Firstly thank you to everyone for believing in us, supporting us and our mission. You have no idea what this has meant to us with all the bumps we’ve had along the way.
The official start of our Australian Tour to Transform Children’s Health, One Lunchbox At A Time is excruciatingly close. Here’s our latest Australian Tour Update- it covers a few weeks so you get a sense of why we say it’s excruciatingly close.
Grab yourself a cuppa, because like the Ninja Turtles say, “This Is Epic”.
About a month ago
About a month ago, the guys converting our bus told us the bus will ready for us to drive away and start making our home on Friday 11th September 2015.
We can finally start to put dates to our plans and start preparing – again.
The first weekend, bring the bus home, wash it and the trailer, move our bed in and sleep in the bus out the front of mum’s – on our own mattresses – with our own sheets (which we haven’t for 9 months). The following week, we’ve booked in for the blinds to be installed in Newcastle on Wed 15th Sept, then the sign writing (thanks to our amazing national partner Scott Sign) 16th and 17th September. Then bring the bus back to my mum’s and pack our lives in it. Then hit the road for a shake down test from 22nd Sept then return to repack and fix any issues. Then head off for the official start of the Transforming Children’s Health Australian Tour in week 2 of October.
Mega excited doesn’t even begin to explain how we are all feeling with one month to go.
Last week’s visit
We’ve been visiting every week for the past month to keep the excitement up and to document the progress (see Bus Construction Walk Thru 1, Walk Thru 2). The rate of progress from Walk through 1 to Walk Through 2 was huge. So last week, we had an expectation to see big changes again. Except there wasn’t.
Israel and I both left disheartened and quite concerned about the 11th September date, even though the guys were still confident on that date.
We’re in a constant state of excitement followed by turmoil.
All our dates are locked in with other providers. Our family has been on tender-hooks for the past couple of months. It’s time to go. We all need to be on the road now. To actually be doing what we planned to do.
Fears rear their ugly head daily – sometimes many, many times in a day. What if they miss this date?
We have told the builders they can not have any more time. We need the bus by 11th September because our plans now have fixed dates and commitments with other parties. Oh, and just to add more urgency to this, our daughter’s Distance Education school have told us we need to be permanently on the road in Term 4, else she can’t stay enrolled there. More pressure, just what we needed!
This week
This week we have begun our countdown.
Today is Tuesday and it marks 10 days until we pick up our rather big baby. We are filled with mixed emotions – the constant state of turmoil continues.
We know we should be full of excitement and we are, but we’re also quite scared. We’ve been excited, then let down, so many times since we bought the bus 14 months ago in June 2014. The contract with the original builder had the conversion being completed by end of November. Then it became December, then definitely January. In March we relocated the bus to a new builder (see broken, not beaten), with a completion date of July, and then end of August.
Our plans for our Australian Tour have bounced around like a cork in water as these dates moved around. We’ve had to totally change the route we were going to take because the time of the year when we get on the road is now 9 months later.
We’ve now locked in the official start of our tour – it will be in Newcastle with the Awabakal Aboriginal Community. This tour start with Awabakal is being funded by Charter Hall. Amazeballs right? But in the back of our minds, the ugly fear is there – What if they miss this new date?
Our 9yo daughter has really struggled these last two months. Only a few weeks ago she broke down and told us we had taken away her life. For 1.5 hours I let her cry in my arms and I cried with her, as she told me everything she was feeling. We had taken away her lucky charm (her cat – which we rehomed back in January to my dad), and we had taken her away from all her friends. She has wanted to, at times, run away back to her old life. And if this didn’t already take a piece of my heart that can never be repaired, this did – she told me she had kept this from us because I had already cried enough this year. Our precious girl, bottling up all her hurt, for the sake of not hurting me. But having the date of the 11th September has given her new hope – that we will in fact deliver on what we promised her 9 months ago as we said goodbye to her friends. A lifetime adventure where she would meet lots of people along the way. The ugly fear is ever present – What if they miss this new date? – I don’t know how we would begin to tell her.
Our money is now severely depleted – we’ve lost $90,000 as well as being 9 months late. When we moved the bus to the new builders in March, further investigation revealed every single piece of work completed by Brett Maxwell Smith of Stargazer RV Motorhomes was either unsafe, non-compliant, or poorly done. (Tip: don’t work with him. Ever.). It had to be gutted – again – and re-built from scratch. The bill to re-do the work is around $85-90K, which almost completely exhausts our emergency cash / deposit for a new home after our trip. With the help of our dear friend and Premium Sponsor Tanya at Waterhouse Lawyers we lodged a claim for the $85,000 of unfinished work / money lost due to rework. We obtained a default judgement (Brett Smith didn’t show up at court) but have since learned he has declared bankruptcy – yet has continued to trade which is evidently legal as a sole trader.
We need to hit the road pronto, to start running more classes to generate more income. There’s that fear again What if they miss this new date?
This week we’ve had a few progress photos of the bus, and the work done looks amazing but deep down in our stomachs, we think about what we believe is a huge amount of construction work still to be done.
What if they miss this new date?
I had a horrendous night sleep at finally at 4am I gave up and got up to meditate. In those 20 minutes, I found a nice silent place to remind myself of how much we have to be grateful for.
We are going to live our dream – and it all starts in 10 days. I realised I needed to flip the bird to that ugly fear and say How great it is to be sleeping in our new home!
That’s me sorted! Loving my new found skill of meditation (do you know meditation is not about all peace and quiet and Omm, try Tom Cronin’s 21 days to Faster Deeper Bliss Stillness Project – life changing).
Last night, Israel went to bed early with a fever and he tossed and turned all.night.long! This morning was the darkest morning he has had in a long time. I told him that he was acting like chicken licken and the sky really isn’t falling (thanks to the discovery in my 4am meditation). That perhaps he should focus on an abundance mentality. Israel being Israel, he gave me that look (yep, you know the one you give your partner when you know they are right but you really want to give them the bird) and went off to sit down at the computer. Then he says to me, “you’re going to love this. I looked up how to get an abundance mindset“… then he rattled off the first step of 9 – in it said
“If I fail, the sky will fall”
Seriously, the sky will fall. Bahahaha… almost my words. It had a whole host of other things that made us throw our heads back in laughter. Blinding Flash of The Obvious coming left right and centre. Then to top it off, Israel received an email from one of our portrait photography clients who we photographed when their daughter was extremely ill and she said they had a devastating house fire last year and lost everything. They were finally moving back into their home and wanted to know if we still had their photos (we do of course, because we archive everything). Talk about perspective, people.
How great it is to be sleeping in our new home! This is the now the thought for the next two weeks.
We’ll be visiting the bus on Friday, so we’ll be adding an updated Bus Construction Walk Thru Video too, and good news that we are on track to be sleeping in our new home in 10 days time! Stay Tuned!