I believe that in this tutorial, he talks about how to tell your node to talk to a few specific nodes and once you get that connected your node will query others and you can delete the specific node you entered. This series is excellent. Hope it can help.
Discussion
Thank you, I'll give this a try.
Looks like thesolutions you suggested is at 24:30 in the newer video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fx_mLXISrfM
Unfortunately that didn't fix my problem. I'll keep troubleshooting.