Season 2, Episode 41: Celebrate Your Birthday! 🎂

Join me as I broadcast from the Wendy’s parking lot and tell you about my joyous birthday celebration last week in Europe!
I turned 68 and this will be a birthday. I will always remember!

Listen to my adventures in England, the Netherlands, and Germany! Hear me talk about my new friend Andre in the Netherlands and my new friend in the temple presidency of the Hague Netherlands Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! Kindness works around the world in any language!

Also, be grateful for technology, recognize it’s a small world 🌎, and take advantage of the opportunities that come to you!

I hope you enjoy this 68th birthday podcast as much as I did creating the stories behind it!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Everybody and welcome to my favorite time of the week. Thursdays at 3 o'clock Eastern, where I get to do the Junk Refund show.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Coming to you live from Nicholson Lane in Rockville, Maryland, in the truck as I'm about to pull into a Wendy's and park here to do the show. I was hoping I could get here earlier so I could actually grab some lunch before the show started, but I wasn't quite that fortunate. But that's okay. I will hang out here and uh we'll do the show from Wendy's and I'll get some lunch right afterwards. And unless they kick me out of the parking lot, I'm in good shape. Uh welcome to the Junk Refund Show. I'm Alan Cook. I'm the founder of 1-800 Junk Refund, which is a hauling and junk removal business headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area. We do junk removal of all types. We pick up scrap metal uh for free. We move people, and you can probably tell I'm backing up into a spot here where, God willing, they'll let me stay for a couple of minutes here to do this do this show. But I think we'll be good. Anyway, welcome. It's been a fun week. I'm sorry I wasn't able to do the show last week. I was in Europe celebrating my birthday and I think I was actually I may have been on a train, I think, at the time. I just was traveling between cities and couldn't do a show from where I was. Yeah, that's right. I was on a train and I couldn't think of where I could go other than in between cars to do a show for an hour, and they may not like me hanging out, you know, in between cars or at the end of one of the cars or whatever. But I'm very excited to be here. I we talk on this show about how to get the junk out of your home and out of your garage and out of your office, but also out of your life. And one of the best ways to do that that I did this last week is to celebrate your birthday. I'm very big on celebrating your birthday. There is a l there are a lot of people in the world who say to themselves, Oh crap, it's my birthday and I'm another year older, and they kind of shy away from it. Um I was in our church one time and a young couple was there, and the young lady was walking down the hallway and she says, Oh my gosh, I just turned 23, I'm so old. And I kind of thought about that as like a mid-sixties at that point, point year old guy, and thought, No, you're just a spring chicken. You you you're just starting to bloom, you know, you're you got you got your whole life ahead of you. Well, I just celebrated my sixty-eighth birthday, and in keeping with what I did last year for my sixty-seventh birthday when I went to Rome, I decided to go back to Europe for this year as well. I have mentioned on this show that one of the ways I try to get some of the day in and day out, you know, junk out of my life is to try to build the spiritual part of my life, and in our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that means you go to a temple, because we have a boatload of these around the world, and I think about thirteen of them or so in Europe and Scandinavia. So I have a little spiritual hobby of going out and visiting these. Um, we have about a hundred of them in the United States. I've been to all of those. We have nine of them in Canada. I've been to eight out of nine of those. I'm starting to go to some in Central America, uh, San Salvador, most recently I went to. Um, and I've been to about half of them in Europe. And so because I had so much fun at the Rome Temple, and by the way, if you want to see a fabulous building, just look up Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they just put in Rome Temple, and you'll see why I flew there to to just kind of take this in. It's a fascinating um building there. But I did that last year and I thought, you know, I'm always gonna remember my sixty-seventh birthday. When I turned sixty, I went to Merida, Mexico to visit our temple down there. And so I have a passion for going to these buildings and participating in kind of the sacraments or the ordinances we'll call 'em, that go on inside, because it lifts me up on a spiritual level. And that's a good thing to help, you know, keep you upbeat, calm, non-judgmental, accepting of other people. You know, it's a spiritual thing, and so I'm very big on that. Well, I left so last week, back in February, actually, I made a I I found a a cheap airfare to London out of JFK. And cheap is about a hundred and sixty dollars one way, something like that. So I made that that airfare, and then I just kept chipping away at it, chipping away at it. Finally bought a flight home from Frankfurt, um, on Singapore Airlines, which is a fantastic airline to fly on. We'll talk more about them later. And then I bought the URL pass, was the last thing I bought, and I kind of put the trip together a as pieces. And one of the things that happens when you decide to celebrate your own life, your own birthday, give yourself a vacation or whatever, there are always things that can come up that would cause you to say, Oh, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe maybe I'm gonna be too busy, maybe I should stay here, whatever. You sometimes have to, at least I have to kind of fight through the temptation to keep things as normal because you feel a responsibility to, in my case, be here for work or be here for clients or whatever. But then you step back and go, wait a minute, fifty-one weeks out of the year I do