A weekend of Traditions

This was our 2nd annual Saco River Rafting trip with two other couples. Parts of the river are notorious for wild parties, but we visit the less-traveled section just up river from that.

The weekend was filled with traditions, old and new:

First up is Friday night's snack after everyone is set up and we can relax for the first time around the fire. My hubby pulls out his open-fire grilling rack and we have turkey kielbasa. Just a few bites for each of us is the perfect topping to a hectic day and the perfect christening to start the weekend. We don't do turkey kielbasa for health reasons, one of the ladies has no gallbladder, so can't have pork. Fine with me...turkey kielbasa is surprisingly fantastic!

Oh, and our campfires are usually made up of 2X4's that are leftovers from my hubby's jobs. Not exactly the romantic fire of my dreams, but it puts out the heat just as well!

This is our "tent," among other things! Didn't turn out quite as convenient as I thought it would be, but it certainly was dry! This may or may not continue to be a tradition (depending on the weather!)

Breakfast the first morning is usually big and hearty because lunch on the river is easy-to-carry snack-type foods. Enter my hubby's Cheezy Eggs. Recipe: a dash of milk. a dash of pepper, a dozen eggs and 12 oz grated cheddar. Mmmmm... and the best. blueberries. ever.

And peaches. Can't forget the peaches! One of the couples lives right next to a fantastic farm stand and brings all the fresh local fruits and veggies we can possibly consume (and more!)

And we can't forget my hubby's coffee. We used an $8 percolator for a few years, but it takes forEVER (according to my hubby who cannot function without caffeine) so he treated himself to this spiffy new unitasker this year! And of course, we still use the little teapot for our hot cocoa and teas! (Especially when we're finished with our next tradition...)

Here we're all lined up ready to go rafting...waiting for two of the guys to get back from dropping off the car at the bottom of our trip!

Rafting in the rain. Mmm. Not our favorite tradition. Last year it was overcast almost all day and rather miserable, but we made the best of it and made a pact that we'd be smarter in the years to come. Well, they all came on with startlingly similar cases of amnesia and wanted to raft thought I was going to stay behind. It was forcasted for rain and thunderstorms even though Saturday morning it was so hot. I finally convinced myself to go when they were getting all sunscreened up and changing into their suits and getting all excited!

If you catch a peek at the top/center of this pic you can see the leaves are already changing!! Of course, it's at 2,369 feet above sea level, but still...it's August 16th!

... and 15 minutes after we got in the river, it started sprinkling. But the water was moving pretty swiftly because it was about twice as high as it was last year. The trip last year took about 5 hours, this year's was only about 3 1/2. (Thankfully!!)

Eventually we caught the thunderstorm (or it caught us!) and we headed for the treeline. It got preety cold with the rain and wind and already being soaked, but we got through it dreaming of a new tradition for next year - scuba diving in the carribean!

This is my hubby's mess kit from boy scout days. He made the casing himself for his sewing merit badge. It hasn't held up TOO well, but after all-it has been 20 years! One of the many projects I'd like to take on this fall is re-sewing his pouch. Or maybe just fixing the blown seams and putting a new snap on it. We'll see. I'm not sure how he'll take it. He's very sentimental about these things and may like it just the way it is!

I sometimes call him my LeatherMan. He uses his Leatherman almost constantly when we're camping or hiking. My tough guy!

And of course, there's the tradition of me taking all kinds of random, mostly nature-related photos!

Quite by accident, we ended up camping at the same campground that our premarital "marriage mentors" camp at every year (for two whole weeks!) and we got to do some visiting before we left Sunday afternoon. It was so great to catch up. We exchanged e-mails, so hopefully we'll have a little better luck keeping in touch this year!

While there, we got a visit from a heron and I got to snap away! Did you know they nest in trees and in communities? It just seemed odd to me. I've never seen more than one at any given time and I don't really know why the thought of them nesting in trees sounds odd, it just does!

Feeling Zen

A few pictures of my camping weekend.

If you concentrate, you can see the rainbow between the groups of trees.

Lazy Sunday, crazy-busy week!

I was supposed to go back to work Sunday afternoon, right? Didn't happen. I zonked out on the couch after church and unintentionally took a 6 hour "nap." Somehow I don't thing 6 hours of sleep constitutes as a nap!
First of all, my boss has been out for two weeks, so I've been slowly been slipping behind with covering for him. Then, last week I'd forgotten that this week my hubby and I are taking two days off to do our motorcycle safety training course, so I really needed to catch up and get a teeny bit ahead at work, but it wasn't happening, so alas, I'll fall a bit more behind. But you know? It's not the end of the world!
We're also going camping next weekend, so I need to prep for that, but I got the food preped last night at least, now it's just a matter of gathering the gear and packing bags. Fortunately, my hubby packs his own bag! I swore to myself I'd never "mother" him and 8 years later, I'm sticking to it! He's a big boy, he can pack his own stuff!
I did get to do a crock pot meal last friday but it wasn't exactly photogenic, so I didn't take any pics. I tried Jenn's All Day Mac N Cheese recipe from Frugal Upstate. It tasted great, but looked a little over-done. I'm going to make it again this weekend while camping for our Saturday night pot luck. We're camping with a bunch of my hubby's family and every year on Saturday night, we just gorge ourselves on awesome, awesome food! I think the crock pot ran for about 8 hours friday, so I don't think I'll start it until late morning next time so it's just perfect in time for dinner!

