RV Vacation of 2016: Second leg, AZ

From White Sands NM, we drove to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Parks, which are really the same place, just on opposite sides of the highway. They are both pretty darned good destination parks, but Petrified Forest just isn't "overwhelming," it is more like, "boggling." It is very interesting, but it seems pretty overshadowed by the Painted Desert, which is very, very beatiful.  My oldest plopped down and just soaked it in, stating that she wished she could just sit all day and look at it.  I recognize that fascination with the "lonely places." It really is surreal in person, and bigger than any postcard or picture can do justice to of course.  The diversity of landscape truly illustrates an amazing creator.

A petrified log.

I have no idea why this boy is saluting, other than just to say, He is really weird...

From there, of course, we went to... where else, but the Grand Canyon!  The Grand Canyon always presents a problem to me; it is sooo grand, and such a canyon, that I kind of don't know what to do with it.  I see it, and I feel that doing anything less than hiking it, rafting it, repelling down it, thoroughly exploring it, etc is sort of doing it an injustice.  So I pretty much find one spot, walk up to it and take a few pictures of it and leave.  I figure the less time I spend there, the less of an injustice I have done to it.  I know, it makes no sense at all... Anyway, how else can you justify spending just 3 hours at the Grand Canyon?

My mountain goats!  This really was an edge of the cliff, not phony like the photo below.  It was a LOOONG ways down.

HELP!!

We reckoned by the Park Signs that from where we were standing (south rim) to the opposite rim was about the distance from my house to my office; about 20 miles. A little hard to fathom...

Another fun Arizona thing to do was explore the famous route 66.  We didn't go out of our way to "Get our kicks on Route 66," but we camped in Williams, AZ and went to their downtown area and it was a really neat little touristy town.  

We saw some other Route 66 artifacts like these iconic little concrete Wig-Wams.  When I saw these, I just shut the old RV down, right smack dab in the middle of the street to take this picture below.

The office is to the right of the picture; then what isn't in the picture is on the other side of the office is an old tow truck that looks like the one in the movie "Cars."  I didn't get a picture of it because by then everybody else driving was getting irritated at me, but I shouted "Hey, kids, look! Its TATER!!!"  They thought it was SOOOO funny that I called him Tater; I guess it is 'Mater, rather than Tater..." Anyway, it made their day...

But with more time, I would have liked to do some more exploration of the Historic Route 66.  I thought it was really interesting; we just stumbled upon it inadvertently.

RV Vacation of 2016:First leg, TX & NM

On the way home from spending an amazing week at Yellowstone National Park in 2014, I told Herself that we were going to save up for 2 years, and do it again for TWO weeks, except we would do a National Park tour in an RV instead of our car.  So, that is exactly what we did; saved our pennies and found a company in Wichita (USA Rv Sales and Rental; great company!) that would rent a family of six an RV.  I'm planning on putting a few memories down on this blog, mostly for the sake of my own memory, not because I imagine that anyone else would be that interested.

I had decided that as the spiritual leader of my family, I wanted to emphasize 2 different elements on this trip, and they would be the common thread that I tried to weave throughout the entire 2 weeks:
First: I wanted my family to study and appreciate God's creation and bring him glory through that study and appreciation, and
Second: I wanted my family to better understand some basic life/social skills of getting along with each other that involve sacrificially giving up what each of us perceive as our rights.  ie, it is my right to my own personal space, it is my  right to my turn on the ipad, it is my right to sit there, it is my right to drink the rest of the juice before finding out if anybody else wanted any.  You get the idea; there were ample opportunities for learning.  I just feel that this is the most basic of building blocks for a good relationship with anybody, but especially important with spousal relationships; you know, watching out for each other, not just yourself...

We started off Friday morning May 6th after taking the kids out of school a few days early. Here we are, about to leave:

We drove (and from this point on, when I say "We drove" know that I mean "I drove," Herself didn't want to drive very much, and I figured I'd be a nervous wreck as a passenger, so I did ALL the driving), on that first day about 10 hours, trying to get pretty close to Carlsbad Caverns so we could go Caving the next morning.

We stopped a few hours short of Carlsbad and camped, and while setting up camp, I noticed the inside Dually was completely flat.  Sooo, in taking care of that the next day in Roswell N.M., it took too long to get the tire fixed to be make the cut-off time to tour the Caverns (they want you there by 1:00, so that they can go home at 5:00...).  

