Estimated reading time: 6 minute(s)

Well, we made it… and you may be able to tell that it has been a bit crazy since we arrived here in Clearwater… I have not been able to put anything up here in a few days. I really wanted to spell out all of the craziness of last Saturday night – the night we arrived here – but I was so beat from that on Saturday, and then Sunday I had a headache – a nasty one – ALL DAY! Wow. Crazy. More on that later… but first:

Saturday

We arrived in Clearwater at around 3:15pm or so… and headed straight to the church to set up for Sunday. We finished that up and headed to our time share for the week! (I think I have mentioned that already, but that was an amazing gift from God straight through some amazing friends of ours. They gave us a FREE week at a time share they own! Wow! That is awesome!) We were quite excited to get in – and also looking forward to doing LAUNDRY! We had just spent this last week in a hotel! 🙂

So, as we are coming in, we notice that this beach-front stuff is not exactly built for trailers… 🙂 We wondered where we might park such a thing. Then, we found the place, but were not sure where to check in… and there really was not anywhere to turn the trailer around! So, that was an adventure. 🙂

Well, when we got to the check-in spot, THEY WERE CLOSED! It was 5:30pm and they were closed. (They had closed at 5!) Doh! There was a late arrivals door with our keys and welcome packet in it… but it was locked. We needed a code to get in. 🙂 Oh well. So I called the phone # and tried to get the on-call person – but I had to leave a message there!!!!! WHAT?!? So… we just hung out and wondered when we would ever get a call back.

Only about 5 minutes passed, and a lady approached our van – it was the on-call person! Whoohoo! We were in! She helped us out, and then we headed over to start moving stuff in.

As we were unloading, we met a couple from Rochester! They own a unit here. The guy’s name is Bob… (I don’t remember the lady’s name…) Bob told us a couple interesting things – 1) we can not have a trailer on the premesis and 2) "Hope you like to get up early…" because of the construction that would start by 8am on Monday morning. 🙂 Thanks, Bob…

So we contined to unload – we have LOTS of stuff to unload. And we unloaded more than usual, as we were planning to leave our trailer up at the church we were singing at on Sunday. That issue was messing up our schedule as well. There really was no place to leave our trailer overnight here, so we thought we would have to make the 45-minute trip up there again… and that was going to take a huge chunk out of our night (that was getting shorter by the minute…)

The MAIN thing we really needed to do was LAUNDRY! As soon as we had unloaded the majority of the items, Jen started looking for the laundry stuff to get that going. When I came up with another load, she said – "I don’t think there’s a washer and dryer…" That was not what we wanted to hear. We were all wearing yesterday’s clothes already… 🙂 Sure enough, we looked around — no washer and dryer.

We found out there was a laundry room on the 4th floor of the building. So, we took a bit of time to figure out logistics of getting that up there, waiting for it to be done, taking the trailer back, getting food for the week, and all the regular preparations I needed to do for the next morning also! We finally decided to try and leave the trailer at a mini-golf place that is adjacent to our complex here. So, since we were kinda counting on that, I got the laundry together and headed up to do it.

When I got there, I found out that I needed quite a nice amount of change to do this job. And I had to purchase detergent as well, so that added to the cost. 🙂 So I pulled out my wallet and looked around for the change machine… no change machine. WHAT? Yes. No change machine. That was unfortunate, as we had no quarters. And have I mentioned that we were already wearing yesterday’s clothes… 🙂 It was definitely time to do laundry!!!! 🙂

SO, I got all the quarters I could out of our van. That seemed to be enough. But when I went upstairs, I found out one of the quarters had been squished or something, and didn’t work in the coin slot for the machine!!! SO, I found one of the units where the lights were on and asked them if I could exchange a quarter with them 🙂 That was nice. They were friendly. So far we had not really found that.

I finally get my quarters, and put them in the detergent dispenser…. nothing. I read it again, it was only $1.00. IT said if the column was empty, the money slider would not work. After several moments trying to figure out what to do, I decided to try it again. 🙂 I put in another $1, expecting to perhaps get 2 pouches of detergent instead of one. Nothing. ARGH!!!! This night was not going well…

I had to do laundry, so, I headed out on foot (cause it was too difficult to maneuver the trailer) to see if I could get some change. First, I had to find some cash, since that was pretty scarce as well. 🙂 I managed to find out where a 7-11 was, and headed out to get some laundry supplies there. They had it! (That seemed like the first success of the night!) I got some detergent and some change… i was good to go! I also OK-ed leaving our trailer at the mini-golf place… so things seemed to be going in the right direction!

When I got back to the laundry room I loaded up the washers and found out i did not have enough to dry the clothes!!!! This was starting to get a bit annoying… 🙂 So, I decided to go get some change from the mini-golf folks. On my way over there, Bob returned. He let me know that I needed to move our van. IT was in a fire lane. 🙂 Bob is very aware of the rules. And he wanted us to be as well. 🙂

Well, I finally got the change I needed, put the clothes in the dryer, and we seemed good to go. One more thing though – we tried to go see the pool before we left to go get food for the week… and we couldn’t find it first… then we couldn’t get in (even though we found out later it was open)!!! What a night!

The last bit o’ fun for the evening was our trip to WalMart. It was a good distance away, first of all, so that took a bunch of the drying time we were trying to fit into. THEN, when we got to WalMart it was PACKED. This was 9:30 at night! Then the lines were really long… we didn’t leave there till 10:15pm. The laundry was done at 10. 🙂 I was pretty sure the perfect ending to the night would be that our clothes were all gone when we got back!!!

Well, we got back at 10:45 and rushed up to get the clothes before the closed the laundry room at 11pm. There were there! And clean, that was good too. 🙂 After unloading all the groceries, I finally got to rehearse for the next morning and print the stuff I needed to. Late night…

Good thing we got that extra hour. 🙂

So… it was quite an adventure. I forgot to mention, the place is under construction, so when we opened the door, there was a HUGE paint fumes odor. 🙁 We left the doors open for hours to air it out. And lots of stuff was missing… so we had fun trying to find all that too.

In the end, we are SO thankful that we get to spend this week here in this place! We just got to start it off with a bang! 🙂

More later…