that. So for one week out of the year, I'm gonna go celebrate me. And that's exactly what I did. So in what amounted to five days, I f I flew across the Atlantic Ocean, went to London, went to Preston, England, went to The Hague in the Netherlands, went to Frankfurt, Germany, and then flew home from Frankfurt back to New York, took a bus back from New Jersey Penn Station, got back to DC, turned around and hopped on the metro, the subway system here. I left Tuesday at noon, I was home Sunday at about eight o'clock. I crossed the Atlantic twice. I went to four countries. No, I went to three I went to four temples in three countries. And I did it in five days. Now, that's a birthday you're never gonna forget. You're just always gonna remember that. So I'm very big on this concept. If you want a fun, happy, adventurous life, just decide what it is you have a passion for and go start doing it, and the adventures that you have along the way will be marvelous. Um, the other reason you need to celebrate your own birthday is that unless you're in a family unit where, you know, they're gonna make a big deal out of your birthday and stuff like that, like when you're a father or something like that, or when you're a child and your parents do it for you. Sometimes you get to the point where nobody's gonna make a big deal about your birthday. You might get a phone call or a card or something like that, but nobody's gonna throw a big bash for you, and I'm just a big believer in rewarding yourself and making making, you know, your own life special as a result of your own efforts. So look at December twenty fifth, right? That's Christmas. That's a celebration of whose birthday? Jesus' birthday. So I'm saying to myself, Hey, my birthday's May seventh, might as well celebrate that as well. And I just had a blast, some of which, um, I'm gonna talk about here during the show today because it was such a fun week. And it just you come back from a week like that and you walk in your bedroom and you lie down in your bed and you just go, I can't believe I just did that because you're just having so much fun celebrating your life. And let's face it, some people have a pretty tough go in life, some people have it pretty easy, but everybody has a challenge or challenges of some point of uh to some degree. And so you have the right to be happy. And many times you need to take the initiative to throw your own party and that that's a really good thing to do. So I'm very big on number one on the show today, celebrate your own birthday. I just did it and I had a blast, and my sixty-eighth birthday I'll always remember. I can't tell you what I did when I turned sixty-three or sixty-four, but I can tell you what I did when I turned sixty, when I turned sixty-seven, and when I turned sixty-eight, and I'm gonna make this an annual event. Because it's just a great thing to do. Second point, um, about the about just kind of life in general and how to get the junk out of your life. You have to recognize it's a very small world these days. It's a seven hour flight from New York City to London. The flight coming back, we left uh Frankfurt. This was almost an eight-hour flight. We left Frankfurt and basically went up over Ireland. I'm gonna call it either the Irish Sea or the Northern Sea, I'm not sure what it is up there. The Black Sea, maybe, I'm not sure. The Atlantic Ocean, probably. But we we kind of it's it's almost as though we went towards the North Pole and then started to come back down over Greenland. I think we came south of Iceland, we came down over Boston and then down into New York, right? That's the best route. Thirty-eight thousand feet, six hundred miles an hour. And what's interesting is the you know, the planes document all the statistics for you if you want to watch your own flight. So you sit there next to a a window, for example, and one foot to the right of you, in other words, one foot on the other side of of that body of the plane, the fuselage of the plane, only one foot, maybe two feet at most, away from your head, it's minus 70 degrees. And you're going six hundred miles an hour, and yet you're sitting there reclining in your seat, drinking a Diet Coke, eating a sandwich, watching a movie. Right? It's amazing that the technology is such that you can get around this planet so quickly and conveniently and easily that it really shrinks the world. Another thing I've told people, you know, people are very big about living close to your family. Everybody wants to live close to their family, and I'm kinda going, you know what, if you're in the continental United States, I don't think it really matters where you live anymore. If you know what the family events are, you can be there. You know, it's what five hours from Boston to San Diego. You can be there, you just have to plan it a little bit in advance. You know, you don't have to live in the same time zone, you don't have to live in the same zip code. You can be there if you just plan it out a little bit, you'll y you can be a part of these events. My I have eight siblings that live in Utah. My mother passed away in December at the age of ninety-four. I called her every week for about twenty years, something like that, and I'm a adventurous guy, and she would always ask me about my latest adventures. I always had a story to give her. And I feel like even though I lived all the way across the country from her, that I had as many good fun experiences with her as I possibly could have had, and I and when she passed away I had no regrets. I was proud of the time that I spent, I was proud of the job I did as a son, I was proud of just doing the things that I did for her to make her life as good as possible. And I when she passed away I honestly said to myself, you could not have done a better job as a son. I mean, you can and that's a really good feeling to have. You know, you see a lot of people at funerals and they're sitting in the pews and their heads are down in the palms of their hands and they're kind of going, Oh crap, you know, now I can't get to know Aunt Mildred anymore 'cause it's her funeral or whatever. Um again, y you want to live life so that there are no regrets.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Right?

