Trips

Post “Turkey” Coma (Thanksgiving Part 1)

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that all your meals turn out as fabulous as our first Thanksgiving of the season did. Holy Wow! 1st Thanksgiving what? So, the NCHA futurity is going on in Ft. Worth, Texas right now and my uncle has some horses entered. When we started discussing Thanksgiving plans last month, we weren’t sure when he’d draw to show, plus the fact that this isn’t our year to have Tbug on Thanksgiving so we just decided to celebrate Thanksgiving last weekend. It was perfect.

There are 6 of us that headed to my aunts house in southern Oklahoma and right now we only have vehicles that will haul 5 people at a time so Abug, Mom, and I loaded up first thing Friday and drove down to AC & UB’s. Hubby took the day off to try his luck at deer hunting and be ready to pick Tbug up after school, come home and have chores done, pick dad up after work, and then they headed out. I should mention that they swung by J.L’s BBQ in Pryor (which is a little out of the way…..) for dinner before heading on to AC & UB’s but that’s okay 😘.

When AC & UB were up last month for a horse show, we ran to Sam’s Club and AC bought me a Cast Iron cookbook with the “stipulation” that I had to make something out of it for Thanksgiving. I decided to make the Orange Rolls (kind of like Cinnamon Rolls) for breakfast for Saturday morning. They were a little dry, but very good.

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Horse ‘n Around on Halloween

After we went to the Trunk or Treat at the hospital, Abug and I met up with hubby and Jared and went down to our campground where we ride horses. They were having a Halloween shindig called Horse ‘n Around on Halloween (I think that’s what it was called anyway… lol). There was also a Costume contest and a Chili Feed. Jody brought JP down with her and we dressed the girls up, but we didn’t get any pictures of them in the costume parade. We then took them back, dressed them back in regular clothing and went for the Chili Feed.

Normally I don’t like chili but they made some without beans so I tried it. I must say, it was good. Part of the reason I “don’t like chili” is I ate a lot of it as a kid. I kind of burned out on it. That and we made it so spicy that one bite and your lips were ON FIRE. This was mild and really hit the spot!

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A Maize Maze… also known as a Corn Maze

So far, every year we’ve made it a point to take Abug to a corn patch; this year was no different. The funny thing is we’ve gone to a different one each year… but we may have found the one we’ll continue on with… maybe. The one we went to this year was pretty darn awesome!

But let’s back up just a bit. I made it a point we NEEDED to go either this weekend or the weekend before Halloween because otherwise we had too much planned and wouldn’t make it, so we went the 15th.

We met up with Jared and Karen for lunch that day and then went to Exeter, MO, via Rogers, AR. We ate lunch in Neosho, drove to Rogers, and then headed to Exeter. Sometimes our crew doesn’t always make sense, but we decided to go to the Williams Sonoma down in Rogers before heading to the corn maze.

Abug slept all the way to Rogers. When we got out, daddy grabbed her and her diaper leaked all over her skirt and his shirt. Yuck… lol. Don’t worry, I got some on me too. Luckily this is a shopping center so he ran to JC Penney for a new/clean shirt, we cleaned up in a bathroom, and then went to Crazy 8 to get the buglet some new clothes. Whew!

From there we headed to Exeter and that’s where our story really begins :).

We got there and bought our armbands. Abug grabbed my arm and immediately drug me to the zipline. Sadly she is too little for the zipline so off we went to the slide. I’ll bet we spent most of our time at the slide, but we convinced her to leave the slide and go to the little tricycle track for those 8 and under. She still hasn’t mastered riding a tricycle so daddy walked around the track with her.

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Kansas from Cedar Vale, Kansas

Does that title have you scratching your head? Well…. Meet Kansas….

Okay, I’ll explain. So a year ago we had 3 colts born… Blue Jeans, Flash, and Cadillac. All stud colts. All yearlings now. We have a lot of horses so this summer we decided to sell a couple off. We posted Flash and Blue Jeans up for sale just to see what would happen. Early in the summer we had a guy hit us up about a trade, horse for horse. We weren’t real sure we wanted another horse, we wanted to disperse some so we kind of said thanks but no thanks.