Roswell, NM

So Mamacita got on her phone and found a camping spot at a different National Park just about an hour south of our intended destination called Guadalupe National Park, a much lesser known and smaller park that would suit our needs perfectly; we drove there, parked, camped, hiked, and slept.  Then loaded up first thing in the AM and got to Carlsbad early.

Carlsbad was... well, incredible!  I just kept thinking; All this cavern, and we would have never know it was there if there would have been one boulder sitting over the natural entrance...  How many more caverns are there under our feet that don't have a "Natural Entrance" like the one we descended into? Anyway, take it from me, if you haven't ever been, you should.

The elevator that normally takes people down the initial 700' below ground level that makes the main portion of it ADA accessible had been broken down for about 7-8 months, so we had to "Hoof" it.  It wasn't easy, but whoever said vacations were supposed to be easy? 

From Carlsbad we went to White Sands New Mexico. It was sooo weird; you are just driving through desert, when Bam! There is a 20' tall pure white sand dune smack in front of you. It was especially interesting to us as the kid's Grandpa used to set off rockets and missiles for the US government there, so we had heard lots of stories about it...

single purpose tool...

Those of you who know me, know that I have a hard time focusing sometimes; I'm easily distracted. For example, yesterday, Stuart and I were working on our new garden area and trying to tuck the weed barrier fabric (that goes in between the raised beds) under the raised beds.

I looked around for my margin trowel from my old masonry days, but due to my children's socialist worldviews of redistributing an even layer of my tools all over our farm (it seems unfair that tools should only be available in the shed, right?), I couldn't find it.  So since I'm something of an unabashed show-off to my kids, I decided to just make a specific-use tool right then and there.  I was within a stone's throw of the forge and anvil, and Stu was just standing there, waiting to be impressed, so I grabbed a scrap piece of iron and lit the forge. This is where it begins getting ridiculous...

And 20 minutes later, viola! a new tool! Quite possibly the world's only Weed Barrier Stuffer Underneather The Garden Beds Tool.

And here is a picture of it at work:  Order yours now, while supplies last! By Danco manufacturing!  (just to be perfectly clear; that's a joke...)

And, I turned the profile view into an "S" for Stuart.

In addition to making a tool that will never be used again, believe it or not, we even got a little something done on the garden...

Still more butchering...

Lest I wear anyone out by regaling still more stories of butchering, let me preface this by saying, I'm almost done here with the whole butchering scene for a while.  But, boy did I finish a pretty strong run of 4 weekends in a row!  Here is the rundown: I started with two of Boy's rabbits, moved up to a large wether, then did the 2 hogs I blogged about last week, and then this last week I helped process a rather large, misbehaving cow that messed up bad enough to get on Dad's "Short-list," so to speak.

If you think about how the last 4 weeks has played out with each weekend's slaughtering growing by at least doubling the weight each time, I HAVE to stop, or find a bison, or an elephant... Here are a few pictures:

Nephew and I coming out of cooler.  It was a big job hanging it, even in 6 pieces...

This picture is really disturbing to me, and here's why:  when I look at myself in this picture, I just see  the spit and image of my dad.  That's not disturbing in itself; what is disturbing is, it actually looks just like my dad with an ever-growing BALD SPOT! Which my dad doesn't have, incidentally. And, if we got to counting, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that I've got more grey hair than him, too!  Anyway, you can tell that we had brothers-in-law, nephews, a new friend, cousins, and last but certainly not least, fun.

I felt like it went really well for my first beef; (dad was still limping bad enough that he sat out; it wasn't HIS first beef) we had it skinned, gutted, quartered, and hung in a couple of hours. I didn't think that was too bad for a bunch of greenhorns.  We will let it age for a couple of weeks and then cut it down from there.

Serious Eats, and Serious Meats...

Is there anything better than sausage?  I'm sure there is, but as seriously as we take all of our meat at the Thistle and Lily, many of our favorite go-to meals involve sausage.  The humble hog, along with common herbs and spices, will supply an amazing variety of foods.  We took the opportunity this weekend alongside our favorite butchering-buddies, the Fall family, to really explore and expand our charcuterie skills.  We took a whole hog, (and a large one at that: 450lbs,) and butchered it for the sole purpose of sausage making, with the only exception being the tenderloin and, of course, the bacon.  We all agreed that if we wasted the bacon, then heaven would rain upon us fire, brimstone, lightning, and maybe even something really stinky as well, just so God could be sure of us knowing his displeasure at wasting bacon.