SPEAKER_02 14:41

And you do that by making your own life an adventure and doing the things that make you happy. That's really pretty simple approach. And nobody can tell you what that is except you, and it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks about it, it's your life. You know, if I get a thrill by flying to Europe and visiting temples and you get a thrill by sitting down and playing Uno with somebody as a card game in your family room, those are equal, right? If it makes you happy, that's what you want to do. You don't have to travel anywhere, you don't have to go anywhere. But make sure you take time in your life to do the things that make you happy and that give you energy and that, you know, pump you up. So it's just an amazing thing. It's a it's a very small world and you can get around it very quickly these days and inexpensively if you just shop a little bit for your airfares and other things that you do. Point number three, be grateful for technology. I do this radio show just using an iPhone, and I do another podcast for members of our church to try to help them kind of spread the gospel and be better, we call it member missionaries, etc. That's kind of awkward for a lot of people in our church to do, and yet we're always encouraged and asked to do it by our church leaders, and so I'm trying to fill that gap um and help people be more successful at it instead of get kind of frustrated with it. Does that make sense? So I've done this for a few years, just using an iPhone. Sometimes I'll use a second phone if I have a guest that I'm talking to and I record it with one phone and I use the other one for the conversation. But what's interesting is that that podcast, maybe now in its, I don't know, fifth year maybe, something like that. Um the last time I looked, which was six months ago, maybe even longer, the last time I looked, it had been listened to in fifty-four countries and about five hundred and twenty cities, something like that. The number one city or location in the world that downloads episodes of this podcast is in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Frankfurt am Mahn or Main train station, the main train station in Frankfurt. Somebody over there, or maybe a group of people, download the podcast and listen to it on their ride in and out of work in Frankfurt or whatever. So I when I was over there, Frankfurt was the last city that I visited. I'd never been to Frankfurt before. Um and of course I arrived at the train station. And so I looked up the stats and lo and behold, the podcast has now been listened to in seventy-four countries. That's more than a third of the countries in the world. Right? And it's been listened to in six hundred and eighty-five cities. Twenty percent higher. And still the number one place that downloads the podcast is Frankfurt Germany train station. So I thought, you know what? I need to do an episode of the podcast from this train station, which I did. And it was a blast. And I also thought, you know, when you're in Frankfurt you need to get a Frankfurter. I mean that's just, you know, simple. Got this big long hot dog with grilled onions and some other stuff on it. And that was fabulous. Um it was t that train station is just an amazing place and I did an episode of the podcast from there just using my phone. Right? Sent it out, uploaded it, blah blah blah, it's done. And I was and I to I had somebody just take a picture of me standing in front of a train in the Frankfurt train station and that is an extremely memorable episode in my podcast. The podcast is called How Great Shall Be My Joy and the latest episode is from Frankfurt, Germany. And it and it it talks about some of the experiences I had when I was on this trip last week, which I'm gonna share some of those with you here in the kind of the the remaining time of the show, but I just um I can't I can't express enough the encouragement to make your birthday special, take advantage of the fact that it's a small world and be grateful for technology. I'm sitting there on this airplane, you know, flying back and forth across the Atlantic watching movies. I watched a movie called Nuremberg, right? The trial at Nuremberg, which was a fascinating movie. And I'm plugging in headphones and I'm, you know, watching movies while I'm going six hundred miles an hour across the Atlantic Ocean while it's a minus seventy degrees outside the plane. I mean, seriously. Show me a better deal. So anyway, I'll we'll we're gonna take a break here for a minute. You're listening to the Junk Refund Show. We'll come back and actually talk a little bit about junk removal and some things going on there. But um I do this show with a passion for my life and what I'm doing, and I tend to talk about the things that are most exciting to me. So we will be back in a minute. We're on the BBS Radio Network, and I'm your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from the Wendy's parking lot in Nicholson Lane in North Bethesda, Maryland. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk removal companies? And wondered what they did with the Hey, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show.

SPEAKER_02 21:28

This is Alan Cook, your host, talking to you from North Bethesda, Maryland, where we're headquartered here. Company is 1-800 Junk Refund. If you are in the DC metropolitan area, we have a deal for you because I just celebrated last week my 68th birthday, and throughout this month, we're celebrating um my birthday, basically, by doing a special deal where you get a pickup truck of junk removal, normally $229, for $68. I do this every year. Price goes up one dollar every year, and I sell sixty-eight of them. And we've probably sold in the last few days, 35 or 40, something like that now. Um it's a great deal. It's a really great deal. It's technically the best deal of the year. And we also, throughout the year, on this network, the BBS Radio Network, if you call in the show and that number is 888-627-6008. If you call in the show during the show and just leave your name and number with our producer Don, he'll let me know afterwards, and we will send you a link that allows you to buy the same pickup truck of junk removal, normally $229, for $79. And that price does not go up year to year. So we got a couple of special deals going on right now, um, only in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. But it's a great deal for the people that live in this area, and we just want you to know about it in case you're listening to the show and you're in the DC area. Um