Good Days in Kansas

There was very little going on last week out here in Kansas. We miss our old home built sail boat we left up a river in Guatemala to come up here. It’s really hot down there and with the China virus all we could do was set on our boat in the hot sun. With that eating well and cool nights it’s great to be here. There is a lot of wild life out here and our son has a little farm near our little house. His dogs caught a rabbit and I took it away from them. Whether it’s road kill or taking it away from a dog. We are having rabbit for supper soon. It’s dove season out here and we will be adding that to our supper table too.

Timmy is very happy.

There is a lot of antiques out here and odd stuff. When our boat was robbed in Belize they took everything. Some things I decided I would never have again. I had a little single tooth hand saw that was very old. They took it. I kept it sharp but seldom used it. I do a lot of wood work on people boats as we travel but today hand saws are out. Electric miner boxes do a lot better job in fitting thing beside being faster. Our son works in heating and air and drags a lot of things home people are getting rid of. He came in one day and said, “I found you some hand saws for free.” He was working in a building that had sold junk for years and had been abandoned or shut down for a long time. New business going in. In the bunch of saws are four single tooth saws. What a find. What is a single tooth? They were sold a long time ago as the best hand saw on the market. They have one tooth on the top side and you can lay a square down on a board, turn the saw up side down and pull it down the square with the one tooth making a line on the board to cut by.

Our saw collection

I said there is useful stuff out here. He also has a metal cutting torch that runs on gasoline. Never seen or heard of one but it works and we have used it. Other stuff, I now have a roll of used telegraph wire that once sent messages to Hays city Kansas here in the old west. General Custer’s wife said it was the most horrid place on earth. Nothing but bars, brothels and cow boys. Who knows what messages went through that wire. Most people out here never think about it but years ago here where we are this was the old west with gun fights and cattle drives. No cowboy back then could have imagined the cowboy of to day. Driving pick up trucks not invented yet that cost more than any house we have ever owned and it’s hard to give a horse away out here and sometimes if you have a horse in a pasture you may go out some morning and find you have more horses. People out here say, “Some one gifted us with another horse last night. You know any one that wants a horse? Life is good and the adventure goes on.

We have been getting some of the smoke from the fires west of us. This is a sunset in the haze.

 

Crazy Weather

Buffalo stew and snow. In the Caribbean the heat is relentless most of the year where we left our boat at a dock there up a river in Guatemala to get out of the China virus lock down and fly here to our little house out on the prairie. We have lived in places where people say, “If you don’t like the weather just give it a few minutes, it will change.” In New Orleans maybe even in Southport NC where we built our boat that is some what true. Out here in Kansas on the prairie the weather can and will get just crazy. When it ‘s hot out here it’s a dry heat and feels nothing like the humid heat in Guatemala. On the other side we have been out here with week on end of below zero and with the wind that is always here. You can not please every one and it can be so hot in the Caribbean it’s hard to breath with people setting around in the shade drinking beer saying they are living in paradise. You hear living in paradise a lot south of the border. Maybe with beer for breakfast to go with your first black beans of the day it is paradise. For some down there that are traveling not just setting somewhere enjoying what they are smoking you hear them say they miss the seasons. I know Pam and I do. It’s not just the feel of the air as the temperature changes. It’s all the things around you like the cloths you wear. In the Caribbean I wear tee shirts and cut off blue jeans everyday. Take the tee shirts with me on the plane. Very hard to get 100 percent cotton tee shirts down there. High polyester is just to hot. Bought some 100 percent cotton tee shirts in Belize and payed 10 dollars a piece just to get them. When Pam washed them an 8 year old little girl could not wear them they sank so much. Wearing tee shirts all the time it’s not long and there sweat stained and hand washing won’t help much. With the changing season you can choose the shirt you want to wear for that day. Up here I like a nice pressed white dress shirt with blue jeans. Nice boots and my Greek fisherman hat. To all my friends that say they are never going back where there is the possibility of snow. This early cold snap the snow didn’t get to us but it did get close. We got rain and the temp got to 39F. We have a wood pellet heater out here and Pam was born to burn wood. She loves it so we have a wood heater on our boat. Maybe this too is an adventure in our life. Setting by a good fire with the weather out side getting nasty. Here it has been with a cold rain. Our friends left us with some buffalo meat and we tried it in a stew. We know people that do a lot to wild meat before they cook it. We tried the buffalo with out any spices and I think it would be better with a buffalo recipe. This is what we live for. Adventure is to us trying new things. With the piece of buffalo meat we have left we are going to make jerky. Good or bad It’s the adventure of having a piece of buffalo to cook or make something out of. Maybe next week Pam and I are going dove hunting. I have and old 1908 Aubery shot gun side by side and Pam has a single barrel. Not what most people hunt with today but we usually bring home supper. We are cool in Kansas and the adventure goes on. There’s a rabbit that we see in our back yard and it’s not cold enough to hunt rabbits yet but that rabbit has no idea the trouble it is in with Pam being here. With her own gun.