The Falls brought a hog to butcher as well, and together, we made nearly 260 pounds of pork to grind, mix, stuff, and/or smoke.  We've done something like this before, without ever committing an entire beast to sausage, though, and we feel like we always ran out of sausage too quickly, and aways previously, we've purchased the seasonings in premixed bags from commercial food processors.  We figured that if we're going to all the trouble of breeding, farrowing, and raising our own stock, why would we "sell out" at the last minute and trust someone else to make a quality sausage mix for us?  Well, we wouldn't, and neither would you.  We went "whole hog." I reckoned I could do it as well or better than those people, so Herself and I searched out the best sounding sausage recipes for pork sausages, and came up with recipes for the following:

German (or Garlic Sausage)

Kielbasa (our fave)

Sage breakfast

Italian

Andouille

Hot Links (the one exception)

Why, you ask?  Because we can.  And because we want to.  And because the Fall-Foster team is an awesome force to behold.  We could probably charge admission for people to come and watch the gore flying around.  We literally stuffed nearly TWO FOOTBALL FIELDS worth of sausage casings today!

Some of the ingredients.

about 9 foot long stretched out. 450 pounds.

Above is what 260 pounds of sausage looks like, bagged, roped and linked.  This is besides the other hog's ham, bacon, tenderloin, and loin roasts.

I know, a walk in freezer is a little over the top, right?  But if you are serious about your charcuterie, you NEED a walk-in freezer...

50 lbs of Kielbasa on the rotisserie.

And finally, kielbasas in the cooler next to the pork bellies brining for a week to be made into bacon.

I know that isn't for everybody, (obviously) but I can't express the amount of fulfillment I get from being a producer, instead of a consumer.  Not to mention providing for my family some seriously good eats!

The Dumbest Man Alive... (Or what Herself wants, Herself gets; Part II)

If, by chance, you thought you knew someone dumber than me, hopefully this post will toss out any such thought without any possible refutation.  I am going to present to you a pictorial argument that will leave you stunned and breathless, nothing short of amazed about how dumb I am, and how stupidly I spend my time. This is in regard to my shutters that I am building for my house, a completely frivolous venture to begin with.  But really what this whole thing stemmed from, is Herself and me looking through countless catalogs and Pinterest not being able to find just what we like, compounded by the problem that even something that we don't quite love being extraordinarily expensive.  So what are ya gonna do? You are just gonna make them yourself.  That's the only way you are going to get what you want for a price you can afford.  You just have to commit.  Stupid!

Boards cut, painted, stacked, ready for assembly.

Shutters assembled.

 Below is the really long (stupid long) process.  This is the hinge making portion, which is the part that really took up a lot of time.  You can see the process in the picture below, I cut the curved part out of big strap iron, and welded it onto the side the long skinny strap.  I made a template for cutting out the curved stuff, but it was still really laborious and tedious.

Here, below, you can see (somewhat) how laborious it was...

Then after the curved portion is cut and welded onto the main piece, I ground the weld down so that it would look as if it were one piece.  I could have, of course, just cut the whole thing out of one big wide piece, but that would have meant a substantial amount more money and a lot more waste.

Tweaking something; I'm unsure what I was doing. This is really a Show-
Off picture of my beautiful anvil.  Isn't She lovely?

With the side (mounting) brackets welded on.

Holes drilled for carriage bolts.

 And now we come to one of the REALLY dumb parts.  Round headed carriage bolts on my "Old World" looking hinges?  Get out!  Not happening here!  I had so much fun explaining to everyone who looked at me as if I were crazy, that I didn't want to do this, but that Herself insisted upon it, and even threatened if leave me if I couldn't come up with square headed bolts.  For some reason, she didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did...

 And viola! Square-headed bolts!  Its all about the details, right?  And Herself didn't leave me!  Marital crisis averted...

Close up view.

So, I think I hold the undisputed position of Dumbest Man Alive.  I dare anyone out there to produce evidence of wasting as many hours doing anything as superfluous as shutters and hinges that don't work (Casement windows; can't really have shutters that open from the outside.) Can I get an amen?