They always say that God will come through in the eleventh hour!  If you were to put the timeline of our leaving Tacoma for this trip onto the face of a clock, and we sold our house in the first hour, I’d say this miracle came at 11:59.  We planned for it somewhere around 7, and sweated through our shirts about it until 10:30, when things got so hairy that we didn’t even have time to think about it.  You see, there were about five million things to do to extract ourselves from our American lives and execute a McDowell migration, but the facilitator of it all was the money that we’d need to come from the sale of our car, in order to cover the expenses of the trip.  We tried to sell it for a couple of months.  It’s a comical thing to try to sell a car that you use to transport toddlers.  After multiple chicken nugget vaccuumings, amateur detailing, paint touch ups (we know a guy who does that), and car washes, we had sold a whole lot of nada.  Only one test drive.  So the time came for move out of the condo and pack the bags we’d put on the plane, and we still didn’t have money for the trip.  We did, however, have a sweet ride, which would have helped if the bridge to England were finished.  (Personally, I’m hoping for one to Hawaii first.) 

 So on the Wednesday before our plane departed, we received a mysterious voice mail.  According to this voice mail, our little crossover was eagerly desired by and locally unobtainable to a certain gentleman in the Ukraine, and he would like to buy it and put it on a transport ship to be the only Outlander in Kiev.  Or somewhere.  We were suspicious.  Experience with craiglist will do that to you.  Tentatively, we began negotiations, really having no choice. 

Long story short, on the very last business day before we left the country with a possibly empty bank account, we met our potential buyer (who was dealing on behalf of his friend overseas) at 8:30 am at 72nd street Starbucks, where, as we all know, many a shady deal has gone down.  The tall friendly redheaded guy we met there was about the least shady character yet to visit that Starbucks, and within 2 hours, we had signed every legal paper necessary, transferred the title at the DOL, authorized release of the lien, and tanked the bank account with necessary funds for eating in Europe for the next couple months.  I couldn’t believe the grace of God. 

Right before he drove away, I asked our new friend Yaroslav if he had ever been part of a miracle before.  He told us that right before he was to move to the USA from the Ukraine, he had no money for the trip and needed to sell his car.  He said that he had prayed, and 2 days before his departure date, his car had sold.  He was happy to have passed on the miracle.  We said farewell to the Outlander, and wished it a Bon Voyage.  Hopefully it is getting to experience 110 mph once in a while, and bringing something fresh to a faraway place, a place where the likes of it hasn’t been seen before.  Hmmm…wonder if there’s a deeper meaning there…