Look out rabbits. They took Elmer Fudd’s gun away from him but I still have mine.

One of our son’s dogs like to ride with him on his bike. Her name is Sugar.

“Pamela Ann” at the dock in Calypso Marina, Rio Dulce, Guatemala. 9/10/20

Still Enjoying Kansas

We are still In Kansas and the weather is great. When we were still in the Caribbean on our boat having trouble getting a flight back this summer, the heat was very troubling. With this Chinese virus going on setting there in lock down not able to go anywhere was hard. We hope our boat is safe there. In our last blogs I said how I don’t like the food available down there and it’s so good out here I can’t stop talking about it. As we travel food is always just what we can find. What we can find at any price in Guatemala is never what we can find in the US. Note this we never say anymore, “Here in America” in traveling down south people say we live in America too living through out South America. That is how it is all the way through to the end of South America. To say the food here in Kansas is best is a stretch even if it is real good with us living in places like the deep south and if things go well we are taking our boat back to New Orleans next summer. We have lived there before as we traveled around the US, New Orleans has sea food just not available out here. No one has a gathering out here to put oysters on a grill. You never see people out here laughing eating craw fish. People always seem happy when craw fish is involved. As a rule people out here don’t get in to grits the way people in the deep south do. Grits out here is instance grits when you can find them and Pam and I have become accustom to the grits we make on our boat as we travel where no one eats grits but corn is available. There is corn out here “for sure” but you are looked at hard if you want just maybe one pound and looked at even harder if you are using it to grind that corn at home to make your own Grits. We had some friends we met many years ago when we were young and we were all driving trucks all over the country visit us this week. They were going on west to New Mexico to work feeding boy scouts that are backpacking in the wilds there. Having food available where they come in to get supplies. In talking about food they left us some Buffalo meat and we are trying to think of a way to cook it to make the best of it. Dealing with the Chinese virus out here they are still a lot of activities not happening and some places ask you to wear mask but for the most part if it wasn’t for TV you would not know there is a lot of bad things happening in our country and no one is taking a kneel “out here.” We did have a young girl in a store tell me she wished she was old like me and could have lived in a more friendly world. I told her we have always had something going on in the world all our lives and this will pass. Don’t wish your life away looking for a perfect world. I told her I wished I had a bag of hot craw fish to share with her. She didn’t understand. I didn’t explain. One thing good that is happening, they have changed there minds and have ask Pam and I to speak at the Heritage Club. In my old age, I may be famous yet. Maybe I will tell them how Pam and I have lived mostly in a world we created and how we live slow enough we can appreciate what is around us. Traveling when we can to see more of the world we live in has been great. Always living simply when and where we do stop.  At an early age my Granddaddy told me that there are people in the world that live to cause mayhem and the more mayhem they can cause the more they feel they are leaving their legacy. They will travel long distance just to take part in mayhem. I was surprise when ask to speak to these people when Pam and I have lived mostly invisible as we can so we can live and not be bothered by the normal people around us. We are working on a book and have no clue as to how to get it published. The name of the book may say it all. The book is named I’m Not Eccentric. Normal people always come after me and not Pam maybe because calling a women eccentric, an eccentric women is usually crazy. As for today it’s cool at night here and we sleep with the windows open. I have put in out blog how we make sausage. Make our on grits and live a lot like we are on a farm out here. This is hard to make people that say you can live better in a third world country on less money on a boat than you can in the US. No where in all our travels outside the US have we found pork at one dollar a pound like we can here. I complained at the meat market that I wanted more fat in our pork we were buying making sausage and the butcher sold us some pure pork fat for 35 cent a pound. Maybe we are eccentric with how happy we are finding pork fat for 35 cent a pound.

Our garden is starting to produce “Squash BY Gosh”

A Happy squash out of the garden.

A few tomatoes.

This is the way our friends are traveling now. A big RV and pull the car behind.