Complimentary Story
Summer 2026Two damaged lives, a yellow truck, an open road, and a life we never could have imagined.
Our somewhat reluctant return to “normal living.” When I say “somewhat reluctant,” I mean exactly that. We knew what life had been like before we went on the road and we knew what it would be like when we left the road. I am not saying that life is bad off the road, but it is better being on the road. That is our opinion and there is nothing anyone can say that has not been there.
However, there are two basic types of people on the road. There are the people that find themselves there because their life went bad for them for some reason. Those people will generally have a different opinion that what we have, but the majority of the people are living there because it is a choice they made.
God guided our lives for us as we went about starting over again. He provided the first job and that job opened the door to the next job. There were a series of jobs over the next 10 years. Each of them better than the previous job. By the time I retired in 2010, I was working in a Research and Development shop alongside an engineer. It was just the two of us designing and building equipment.
We were able to purchase a house and have now been here for 26 years. Hadassah worked at a local nursing home and took care of a neighbor that was bedfast. She had an interest in Herbology and was able to take a course in it.
I retired in 2010. It was not an easy decision, but I had been diagnosed with cancer in 2009 and that was the deciding factor. Because of Hadassah’s training as an Herbalist and our desire to stay as far away from the medical world as we possibly could, we decided to make some changes to our daily lives and trust God for the outcome.
It has now been 17 years since I was diagnosed. Our decisions did not make the doctors happy, but we figured they would get over it and we did what we thought was the right thing for us to do. I had already seen friends and family die after being treated for cancer and we chose a different path than they had taken.
We had not been on the road for about 11 years, and while sitting in a favorite fast food place drinking coffee, we realized that we were now free from the daily grind of going to work and could do as we pleased. We came up with a plan that allowed us to buy a fifth-wheel camper and truck and start traveling again. We did that for about 1-1/2 years.
We really do believe God just let us do it for a while. God seems to have stopped our home from selling and we could not afford having two lifestyles. Since the house did not sell, we knew we had to sell the truck and camper and return to our home and, once again, start over. We had sold almost everything when we left with the camper, so we moved back into an empty home.
One of the last places I worked had been sold and the new owners contacted me about going back to work for them to help straighten out some problems within their shop. I stayed there until Hadassah had a “brain bleed.” We were told that a situation of that type either left the patient dead or totally disabled for the rest of their life. Well...God did not see it that way. She was left with problems with her right side, but she was certainly able to get around for the next 8 years.
One year ago, she had a second “brain bleed” and she has been in a wheelchair ever since. Before she had the second problem, we had been able to volunteer at Voice of the Martyrs in Bartlesville, OK for several months.
We have had a very interesting life filled with unusual experiences. It has definitely not been the normal life that we were expected to live. God took us many places and showed us many things.
I have been asked many times what it was all for and I do not have a good answer for it. All I know is God asked us to do things and during that time He changed us and brought us much closer to Him. Obedience is extremely important to God. (1 Samuel 15:22).
This article is certainly different than any I have written before. It is just a very brief recap of our lives for the last 27 years. It has been a good time even with the fact that I went through cancer and Hadassah has had serious health problems and has ended up in a wheelchair. In spite of it all, we praise God for the life we have been able to live!
There are some days that it is not easy to thank God for our life, but that certainly does not mean it has not been good. It means we are still human and can have bad days. There have been some hard days, but we get past them.
This will be the last article. I thank all of you that have followed our travels across the country and I thank Rob Pue for encouraging me to write these last two articles. We are both well into our 80s now and we still love to tell people about our time on the road.
We would love to hear from some of you.
“For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, ‘Fear not; I will help thee.’” (Isaiah 41:13 KJV).
Email:
harry@virtually-forever.com