there's a birthday voucher out there on our website that you can find. I think if you just look up the number 68, you'll you'll or that that page number or post number on this website. And the website's 1-800 junkrefund.com. So we're having some fun with it, um, and it and it's working well, and it's a it's a great thing. Here's another thing that I mentioned to a lady from Upland, California, who called me a couple of days ago, who's got a garage full of stuff and needs to get it cleaned out. And she called me and said, What you know, have you guys got what kind of deals do you do? And I like that you, you know, you're kind of a one-stop shop where you'll you'll do the donations, you'll put stuff up for sale, you'll recycle stuff, and you'll junk the junk. And I went, Yep, you got it. That's the idea. Well, we're doing a a celebrate America, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary thing between now and July 4th, where you get half a truckload, and this is not a pickup truck, this is a steak body truck, like the truck you'd rent from Home Depot, for example, or U-Haul. Uh an in a box truck, 12 foot long box truck, if we fill one of those up regular price at six hundred and ninety-five dollars. If you and so half a truck is three hundred and ninety-five dollars. What we did in honor of the two hundred and fiftieth birthday is we were making vouchers available for a half truck for two hundred and fifty dollars. That's $145 savings. If you're interested in that, and and this one could go across the country, actually, as long as you buy one or two, not one, but you know, two or three of them, we can justify coming to help you out. But um, you're welcome to to contact us at junkrefund at gmail.com or call the show 888-627-6008, leave your name and number with Don, and we can send you a link for that one. That one is good around the country. The lady from Upland, California, when I explained the size of the trucks and the cost and stuff, I said, you ought to buy, you know, a couple of these things, and instead of paying for a full truck at $695, you buy two half trucks at two fi $250 apiece. You end up paying $500 and you save $200. Great deal, right? That's I like great deals. So that's another one that's out there right now. I call it the Celebrate America vouchers, and we're promoting those as well. Those are around for almost another two months. Um, and uh that's a great deal. And we someone said or texted me and said, Do you guys come in and get the stuff? Yes. Do do I have to put it all in one area? No. You just have to point to it or tell us where it is. Um, is there anything you don't take? We don't take paint and gasoline, although in the Washington area we got we have a recycling place here that will let us take metal paint cans in there and uh we'll recycle them. So but as a general rule, they won't let us as a commercial company take paint or um uh gasoline into a landfill, but they generally will let local people show them your ID, they will let you take it in and give you a certain amount that you can just drop off. They kind of space it out throughout the year, at least that's the way they do it in Montgomery County, Maryland. But at least you can go get rid of it without having to pay to get rid of it, and that's the way to do it. Um the trucks we we use 12-foot box trucks, they are 12 feet by 8 feet by 5 feet, that's 480 cubic feet. We also use pickup trucks that are six feet by five feet by four feet, that's 120 cubic feet, it's exactly one-fourth of a big truck. Um when we clean out homes and we are you know we'll rent trucks that are sixteen feet long, which means we can get more stuff on the truck and make less trips, which saves us money. Um, and we do a lot of that as well. We are going to start a job in a week where we're gonna go in and clean out, we're gonna do a couple of truckloads of stuff on the weekend uh for a single family home of a hoarder that has a lot of stuff, apparently. I haven't been there to see it yet, but um, we've been invited and actually contracted to go in and start on that job next weekend. I got a call from somewhere in Minnesota, old, really nice old lady whose husband passed away a while ago, who now has all of his welding equipment that he had compiled over 40 years out in this big garage. There's a boat in the garage, there's a bunch of other tools, and then there's stuff in the house, and she's now got kind of dumped on her lap the the necessity of cleaning out all this stuff and getting rid of it. Really nice lady. So I gave her some information and hopefully we'll head to Minnesota uh pretty soon to go help her out and do a job there. The point is we go around the country doing jobs for people. We can't come to your area if you just have a refrigerator that you want to get rid of because it's too small of a job. But we have 63 affiliates around the country, and we can have one of them in your local area come and haul the stuff away. These affiliates do not get involved in reselling stuff. If you have an estate or you're moving out of your home and it's a bigger job, we will just come ourselves from Washington and do it and handle it and handle the selling of it and all that stuff. Um and we don't charge you for the travel because we travel really cheaply around the country. And it's a it's just a as I told some people last night, I said there there you know when you f when you think about this last week of my life and what I was able to do in a week, right? In even less than a week, this is the best time in the history of the world to be alive. I mean, I can't imagine a better time to be alive than now. And so if you're finding yourself, you know, stressing out about political stuff, or you know, what's going on in our country, or what's happening with Iran, or the president's vision to China, or you know, whatever it might be, sure, there's always something out there going on that's not gonna sit right with somebody, you know. I mean it's just the way it is. We've got a lot of diversity in the country and people see things differently. But through it all, it's you still have the best opportunities in the world in this country to make of your life whatever you want to make it. And I just think that's an amazing thing, and something that we should never forget. All the great opportunities we have. I mean, look what I just did, right? Um, I was stunned at at what happened. One of the concerns I had, by the way, before going on this trip is that I had to renew my driver's license. Now, uh you don't rarely see, I don't know that