September 17, 2005 - Auburn, NH

YIKES!  It's been over a month since I've been here.  Sorry 'bout that.  Sort of.  Had some shoulder surgery that gave me an excuse to goof off, and then having Barb's five wonderful sisters entertaining us, and having Barb's soon-to-be 92-year-old mom to enjoy has kept me elsewhere.  And besides, there was some stuff we'll be showing later that I needed some information on that was in a newspaper sister Jennie up in Harrison, ME, saved for us.  Until yesterday, when sister Carol brought it to us (from Jennie).  Along with a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies!  Yeow!  Can it possibly get any better than that!  But I digress.......

Well, this is what "dirt fishing" can look like.  Guy and Carol have a wonderful home that includes a bunch of trees on an odd shaped lot.  Guy had located all but one of his boundary markers.  He'd been looking for it for years.  Steel pipes driven into the ground at each corner.  Took the metal detector about five minutes to locate it.  Mostly because Guy had put a lot of effort into measuring from all points to find the missing one.  He said, "It should be around here someplace" and marked out about a two-foot area.  Pretty simple job for me.  In these pictures we're just poking along a trail that leads across the back part of his land.  Found some old relics that are probably worthless, and some nails and other "junk" but no real treasures.  Still lots of fun.

Old Home days they call this.  Lots of small villages and towns in this area have them.  While this was called Hudson Old Home days, this wonderful old house was actually in Alvirne, about 5 or 6 miles from Hudson.  Carol and Barb made good use of the decorations.  Too bad the glasses were empty!

There were a lot of vendors there, and I had to include the booth selling "Frappes."  As a good California boy I had never heard of a Frappe until I met and married Barb.  While we were dating I'd ordered a milkshake, and she called it a Frappe.  I knew she was weird because she was from the East Coast, but that was really a bit "out there" for me.  She could hardly wait until we visited out here for the first time so she could show me "Frappes," "Lime Ricky's," and "Moxie."  Good grief.  Talk about regional differences!  The local police department was also on display with their helicopter (huge thing!), several very clean Harley-Davidson police bikes, a couple of squad cars, and my favorite.  This little bomb robot.  It rolls down the ramp and goes wherever it's told to.  Grabs the bomb with those fingers sticking up.  Wanted to see it in action, but alas no demonstrations were planned.

Christmas in August?  Yup.  This campground we're in really does make an effort to be a fun place.  Santa came in on a big fire truck with sirens screaming, and the kids and parents all knew what was going on.  Gifts for the kids too.  After a few pictures we headed back home, but guessed a good time was had by all.

You can see the Road Abode hiding back there in the trees behind Barb.  And then Carol, Guy, Mom, and us headed off to do a tour of the Anhauser Busch brewery nearby.

Say what you want about breweries, they sure do nice landscaping!  One of our brochures on this brewery claimed it was the most picturesque of all the Anhauser Busch properties.  Can't dispute that based on what we saw.  Somebody referred to these tall flowers as "spider flowers".  Easy to see why.

This is inside the waiting area and gift shop.  Sure comfy surroundings!  This display case was interesting because I was unaware that "Bud" made so many different beverages in so many different containers.  See those tall "bottles" in front?  They're actually aluminum cans that just look like bottles.

The sign says it all.  The "withers" on a horse are akin to the top of it's front shoulders, in case you were wondering how tall these guys get.

These hops are just for display purposes.  This part of the country doesn't grow very good hops apparently.  Those little "buds" (no pun intended) on the vines are the hops.

And no, these aren't window washers that have vision problems.  They're actually keeping the outside of the building spotless!  And there's the whole tour group.  The teen-aged girl with the shorts and blue top was very inquisitive about the beer making process and asked lots of great questions.  Stuff Barb and I didn't even think of.

