When we left New Orleans, we drove up to Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Mountains of Virginia. I read about Shenandoah in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, where he said it’s one of the most beautiful places on the Appalachian Trail. Here’s Dan at the campsite: The weather was mostly perfect, except for some rain the second night we were there. We hid in the car for the worst of it, but that didn’t even last an hour.
new orleans
After Nashville, we drove down to New Orleans. Wow, what a beautiful city. We got there after dark; it was warm and and humid. Our airbnb was a couple blocks outside the french quarter. The trees, with gnarly trunks and crooked branches, lined the little residential streets and canopied over the streets in places. That night, hungry after arriving, we dipped into the French Quarter and walked to a 24-hour bar/restaurant, Buffa’s, (New Orleans has a bunch of those) and had maybe the best burgers from a restaurant on the whole trip.
goodbye nashville
It’s Tuesday morning and we’re finishing up 5 days in Nashville. We had a great time here! You know it’s true because I had TWO corndogs over the course of the weekend; it doesn’t get much better than that. We got here Thursday night and went out to Five Points Pizza where my cousin Jackie works, for pizza and beer. My sister Julie met us there after she got off work and we got to hang out and catch up.
tennessee state fair
We went to the state fair yesterday! Fried oreos, ferris wheel, games, rabbits, a pathetic haunted house, and pig races! We did it all. What a delightful evening. Thanks Julie! stephen
now with comments
There’s a link to login to add comments at the bottom of posts now! You don’t need an account or anything, but you do login with your name and a password. (You need to ask one of us or check my facebook). The idea with the password is keep the comments semi-private, but not worrying too much about that, and just trying to keep the spammers at bay. We’ll see how this goes and make more changes if necessary.
quick lil morning update
Hey reader(s), We have slowly inched our way eastward! Yesterday, we crossed the Mississippi River and then made it into the Central time zone. We left the farm in Boulder Saturday afternoon went back to Denver for a day to hang out with my cousin Mikey and his fiancee, Brittney. We scared the crap out of their dog! Woops. He eventually grew to like us (just in time for us to leave).
the eclipse
So after we left Curley Creek, we knew we wanted to head toward the totality zone of the eclipse. Our original plan was to head to Yellowstone—which would have actually been Grand Teton to be in the right position—but we had two obstacles. First, we didn’t have the solar filter glasses yet. Second, we realized the big national parks would probably be super crowded and we needed a place to stay the night.
ramblin
Howdy Quaids, Long time no write! The rest of our time at Curley Creek was great but this is gonna be a loooooong entry so I’m gonna sum it up a bit briefly. We did a good amount of harvesting on Thursday and Friday for the farmer’s market on Friday afternoon in Troy, MT. Unfortunately it was drastically under-attended as far as shoppers go, which was too bad because the market itself was really nice!
montana extravaganza
Howdy y’all! We finished up our time on Orcas Island. It felt good to get on the road again after 4+ weeks, but it was sad to say goodbye to Cait and Zack and their family and friends, as well as the beautiful land itself. We’ll be back! Here’s a pic of us with Cait after we chucked some bales of hay: Cait is a great teacher and really knows her stuff, so it was awesome to get to spend two weeks working with and learning from her.
done-zo!
Hey everyone, We finished the permaculture design course! (over a week ago… when I started this update). It went great. We got to spend a lot of time around people who were very enthusiastic about what we were learning, and made a whole group of life-long friends. The class culminated with group projects where we got to observe a piece of land and design our own landscape plans for said land.