I've ever seen anybody on Facebook or social media make a post that talked about how great their visit to the Motor Vehicle Association was. What you usually see is, you know, I've waited for two hours, I have to come back, you know, three times, it cost me a lot more than I thought, you know, whatever. And I haven't renewed my driver's license, I think, for ten years, and so I kind of went, okay, this is probably gonna take a while. I called, I went on the website, I called the MVA, they told me, you know, you need a copy of your birth certificate. Well, I was born in Utah. I live in Maryland. I can't just go grab a copy of my birth certificate. And I happened to call them the night before my appointment, right? Not exactly great planning on my part, but hey, that's the way it worked out. So they said you need a copy of your birth certificate. Well, that's out in Utah. Okay, um, I can't get you know, could you have a sibling, go pick it up and then FedEx it to you? Not by 8 30 in the morning, which is when my appointment is, right? That's not gonna work. So so then um they also said, Okay, let's see, what else do you need? You need a copy of your birth certificate. Oh, you need a social security card. I went, I don't have my social security card. Uh last time I remember it, it was like in a journal or something that I had it in a scrapbook or something, but it but I I haven't used that in years. And I called the Social Security Administration, they said, Yeah, we can give you an appointment to come get a new card. But our nearliest appointment is uh a month and a half from now. I went, Oh crap. And I tried two or three Social Security departments in this area, and always got the same story. It's a month and a half from now. I went, okay, that's not gonna work. Then they said, Well, you can take in I my address had changed from the last time I did this ten years ago. They said, you can take in some statements from your a couple of like a your most recent statement from a bank statement and a credit card company statement. I thought, well, let's see, do I have some of those at the new address, right? So I I took a couple of those in. But I w the point is I I made the appointment and I went in the next morning willing to bet that this wasn't gonna work and it was gonna take me forever to get this done. And I I kind of felt like I need that driver's license renewed and ready in order to show it or put it in the TSA terminals at airports when I take this trip. Well, you know what? It turns out I don't think once I had to use that license, it was all about my passport. Um but lo and behold, I went in for my appointment at 8 30 to the MVA, and in literally twelve minutes, I was done. I was out, and the next day my driver's license showed up at my home, brand new driver's license, overnight to me. I think it was maybe a day l uh two days later, but it w I paid an extra eighteen dollars for them to expedite the delivery of it. And I'm saying literally within forty-eight hours of going there, one appointment, twelve minutes, my driver's license showed up at my home within forty-eight hours. Now that's unbelievable. I was stunned. I didn't they never asked for my birth certificate. They never asked for my social security card. Um I I showed 'em, I had a bank or statement there, a credit card company statement or something, just to verify where I'm living. I think they took a quick glance at that, but that was no big deal. Their main concern was, you know, put your forehead up here next to these things and let's see if you can read. They I did that, and I was curious. That's been ten years. I've always had good eyesight, but I thought, yeah, maybe my eyes are shot. We'll have to see. Maybe that could be an is an issue, and they're gonna say, I'm sorry, Mr. Cook, you have to go get glasses, right? Well, that's more time and another appointment and more expense. So I put my forehead up to the thing, and they showed me a bunch of letters. Uh, you know the drill. They get increasingly smaller, and in this case as they go down, and in this case there were four rows. Lady just asked me to read the letters off on the fourth row from left to right. I did. I got 'em all right. No problem. Then she said, you know, tell me what you see, and I saw a blinking light on both my right side and left side of my peripheral vision. Now what do you see? I said a blinking light on the right side. How about now? Blinking light on the left side. Okay, that's good. That was it. You know, and then I paid 87 bucks, about sixty or sixty-five dollars to get the license, and another eighteen to have it expressed to me so I could get it quick, and that was it. I was done. I was stunned. Twelve minutes. I'm in and out of the MVA with a new driver's license on its way to me that I got, you know, twenty-four hours later. Now how's that for amazing? I was I was I was so excited. I just walked out of there with all this stuff I had prepared to take in with me, which wasn't exactly what they told me on the phone I was gonna need. But now I'm sitting here on my literally sitting on my new driver's license, right? Good for I think at least eight years and maybe ten. You know sometimes life throws you a curveball and you're just not expecting it but you hit it out of the park. And it works. And it was great. So hats off to the MBA in Gathersburg, Maryland, because boy, those those folks and this lady was really nice. Uh they were they were so good, it was so quick. I set up the appointment online, I went in, no standing in lines, no waiting. I literally walk in and they call my number at, you know, booth eight, come to booth eight, and boy, that was that was one of the most amazing things that's ever happened in ten years. And I have my new driver's license, no restrictions, and it's good for years. Incredible. Contrary to what I thought was gonna happen, sometimes life throws you a positive curveball and you hit it out of the park. And it was just great. Um a shout out to the company that I use for podcasting, buzzsprout.com. Just like it sounds, BuzzSprout.com. You can go today, you could sign up for, I don't know, ten bucks a month or whatever it is, and you could start your own podcast with just a phone. And I told you earlier in the show about mine and how many countries it's been listened to now, 74 countries, and six ho almost 700 cities around the world have listened to this podcast. It's amazing the impact you can have, and one of the things that I wanted to that I put into this little outline for the radio show was to understand the