The Saturn Sky, Route 66, and the 15-Year Loop

Sometimes, God allows a seed to lie dormant in the dirt for over a decade before He brings it to life. In April of 2010, the ground shook beneath me once again. After years of running from the heartbreak of losing my firstborn son, Christopher, who was born still in 1979, 18 years of taking care of both my parents, still raising a family, and enduring the agonizing pain of being disowned by my siblings in 2001, after the death of my father, I moved with my then 14-year-old daughter cross country from upstate NY to Orange County California to start a new life near the ocean!

The first 8 years went well; I was able to start a successful pregnancy loss support group at the hospital I worked as an RN. But as with many things “politics” enters. In a flash, I lost the group, and soon after, my job. Stripped of my routine, deeply wounded, I made a choice in June of 2010 to make a cross-country trip back to my roots, regroup and find my way back. So, I packed my laptop and camera and a few essentials, climbed into my Saturn Sky convertible, grabbed the standard shifter, and set out alone across the country, making a circle starting south along route 66. I called the journey Riding the Wave. I intended to write a grand blog about my trip. I even created a banner featuring a sand dollar picture from a local beach. But the wilderness was too heavy, the road was too long, and after just a few raw posts, the writing went completely silent.

15-year Journey in the Wilderness

It is true that there are times when God takes you into the wilderness, not to punish, rather to pursue, to love on you, to strip you of all the important things or what you thought were important, to put you back as clay in the Potter’s hands, not to destroy, rather to rid you of what is not important, that you do not need. It is very hard, full of many ups and downs, fears till all you have left is to depend on God. During all that time, I never went without, had just enough money, even got down to $25.00 to my name, and never overdrew on my bank account! I call that divine provision.

The Turning Point

Shortly after my three-year journey of searching for the answer to “What is finished?” I got very sick, very fast with septic shock, my heart and kidneys were giving out, but miraculously I made it through, no lasting damage. So now the question for me was ok, where do I go from here, what is the lesson, what is the plan God. I turned to wanting to write a book, I had so many ideas and so many notes from over the years, the desire to put it all together, so I bought a laptop to use more of the Office 365 features than I could use on my iPad. With the purchase came a year free subscription to office 365 and copilot, my introduction to AI. LOL, my life has not been the same since in a good way that is. So began the birth of Shore & Sand Co.

Another Lightning Bolt

I tried Substack, but it didn’t fit the vision. That was when a sudden memory caused me to log into my old, forgotten 2010 WordPress account for “Riding the wave a family reunion,” When the screen loaded, I sat back in utter shock: there it was, completely intact. A time capsule from the exact moment my 15-year wilderness journey began. And right there in the header of a blog I hadn’t touched since the summer of 2010 was the sand dollar. On June 13, 2010, standing on the edge of a massive unknown, I had titled the post, “What is a journey?” with a picture from Route 66 in the middle of nowhere, no people, just dessert and blue sky, I can still feel the heat of the day, and the goose bumps of standing in the middle of such vastness.

A quote from John Steinbeck’s book “Travels with Charlie”

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”  John Steinbeck

A Trip Takes Us