It's Tourist Season!

 Living where we do, we are in the heart of the celebration. Mount Rushmore a mere 45 minutes away is having a huge celebration; fireworks and events throughout the week. Are we going? Heck no! We are in peak tourist season here and we do not even go to town unless we absolutely have to. There are RV's everywhere clogging up the streets. Out of state license plates line Main Street and don't even think about going out to eat. 

We did have to go to town however, to get a package at the post office. This might be foreign to many of you, but if you have a large package, we have to go to the post office to get it. No, the mailperson does not drive up to your door and drop it off. We do have an oversized mailbox which accommodates a lot of items but anything larger than that stays in at the post office and we have to drive 20 miles to go get it. 

But Rushmore is not the only tourist attraction, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Custer State Park and Crazy Horse are all within an hour of our house. Not mention The Badlands and Wall Drug a couple hours away. Yes, it is crazy around here right now. 

Think about how our country has changed and grown in 250 years. The first thing that came to my mind was farming practices from the horse and oxen single plows of the 1700's, the first steam tractor in mid 1800's, gas tractors in the early 1900's to the air conditioned, nearly fully automated equipment of today. 

Heck in our own lifetime we have seen the invention of computers, cell phones, and most importantly TV remote controls! I remember having to be the remote while I was a child, sitting next to the TV changing the channels as my dad said "Next, next, go back" as I flipped through the 6 or so stations, we had. 

I wonder what the country will look like 250 years from now when our great, great, great grandchildren (I think I got that right) are alive. One thing I hope for is that that generation will look back at how we treated cancer with radiation and think how barbaric it was. Do you think people will even have babies naturally anymore? Or will they be grown in incubators? Seems weird to think about today, but it is conceivable (see what I did right there?!?!)

The 4th of July is especially special to us as it is the day that our daughter Jessica was born. It is hard to believe that our little girl is 45 years old! She is celebrating while on vacation in Myrtle Beach with her family and our son Forrest and his family.

But alas, we live in today, so let's talk about that. We are continuing to work on getting the woodshed filled. We are better than halfway, but the high temps really put a damper on our motivation. 

Barb is about as far as she can get on the landscaping for now until we get more rock. She added two more juniper plants and some larger quartz chucks for some color.  

Dan and Bonnie came over one afternoon; we smoked some salmon and played dice games. 

They were down to their last few pennies, but they won and actually went home with some dollar bills in their pockets!

That weekend we drove to Spearfish to see Ryan and Alana and have a doggie playdate with Sophie and Loki. Ryan and Alana live on a golf course we spent the afternoon critiquing the golfers as the dogs played. 

A few hours later the dogs were all tuckered out.

They were even tired on the way home!

I did get away for one solo adventure when I drove to central Wyoming to scout for elk for my hunting trip in October. Talk about remote country, I bet not many of you have heard of Lysite Wyoming. With a population of 80 it is the nearest town to where we will be hunting. 

I have been applying for this tag for 9 years and finally got it! While checking out the area looking for a place to hunt this fall, I saw lots of wildlife, the most prominent being pronghorn antelope. 

Next was mule deer. I ran across a group of bucks and got some really cool shots of them.

But I was out there looking for elk of which I only saw one, a lone cow elk down by a stream. 

The area is mostly grazing land for cattle with thousands and thousands of cattle everywhere.

It is very dry out there right now so I focused on the many springs in the area thinking the wildlife would need to stay near water sources to survive. These springs popped out of virtually nowhere to provide much needed water to the local residents. 

There was plenty of other smaller critters living around these water holes; like this marmot and sage hen. 

Meanwhile back home I put out a few trail cameras. Lots of cows and a few deer......

Three weeks until Maisie Day! The Amazon driver is getting tired of coming to our house, but I think Barb has ordered everything she needs for her arrival!

The next 10 or so day should go pretty quick as we are headed off on another adventure!

Who Has Been Commenting on Your Blog the Longest?

 We have been blogging now for over 12 years with our first post coming out in February 2014. We had sold our house, 90% of our belongings and were weeks from going on the road in our RV. That first post received one comment. The following week, our next post received 3 comments. Over the next 12 years, that one reader has been a faithful reader as far as I can tell, commenting on each and every blog. 

Who was this reader you ask? Surely it was someone who knew us, a family member or a good friend who wanted to follow along as we went on our big adventure. Oh, contraire. Bloggers out there know family members rarely comment on your posts. This reader was someone I had not even met (yet), but was a likeminded traveler/blogger, traveling the country with their spouse. 

That got me to thinking... who are the top 5 commentors who have been consistently reading and commenting on our blog as I went back to 2014 and took a look. Most, of our commentors were and continue to be fellow bloggers; some were travelers like us, others were living a "normal" life and blog about their weekly lives. I have a loose rule that if someone comments on our blog, I in turn read their blog and leave a comment. Some of these "relationships" have continued for over a decade.

Going back and reading those early posts brings back a lot of memories and a lot of questions. The memories were from the many adventures and new experiences we had back then. The questions came from wondering where some of these bloggers that stopped blogging were today. Some wrote a farewell post saying that they were moving on to another chapter of their lives and were no longer going to blog, others just disappeared into the mist. I sometimes learned that the blogger had passed away, many times I have no idea what happened. 