power of a of a podcast and the power of podcasting, right? It it is an amazing thing. People can listen to them just about anywhere. If you have a passion for it in some way, go for it and you know, share your passion, try to make a difference, see where there's a need, and then go in and try and fill it. And if you have the right formula for filling it, you'll fill it and people will love it, and everything will work out great. And I just think it's so I just think that the power of a podcast is a wonderful thing. Um I'm gonna I gotta talk about the your rail pass. I was uh familiar with these when I was twenty one. I went around the world in 80 days with a couple of buddies, and when we went to Europe, we bought your rail passes, I think good for maybe a month or something. And we went all over Europe on the trains. Uh back in those days, if you'd traveled coach, you s you you sat in a car and they had three seats opposite of each other, so total of six seats in a compartment, and those seats would fold down together so they would meet in the middle, so at night you could sleep in the same car. Right? So I bought a your rail pass, a four-day URail pass for three hundred and three dollars. That allows me to travel pretty much anywhere in Europe on the train systems and Scandinavia um for four days, and you basically go in and you you you say, Okay, I'm gonna use day one today, and then they have a your rail pass app, and you go into the app and it says where you're trying to go from. I'm trying to go from you know London to Preston, England. Okay, here are the trains, here's the schedule. Um these are the trains that are in our system. If the train's not in the system, it'll tell you that. And you basically pull it through the app, you pull up the barcode on your phone that allows you passage to get on and off these trains. And in this last trip that I took, I bought a four-day year rail pass for $303. I found out that the one-way fare from London to Preston is $200. And I went from London to Preston, back to London, across the English Channel, up to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and from Rotterdam to Frankfurt. And I only use three days. So I've still got a day left that I can travel for free on the trains of Europe as long as I do it by June 5th. And I'm kind of going, well, if I can find a cheap way to get back over there, I might go over and use day four. Anyway, hats off to the URL Pass. It is a great way to get around Europe. It's even good for some some ferries, some boats, um, you know, etc. over there, not just for the trains, but it was a great time saver and a great money saver, and I I just loved it. It was fabulous. We're gonna take another break for about a minute. I'll be back and I'll tell you some stories of people that I met on this trip last week that are unbelievably nice. You're listening to the Junk Refund Show. I'm your host, Alan Cook, talking to you from the Wendy's parking lot, where I can't wait to eat in about 20 minutes. The Wendy's parking lot on Nicholson Lane in North Bethesda, Maryland. We'll be right back. This show is talking more about how to get it out of your life because I had such a blast last week traveling in Europe and visiting three different countries. The trains in Europe are fabulous. Um that brings me to a story that happened in Octon, Netherlands, uh, where I was traveling from Rotterdam towards Frankfurt, and one of the things that happens in a system of trains is that sometimes those trains cancel, and then you have to come up with plan B and go to the app and see when the next train is to try to get you from point A to point B. Well, one of those trains canceled in Octon, um, Netherlands last, I don't know, Friday, I guess it was. And the problem the real problem I had is that my iPhone needed to get charged, and on the train I was just on, they didn't have power outlets on there to charge your phone. So now my train's cancelled. I gotta get my phone powered up to find out when the next train is, and that's kind of critical. And so I I get off the train, there's kind of a nice business district right there, and I'm looking for a Starbucks where I can go in and just charge up my phone, but there's no Starbucks around. But there is a Chinese deli right there on the corner of this little strip mall kind of place, and so I walk in there and ask them if they have any out power outlets where I can charge my phone. And they said, No, we don't. They only have a you know a couple of tables in this little deli, but they said, No, we don't, unfortunately. But there's a kid, a twenty three year old kid, whose name is Andre, who is sitting in the corner of the deli. He's got his Phone out and he hears me and he says, Hey sir, I might be able to help you. And I I said, Yeah, I'm trying to find a way to charge my phone. And he pulls out his power pack from his backpack. He says, Here, you can use this. And he starts plugging it in. Now, this is the second time I've seen a power pack. I didn't know these things existed until a couple of months ago when a gentleman in our church uses one, and I had to use it to charge up my phone then. He says, Yeah, it's a power pack. Here, you can just sit here and we'll charge it up. And he just kind of takes control and starts to, you know, plugs it into my phone, plugs it in. He goes, There you go, starting to charge. And sure enough, it's starting to charge. He solved my problem right off the bat. I thought, well, okay, I'm going to be here for a few minutes. I might as well get some, you know, egg rolls or something to support this business. Now that I'm sitting inside their restaurant or their their deli, and I bought eight mini egg rolls for like five Euros or something. It wasn't much. And I go back and I sit down and Andre and I start talking while my phone is charging. Turns out that he's that's when I learned his name. He's 23 years old. He speaks five languages, including Dutch and English. And he lives in that city, but he's getting ready to move. And I was now concerned about taking up too much of his time. I had about 45 minutes before the next train came, and he pulls out his phone and verifies, yeah, your next train's coming at such and such time. It's on track one, no problem. You got 45 minutes, that's plenty of time to give some juice into your phone. And I'm just kind of blown away with how nice this guy is to a total stranger, right? I usually try to be the guy who's nice to the total strangers. Now the episode is flipped, and I'm the guy being treated really well here, which I'm all for. It was just a little different for me because I'm usually on the other side of the fence. So he verifies my train time, then he says, Hey, by the way, there's a technology store just right around the corner here. We could go in there and you could buy your own, you know, power pack. And I went, Now you're talking. That solves an even bigger problem for me. So after about 20 minutes of charging my phone, he goes, Here, follow me. Oh, okay. So we go around the corner into the store, and he takes me right to the power pack area, and he starts price shopping for me. There's one there that's $45. There's another one that says $19. He looks to see how many hours or whatever, watts or whatever that it will hold. He goes, Yeah, this is a good one. The $20 one. We go up to the counter, the guy rings it up and it says $40. 