with this being me doing this and us this old, but we have never been one to give up.

This is the steering wheel we made while we were in Belize out of some local wood there. The dash we found in a junkyard here in Kansas. 

The plans for our car. “A Pennington Cozy”

I also said last week I would put some pictures of the car we are building we designed ourselves out here. Crazy as our life can get, we took on another project. We need away to promote our work with art and our books is what the experts are saying. We also need a way to take our art to shows and galleries. We were given a truck a little tired but if you know us you know we are Frankenstein people. A lot we own we have we raised from the dead with bone yard parts we can find.

This is our 1951 Chevy truck.

This is a project. Friday, we managed to get an abandonment title from the DMV. By law it now belongs to us, and we can get a tag. No record of who owned it before with it being just a little old. Last tag on the truck was 1975. It was in a junk yard, and they were going to crush it. Now for a box to put on our truck to carry our art, we were given a camper. We hope to cut it apart and build a box van out of it to carry our painting. Remember all this is old, we’re old and it’s crazy but sometimes “crazy works.”

This is the trailer we are taking apart and using to make a box for the back of the truck to carry painting to Art Shows. 

The other night we went to a potluck for seniors and there the speaker, was an 18-year-old girl trying out for Miss Kansas, Beauty pageant. Seeing a girl this pretty will make you think. Remember our first night together as a couple Pam was just 15 and I do believe she could have given this girl a run for her money on how she looked. I hate to hear, “I bet that is was a pretty woman when she was young about any women.” To me Pam is still a pretty woman. It’s always about the what ifs in life. What if I had left Pam alone like her mother wanted. What direction would her life have taken. After the girl made her speech, she asks if anyone had any comments and if you know me you know I have a disability, my mouth, is not in direct contact to my brain. I said, “You have made it this far and pretty as you are if you have a setback, don’t let it stop you.” People there seemed to agree. On the way home Pam said, “With all we have going on you may have to take some of your own advice by not giving up.” (Remember things we did we are proud of in our life together is just our opinion and not everyone see it as the same.) Now with all the things we made happen being high school dropouts in our life with all we have going on right now this may be a little much with us being this old, but I guess time will tell. Either way what a life it has been with the adventures we have had.

                                          The Adventures of Life Goes On