So, who is this reader that has stuck with us for over 12 years? Let me start by telling you the top 5, all of whom are or were fellow bloggers. #5 is none other than the infamous Dino and Lisa who first started commenting in March of 2015. He has been enamored by my writing ever since and anxiously awaits our posts each week. He still blogs once in a while, but he has a hard time putting a coherent sentence together but once every month or two when he is sober enough to post one. 

#4 goes to Steve and Dianne who started in January of 2015. These first two we met while we were on the road and started reading each other's blogs.  They still blog consistently every few weeks about their adventures in Canada and abroad. 

For the remaining 3, we read each other's blogs but not met. We have met each of them since them, but in some cases did not meet in person for years. #3 belongs to good friends Jim and Diana. We have been following each other's blogs since December of 2014 and have since met up numerous times over the years here in South Dakota, Michigan and Florida to name a few. In fact, the first time we met them is when they were passing through South Dakota and stopped to see us!

#2 is John and Pam, they have since stopped blogging but continue to read ours. We have been able to get together with a couple of times over the years and are a great couple. For those of you who know John and Pam, you understand that this first picture is the perfect picture of the four of us. 

#1....drum roll..... is Debbie and Steve! We found each other's blogs in 2014, and I would venture to say we have commented on each other's blogs since then. In fact, I bet if Debbie were to look back, we are probably their most faithful commentors. 

So many good friends, so many good memories. Hopefully decades more to come. Who are your longest commentors? How long have they been with you? We will stop blogging someday, Lord willing, by my own choice with a farewell post, but who knows....

Four more weeks!

Waking Up

 What time do you wake up in the morning? For me it varies, but it is almost always before 6am, sometimes much earlier. The first thing I do when I wake up is try and guess what time it is. More often than not, I can guess it within 10 minutes. Other times, I am way off. 

First, I listen. If I don't hear birds, I know it is early and I should go back to sleep. Many mornings I cannot. If I do hear birds, I know it is at least 4am as that is when the little tweet-tweeters start tweeting. Then I open my eyes. Is it light out? The amount of light gives me my next clue of what time it is. The first vestiges of light take place about the same time as the tweeters. The lighter it is, the later my guess. 

This morning I woke up when there was no light. I guessed 3:30. I was 12 minutes off at 3:42. When my internal clock is off, I will do this exercise only to find out it is something like 12:40am and try to go back to sleep. Sometimes my brain will let me, sometimes it will not. If it does not, I will ever so quietly go to the closet and grab my robe and a blanket. As I am sliding the door closed (it is a sliding barndoor), Barb will often say, "You are not a church mouse". Other times she will say, "Seriously?", to which I would say, "I am a church mouse". To which she will say, "You are not a church mouse". 

I will then go out to the couch sit in the recliner and either try to get back to sleep, work on the blog, or just watch TV. Sometimes I will take sit in the hot tub and enjoy sound of the tweeters. 

I have a friend who will remain nameless, but you read his name in almost every blog, who on several occasions as gotten up, made himself breakfast, ate it, got ready for work only to find it is like 12:30am and he does not have to be to work until 7!

At some point, I may fall back asleep for a bit, usually for 30-60 minutes before I am up for the day. And there you have it, my morning routine probably 5 out of 7 days. The other two days I sleep until 6ish, now those are good days!

Barb was busy working on her landscaping this week. We borrowed Neighbor Jim's dump trailer and went to the rock store and got some landscaping rock.

Barb also made a rolling rack for our kayaks so we can move them out of the way and load them easier. 

We also spent an afternoon at Neighbor Jim and Carmen's helping them put trusses up over their garden. You see, there is so much hail here that most gardens have some kind of covering over them. Jim and Carmen are expanding their garden, putting trusses over it and then laying hardware wire over the top.

Now, that is going to be a garden!

I continued work on my deer blind. It is basically done, I am just waiting on the plexiglass to come in. The stuff they carried at the store was not thick enough. I wanted 1/4" plexi and had to order it online. 

In the fun category we went over to Kevin and Cheryl's for supper one night. Kevin's mom came up from Arizona for the week so we went to see her. Well into her 80's, she is a sweet woman and a joy to visit. 

We also got out fishing again! Same lake as last week. A beautiful day, 80 degrees, light wind and the fish were biting. 

While our target species was walleye, we caught 3 different species as well; crappie, smallmouth bass, and catfish.

I know many of you are wondering who caught the biggest and who caught the most but the thing you understand is that fishing is really a team sport and keeping track of things like that are really unimportant and if you really think about it, petty, so on this day I am going to say there was no outright better fisherperson. We are just going to move on and focus on other things.  Overall, we caught dozens of fish, keeping 5 walleye for the supper table. 

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. We both miss our dads to this day. My dad has been gone over 26 years; he would have been 100 this year. Barb's dad has been gone for 14 years now and would have been 88 this year. 

Here is your dose of cuteness for the week. While the baby fawn did not return for a visit, some other forest friends did in the form of a baby squirrel and bunny!

Then there is Ms. Maisie......we can pick her up in less than 5 weeks!

Have a great week!