40 Euros instead of 20 Euros. Andre pipes up and goes, wait a minute, it said it was 20 Euros. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm sure. I stay there at the counter while he and the store employee go back to double check the pricing. He's doing this all for me, right? This is all about my phone and my need to get a phone charge. I'm standing at the counter, a spectator to what's going on. They come back a few minutes later, Andre hands me another one. He goes, Here, we're gonna let's do this one. This one's 26 euros, but it's got good capacity and all things considered is probably your best deal. And I went, fabulous. Ring me up. So I bought it. Um it's then time to go get on the train. Well, as we're walking to the train, Andre says to me out of the blue, he goes, Do you believe in God? I went, Yeah, I do. He said, I'm not sure if I do. I'm kind of an agnostic, I'm not sure, you know, what's I'm not sure what's up with that. Well, I kind of thought, well, I can kind of tell you, I think. I got some good ideas for you. But in the meantime, it wasn't even about that, it was about he wanted to get me over to track one, platform one, to make sure I got on the right train. Well, one of the things I learned, thanks to Andre, is when train number one comes in and starts dropping off people and loading people, sometimes train number two comes in right behind it and loads from that secondary position, and if you don't get on then, it's not gonna pull up and stop again in the first position, it's gonna go right through the station and move on. That was the case with this train that I needed to get on, and Andre knew that. So he says, Here, you should get on now just to be safe. Get get on the train now, etc. I got his name and his phone number from him, and I took my power pack with me that I was now I was now cocky and proud that I had stepped up, taken a step up in the world of technology. I got on the train, I plugged in the power pack, which already had some, you know, minutes on it that could some power on it that I could use it right away. And all of this all of this happened because Andre was attentive to someone else's needs. Now, if you want to bring some joy into your life, do what Andre did. Stop thinking about yourself, stop worrying about how many followers you have on Instagram, stop taking selfies and then posting them so you can get more attention or whatever. I'm not trying to be judgmental here, but you know what I'm saying. And look for opportunities to help out somebody else. Be observant and just observe what's going on around you and try to help out somebody else. There's a really good chance that there will be a need to help somebody out right under your nose. I mean, I couldn't believe it. In fact, when I got to Frankfurt and I decided to do the podcast from Frankfurt, I talked about three people, one of whom I'm going to talk about in just a second. I talked about three people I had met on the trip who were just extremely nice and who helped me out and were the model of how you help other people in life and find happiness. And my 23-year-old buddy named Andre in Octon, Netherlands, is one of those guys. The other guy I'm going to talk about is up in the Hague in the Netherlands, who works as one as a counselor to the president of the Hague Netherlands Temple. Now, this was the third temple I visited on this trip, and sometimes when you show up at these temples, we tend to build them next to one of our big meeting houses. And if you get there late at night, sometimes the meeting house is open, and they'll actually let you go in and just take a nap in one of the classrooms because it's not being used or anything. They'll let you take a nap, and then in the morning the temple opens up, and then you go into the temple and do your thing, and then you hop on a train and move on. Some of these temples have housing for people like me who travel to visit them. They actually offer housing where they put you up for the night for a whopping cost of eight dollars. And you basically get a college dorm room there on site with clean sheets, clean towels, your own bathroom, you know, all that stuff. And I used three of those at three of the temples I went to and actually stayed there. This one in The Hague does not have anything like that. It's just the temple, and it's not next to a church. That's just fine unless you show up at midnight and the temple's not going to open until about 8 a.m. Then you got a problem. And I'm one of these guys who says, I, you know, I'm just I'm by myself. I don't want to spend a couple of hundred euros to get a hotel room when I'm really only going to be in the room for maybe five hours by the time I get there and then get up in the morning and come back here. I, you know, is there a park bench I can lie down on? Is there a place I can sleep? You know, whatever. Well, in this and and keep in mind, these these temples that we built are multi-million dollar facilities. We make sure we have security and cameras at these places. So the one thing I don't want to do is look like I'm, you know, hanging around where I shouldn't be hanging around, and that I'm a threat to the property or whatever. So at midnight, just because of the way the train system worked, here I am showing up at this place, and I ended up sleeping on a park bench that was across the parking lot from this temple for a few hours. It was not cold, it was only about 50 degrees, so that was tolerable. I even slept on a sidewalk in between the hedges on the outside fence of the temple lot and the front bumper of a car that was parked in the parking lot. You know, you got a two-foot gap on the sidewalk in between the bumper of the car and the hedges on the outside of