A few camping shots...

"Camping" at the racetrack means setting up in over-sized parking spaces on a dirt lot. Here's a shot, taken from underneath our awning, a foot away from the camper on the far left of the picture...space in the distance shows camper number two, and camper number three is backed up right to our "site."
When the rain came during the race, we made our way "home." My camera battery wasn't juiced up in time to capture the ankle-deep muddy river running through the lot, but I was able to get a shot or two in a little later...







When a camper sleeps 7 people...thank goodness for bump-outs!!!


Breakfast, camping-style.

A weekend at the track

My hubby and I got to spend some time at the race track this weekend. We "camped" with his cousin's family. It's not exactly like any kind of camping you'd ever experience anywhere else. Each camper is within feet of each other, narrow alley-wide lanes to travel through, partying all around you, no tents allowed (only RV's, pop-up campers, piggy-back campers, etc...must be "self-contained" and have a generator because there's no electric hookups available) You're basically in a dirt parking lot with just enough room for your "bump-outs" on one side and your awning on the other.

We got home pretty late last night and over-slept this morning, so no time for uploading pics, but I'll post them all later in the week!

It was a pretty exciting race for me because Tony Stewart lead the most laps. In the end, NASCAR "called the race" (officially ended it early) because of rain with no end in sight. They can do that if the race is over half-way finished. There were less than 20 laps left, so it was pretty close to the end anyway. The only bugger in it for me (And Tony, of course) was that Tony was in the lead when they came in for a caution a few laps before the rain started, he put on fresh tires while most everyone else just did a "gas 'n go" so he fell pretty far back. BUT had the race gone to it's scheduled end, he'd have had fresh tires while everyone in front of him wouldn't, so there's a very plausible chance he'd have been able to lead in the end. Alas, that wasn't how it unfolded, and the top five cars all had their best finishes of the year based on a gamble with the weather. As they say - that's just a racing deal and a win is a win, no matter how you come by it. I agree to a certain extent - unless you crash or spin someone else out to get it. It's still a win, but I don't have much respect for that method of winning.

More racing drama happened with another of my favorite drivers - Kyle Bush; and one of my least favorite drivers - Juan Pablo Montoya. If Montoya isn't punnished by NASCAR for messing with Bush on a CAUTION LAP, my point will be made...Montoya can do whatever he wants - crashing people on purpose (he openly admits it!!!), driving dirty, etc... - and get away with it because no one wants to do the un-PC thing and complain about the first modern-racing-era foreign guy (from Bogota, Colombia). Well, to me, for anyone that climbs into one of those race cars, the same rules apply. I'm the first to admit Tony Stewart and Kyle Bush are very agressive drivers. And they take the heat from NASCAR, their sponsors, and the fans. I wanted Montoya to do well. I wanted to like him. It just isn't happening for me. He drives dirty, laughs it off and doesn't get punished by NASCAR.

On the flip side, former NASCAR bad-boy, anger-management graduate Tony Stewart was called a "CLASS ACT" by one of the announcers after their post-race interview. Give the boy a hand! This, at the same track where a few years ago he was accused of punching a safety crewman after he was wrecked. (false allegation)

Besides the race, it was a pretty good weekend all around. I decided I needed a day to myself, so I stayed behind at the camper on Saturday while the rest of the crew went into the track for the day's events. I got some sewing done. A refashion of a man's t-shirt into a more feminine version. It was my first completed refashion project and while I'm not overjoyed with how it came out, it was good enough to wear the next day, and I learned a LOT from the experience.
I do a lot of cross-stitching and while I'm doing that, I'm relaxed, poised, I don't rush. I don't think twice about ripping out a row or whole section of a project if it's wrong, I just do it and start it over again. I take pride in that work...it's a piece of art and it should be as I want it, not slapped together to meet a deadline.

While I was working on the t-shirt, I found myself rushing and not exactly doing things as they should be, and I thought - what is so different between this and cross-stitch? Well, while the t-shirt isn't going to be hung up on a wall, it's still a piece of art. So I began thinking about my sewing in the same light and you know - I really enjoyed it and I didn't rush, and it ended up half-way decent!

Sunday morning we had passes to Kasey Kahne's hospitality tent. Kasey is my hubby's favorite driver, so it was real exciting. I was able to get video coverage of his interview on my camera and may post it here later in the week as well. We also got pit passes and I was really enthralled with the inner workings of inspection and the pit carts. Again - took LOTS of pictures!
By the time the race came around, my camera battery went dead, but that's okay. We ended up walking back to the camper in the rain and thunder/lightning, ducking under the canopy just before the hail started! Seriously!

All in all, I had a great weekend. I spent some time away from the computer (especially freecycling and craigslist) and had some me-time, enjoyed one of my favorite sports up close and personal, and got to see my favorite driver called a class act...something I never would have guessed would happen a few years ago.

And now back to work. Oi.