About a week ago or maybe 2 now though, we rethought that and hubby hit the kid up. I say kid because now we’ve met him and I think he’s probably 18… that’s a kid to me ;). Anyway…. we got some more info on the horse. He’s a 7 year old broke gelding who is just grade. Now grade means no papers. All of our horses are registered. Does that matter? Really only when you go to show maybe.

We kind of wondered why the kid wanted to swap a broke horse for an unbroke stud, but we didn’t question it too much. After some discussion, we decided to do the swap. We got a broke horse out of the deal and sometimes they’re easier to sell anyway if we were to decide to sell him.

Karen and Jared came over on Tuesday of that week to help us try to get a halter on Blue Jeans because he wasn’t broke… not one bit. Not even halter broke. It didn’t work in our favor.  Thursday night my dad went back out with us and we finally got a halter on the colt after a lot of trying. It wasn’t an easy feat but the minute we had the halter on him, his attitude changed. We had him leading in 20 minutes. It was crazy.

And our only real casualty was dad’s arm. Some how dad’s arm got struck by Blue Jean’s front leg. Ouch!

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Underwater Pumpkin Carving

I typically get sick twice a year… this year I think I’m at 3 times. Blech! I’m so over this! Anyway… A couple weekends ago we had our annual Underwater pumpkin carving. Yes, I said underwater, because who doesn’t want to carve a pumpkin underwater? Don’t answer that.

The surface temperature topped out around 78˚. The water temperature wasn’t bad at all either. I heard the thermocline was down around 30 feet. I couldn’t get past 3 feet because of whatever this is. My ears were jacking with me so I carved my pumpkin basically laying right under the surface of the water.

I’ve been bugging hubby for family photos all summer long so finally we found a weekend when we had Tbug and it just so happened to be this weekend. We got up early (although not as early as I would have hoped, my fault) and went to the lake to do photos. Not quite where I wanted to take them, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches and I was happy with how they turned out so it’s all good.

That morning it was a big chilly. Abug got cold so Tbug zipped her up in her jacket with her. I turned around and this is what I saw.

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Chiefs vs the New York Jets

We were back at it Sunday morning. Time to load ’em up and head ’em out… out to Kansas City that is to go watch our Chiefs play the New York Jets! I’d been watching the weather all week and we bounced around for Kansas City weather from 100% chance of rain to 60% chance of rain back to 100% chance of rain. At home we started out with a beautiful sunrise, but the clouds quickly ate the sunrise.

We loaded the Chiefs bus and headed toward KC.

On the way up we got a glimpse of the sunrise but then, it was gone and all we had was cloud cover.

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Ride for Life 2016

Last weekend was a busy weekend! Hubby, Abug, and I were able to participate once again in the Ride for Life to benefit St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. With the sale of our house, it was kind of iffy leading up to the week if we’d be able to go or not. It depended a lot on if we got moved, etc. We were mostly moved (minus the garage, we did that this week) so we decided to take a weekend off from life and go to the ride!

Jared had his camper down there so we had a place to sleep, they took a horse for Abug and me to ride (why we didn’t take one of ours, who knows, maybe that last minute decision of actually going), and away we went.  Earlier in the week we discussed what we were going to eat Friday and Saturday night. I mentioned Chicken and Noodles for Friday night. Deb said if we had that, we needed mashed potatoes. So the idea was born.

Thursday night I made up 4 batches of homemade noodles, then woke up Friday morning and my little helper and I went to work making Chicken and Noodles, Mashed Potatoes, and 2 pans of Biscuits. One pan was for us to eat Saturday morning, which oddly enough we wound up eating Friday night with dinner and the second pan was for the baked sale auction Friday night.

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Mermet Springs 2016

There’s a story, of a trip to Mermet… oh wait, that was last year’s theme song. There actually wasn’t a theme song this year… more of a quote… but I’m not putting that out there!

It’s the yearly trek to Mermet Springs over in Metropolis Illinois. Last year on our way we found an Italian Restaurant we wanted to eat at. Turns out we’d have had to wait for 4 hours. This year, we made reservations and trust me, it was worth it. Italian Grill on Broadway. After dinner we went down to the Ohio River shore which was like 8 blocks or so. The weather was perfect for an outing like this. And our friends John and Nelda met us for dinner and our walk to the shore.

Down at the shore there were all these murals on the wall giving the history of Paducah. I wish I’d have had time to read them all!

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