Vacation Blogging

I am blogging our vacation here:

http://huckleberrypi.blogspot.com

We've had a lovely time so far, with lots of nice letterboxes in gorgeous locations. A few hits and misses with the boxes, but all in nice locations.

We also had a great dinner with lionsmane and AstroD and spouses in Santa Fe.

As I type, I am watching Shadow Mountain Lake near Grand Lake Colorado. It's a lovely view. Today looks to be a nice day for hiking and enjoying Rocky Mountain National Park, which is our agenda for the day.

Car Packed

I'm up first...it's 5:30 am and we're leaving in a little over an hour--or really, whenever everyone's ready to go. That's one of the best things about car trips, isn't it? There's really no hard and fast deadline about when you have to pull out of the driveway.

Anyway, it's such an anticipatory feeling. Both the adults are looking forward to completely and totally relaxing. That's why the two weeks. It just takes almost a week to fully slough off work and responsibilities and the whole nine yards that serve to make our daily lives fairly hectic.

Peachy Keen

Summer produce. Yum.

Thanks to a sweet friend (hi Vicky!), we had some lovely Fredericksburg peaches hand-delivered to us when we were in Austin. I had dreams of a cobbler, but we sort of fell on them like hungry fruit-starved wolves and ate them right out of the bag (all four of us like peaches).

We're not doing our CSA this spring/summer, so I ventured over to a farmer's market this weekend. Local corn and some heirloom tomatoes. More peaches, and some lovely local blueberries. Blueberries for a cobbler; peaches to eat. A few of the peaches got a little too ripe, so I wanted to cook with them.

As an aside, I also bought a gazpacho at the market...I've been craving gazpacho. I usually make my own, and I sort of had all the ingredients, but I couldn't resist the already-assembled variety. This one was different than the type I make--the chunks were bigger and it used raw corn. Different, and good; Paul and I ate it right up. My soup uses carrots and a bit of tomato juice and balsamic vinegar--this one was carrot-free and was kind of in a watery, but spicy broth. There are probably a million different gazpacho recipes.

Anyway, back to the peaches. Tonight's dinner was pan-sauteed pork chops with a peach-adobo sauce. The peaches break down and form a sauce...and the chipotle peppers (only two) add a bit of perk without the kids noticing too much of a bite.

What's your favorite summer produce and how do you use it?

What's Your Saying?

One thing we noticed about Austin is how sort of tuned into t-shirts people seem to be. I'm not sure why that is--it would be interesting if someone had an idea. Maybe it's because it's a university town.

Anyway, a lot of our shirts (as befitting our geek status) are sort of math-y. My husband was in line at the Einstein Bros and the guy behind him turned and said, "e gets no respect! Pi takes all the attention!" because he was wearing his e shirt. Then the worker chimed in on the math shirt theme. A similar scene was repeated the next day when he was wearing his speed racer shirt.

I have a favorite shirt that is a picture of various animals and the line, "with our powers combined....we are platypus!" My boys are kind of into these star wars fan shirts with giant vehicles with @ @ signs (star wars fans will get it--they're at-ats). They like the funny shirts at woot, and we generally check out the day's shirt offering together.

What's your favorite shirt and how stained and messed up does it have to get before you will stop wearing it?

Austin

We went to Austin for the weekend and stayed a few extra days. It's very easy to be at my sister's house. The neighborhood pool we've gone to for years and years is permanently closed this year, so we haven't had the chance to swim that much here. So, it was nice to be able to swim whenever we wanted to. Paul was going to go into the Austin office and work from there, but somehow that never materialized and he just telecommuted. That's not something he can do all the time, but it is nice when he can.

Anyway, I felt myself really relaxing into the rhythm of the summer. Like the last little bit of tension from this crazy busy spring finally went away.

We were getting ready to leave--hoping to find a few letterboxes--when we realized that the back tire was completely flat. Many thanks to Lamb's Automotive in Austin for patching the tire relatively quickly and with great service. But that meant we were delayed, so we of course couldn't stop. Story of my letterboxing life! But, the boxes will be there when we go back in August.

Obsessive Trip Planning

I'm in the midst of planning our big summer vacation. It's a road trip to Colorado and Wyoming and South Dakota. About 17 days of on-the-road fun.

I really love armchair traveling. I like reading about the places we're going to visit and figuring out all the options. We have an odd hybrid of traveling rigidly and traveling flexibly. I plan obsessively, and make a giant spiral bound book of all of our options. Then, when we're on the road, we have the option of picking and choosing the things we feel like doing.

When we're going to be somewhere where hotel rooms are scarcer, I like to book in advance. But when we're just seeing how far we can get, we just take the AAA books with us and call about an hour before we want to stop. Did you know that a lot of hotels will drop their rates around 9-10pm? That's when they're just sort of desperate to fill the room for the night.

Our recent road trip to Michigan was not our typical planned vacation...in that we had a much more rigid time table. We were pulling a U-haul up there, so we didn't feel comfortable with sort of our meandering ways...it was straight ahead and stay on the highway and only stop in those sorts of places where you can pull through! No backing up with a trailer!

On the way back, we were able to wander a little bit more, because we'd left the trailer in East Lansing. We also found a few letterboxes on the way back. The only state I added to my life list was Arkansas. But I hope to add Wyoming and South Dakota with perhaps Montana onto our states we've found letterboxes in!

Laid up

I sustained an injury while letterboxing yesterday. I stepped into a pipe that was hidden by leaves and debris. To do it, you had to step just right and I did. I didn't see it, of course, before hand, and I imagine I was quite a sight falling straight down (and not in a good way). My foot got stuck and to get it out I had to sort of twist it. Which means that I bruised and damaged my shin and calf. Thanks to my hiking buddy, I got home. Then I cleaned it up and dressed and cleaned the wound. There's nothing really that could be done--it wasn't anything you could stitch up. No broken bone, thankfully! But boy did it (and does it) hurt.

Anyway, the upshoot is that I'm stuck laid up for the next few days. I have some crutches, but it's best if I stick to the couch and the bed.

So, I'm asking my buddies, send me links to fun online games or funny youtube videos. Post them in the comments or email me. Anything to keep me amused while I'm out of commission.