These shots were taken in and near the sampling room.  Photographs of the actual process were forbidden of course.  Pretty fancy carving, eh?  After that picture of the group of us was taken, we got to sample two glasses of which ever brew we wanted, and there were some samples of some new stuff they were trying out as well, and if we took one of them we were asked to fill out a card sharing our thoughts.  I had a lime thing I didn't like at all, and somebody else had some other flavor that was yukky too.  As we sat there enjoying our snacks (free) and beer (also free) sister Carol (and she'll kill me for telling this) finished the last of her glass and looked around at the rest of us and announced, "Gee, I drank the whole thing and don't even feel a buzz".  And then we reminded her she'd had the O'Doul's, which is non-alcoholic!  She'll live that down about the time I'll live down my mispronunciation of the name of a nearby town!!  We still crack up telling on her.  And then it was outside to check on the horses and their homes.  And I should mention that the spry little lady in the blue jacket is the mother of these 6 girls who will be celebrating her 92nd birthday on the 3rd of next month.  She's a great person, loves to walk, loves a good story, and has a good sense of humor.

The big fellow getting a bath isn't really all that unhappy about it.  He'd flicked his ears back to listen to something behind him as the camera flashed.  Pretty placid horses for the most part.  And there's one of the original wagons.

That little filly is about 7 months old, and on loan to this place for a while.  Pretty good sized girl already.  Pretty neat digs these horses live in, eh?  As clean as any stable I've ever been in, and the pavers in this area show the marks of their shoes, but nary a speck of dirt.

Meanwhile, back at home, the bird feeder vs. chipmunk battles rage on.  I put that coffee can on the post of the seed feeder to keep the little guys from climbing up there and eating all the bird seed.  Well, actually they eat very little of it.  They mostly fill their cheeks to bulging and then scamper down a hole someplace to store it up for winter.  We had to move it anyway.  That little rascal jumped from that rock he's on, and landed on top of the coffee can!  Then scampered up to the feeder.  Little devil.  And doesn't he look innocent standing there?  Yeah, right.

So, we kept him out of the seed feeder by moving it away from the rock, but the sack feeder (sterile Niger seeds for the finches) hanging on the shepherds hook has no can or other chipmunk proofing.  And he knows it!

And the next day the yellow finches were reduced to eating out of the seed feeder.  Oh, well, fun while it lasted.  An interesting note here:  We didn't know these little guys were omnivores.  We thought they only ate vegetable stuff, like seeds, bread crumbs and things like that.  But on more than one occasion we've seen these guys eating frogs!  Barb is totally grossed out at this discovery, and I'm wondering what I've been missing all my life.  Sometime I'm going to Google it and see if I can get some verification, and find out if these guys only eat frogs that are already dead or if they're killers as well as thieves of our birdseed.

Stonyfield Farm was originally a school.  To teach organic farming.  As you can guess, it didn't work.  But what did work was the sale of their organic yogurt.  Boy did it work!  They've been growing by leaps and bounds (20% a year for the last 10 years)!  And Barb says that there really is a difference in the taste; the brand is carried in the local stores, and can be found in all 50 states, but not in all the stores of in the 50 states.  Mom, Carol, & Guy were with us on this tour as well, but that's about the only picture because once again, cameras not allowed. 

Then we took a break from living in the Road Abode and spent a couple of days in Maine with sister Jennie and her husband Don.  They have a beautiful home on Long Lake, near Harrison, ME.  I was taking a break in the action, and Barb was wandering around their place with the camera.

And then after an nice nap, it's time for some new games.  At least for Don and Jennie.  I'd found a couple of "easy" geocaching spots nearby, and Don actually knew where this rest area was.  The coordinates showed there was a cache in here someplace.

Don and Jennie started wandering around and I was checking the GPS while showing the roots of a very determined tree.  There obviously was a nice river down there.  Nice in that it's the kind that trout like to live in and kayakers like to go down.  It took us (Don) less than 5 minutes to actually find the cache.  Since it was so easy for us, I'll not include any more pictures of it here so I won't spoil it for anybody reading this who may want to go caching in this area.