the temple, and it's dark because you're in the shadows. And when you're doing what I'm doing, you want to just kind of slip into the shadows and disappear for a few hours until about 7 a.m. Well, I'm one of these crazy guys that can sleep in an airport, in the gate of an airport, in the corner, on the floor, if it's quiet, and I don't need a mattress, and I can actually fall asleep. For a couple hours I slept in between this car and the hedges, on a sidewalk, no mattress. How's that for crazy? Waiting for it to open up. Eventually I went over to the park bench at about six in the morning and just kind of stretched out on the park bench and tried to fall asleep in a kind of a reclining but sitting position. And a young a young guy, I'm gonna say in his 30s or something, that lives right across the canal from the the parking lot I'm in, comes out of comes out and starts walking his dog. And he sees me sitting there on a park bench at 6 a.m. and he walks the dog and he comes back and he comes over to me and goes, Hey, are you okay? Is everything all right? I said, Yeah, I'm waiting for this temple to open up at about 7 30 or 8 o'clock, and I've been here since midnight, and I just didn't want to go get a hotel, so I'm just kind of hanging out here until they open up. He says, Can I get you some coffee? I went, No, I don't drink coffee. Can I get you some tea? No, I don't drink tea either. I said, Do you have any hot chocolate? He goes, Not really, but let me see what I can whip up for you. Well, he goes into his house and about five minutes later comes out with this piping hot cup of homemade hot chocolate that he said, I even put maple syrup in it. I went, Okay, this should be fun. And boy, did it feel good to put a warm glass in my hands and just drink some hot chocolate. Which I did for about ten or fifteen minutes. And he said, Oh, by the way, I gotta go to work. When you're done, just put the the glass back the container back on my uh my doorstep. I went, Awesome, okay. This was a plastic large cup with a plastic lid on top that you can, you know, lift up and put back down, right? So I finished the hot chocolate, I lifted the lid up, I stuck a five dollar bill underneath it, I put the lid back down, and I put the cup back on his front porch. At this point, it's about seven fifteen in the morning, it's getting still kinda cold. I've been out I've been outside for seven hours, and there was a guy who showed up at this temple at six AM in his car, and I thought he's probably the security guy or somebody to kind of get the building started, but he's the only guy that showed up. Well, I decided to go around to the front door and just, you know, kind of ring the doorbell and see if anybody answered. Well, sure enough he did. I told him my situation. He goes, Oh heaven's sakes, come on in. And he takes me down into the basement. There's there's three guys who kind of oversee the operation of one of these big temples, a president of the temple and his two counselors. And the guy who took me in said, one of the counselors of the temple presidency is gonna come walking in this room any minute. Just say hi to him and let him know what you're doing that I let you in and you'll be fine. That temple counselor came in and basically laid an andre on me. He came in and said, Hey, um, would you like some tea? And he said, We have we have uh red bear tea here which which we serve in the temple to people. Would you like some tea? And I went, Yeah, I would like some tea. He gets me this piping hot container or cup of tea. He says, Would you like some breakfast? I went, Yeah, I'd like some breakfast. He pulls out a loaf of bread, pulls a couple of slices out of it, puts it on a plate, butters the slices for me. He says, Would you like some real Dutch cheese? I went, Well, yeah. So he slices off three slices of cheese for each slice of bread, and basically he's fixing me this breakfast right in front of my eyes. He hands it to me, he says, Hey, when you're done, just put the plate in the sink. Oh, that'll be fine. Then he said, Oh, by the way, when you're done with this, you've still got about an hour and a half before your appointment upstairs in the temple. If you go up the stairs to your left, there's a waiting room right there, but if you go into the closet of that waiting room, there's kind of uh that waiting room is kind of a large closet, there's actually a couch right there that you could hang out, you could take a nap for an hour before you come into the session. And I went, fabulous. I mean that's that's just first class service, right? All the way. Um so I talked about when I did my podcast from the train station, I talked about Andre, I talked about this guy in The Hague. Just the pure kindness that these guys showed me was incredible and I loved it. And I was so touched by their kindness and the way they made me feel that I talked about it in the podcast last Friday from the Frankfurt train station, and I'm talking about it now because those kind of people are the people you always remember, and if you are one of those kinds of people, you're gonna get blessed in your life, and God's gonna help take some of the junk out of your life because you're taking the time to take care of somebody else, which God really loves. So there you go. If you want to hear more about my my ep my uh my trip over there on the podcast, go to the podcast called How Great Shall Be My Joy, and just just download the most recent episode from Frankfurt, you'll see it, and I'll tell you more stories and more details about the couple of stories I just shared with you here. But anyway, those are some thoughts about what my what my week has been like in this last week. One of the one of the best weeks of my life, and I actually crammed it into about five days, and I loved it. So celebrate your birthday, treat other people with kindness, and you're gonna have a wonderful life, and you're gonna be able to handle any of the hiccups that come along along the way, which is just a normal part of life, because you're floating along on such a high level on a high plane because you're so excited about your own life. So that's it for today for the Junk Refund Show. Uh check out the podcast. Thanks to BBS Radio for their support, to Don Newsom, a great producer, and we will talk to you next week, Thursday, 3 o'clock, on the BBS Radio Network, live at BBSradio.com. I'm your host, Alan Cook. Have a great week, and if you're bored and you don't know what to do, go to Europe for five days. That'll work for you. Thanks everybody. See you next week.