The Month of October

Well, we made it back to Emmett. We were there for only a week, which went by very fast. it was good to see friends and family again. Lorrie is taking such good care of our house for us. We sure appreciate her.

We did make time to get together with our good friend, the Walkers,
the Thomas',
and the Manwarings. We had a great dinner around their outdoor firepit.
It seemed kind of sad that we probably won't see them again for about a year. That is one of the drawbacks about having a traveling home, we don't make it back to our permanent home very often.

We got to Rexburg on the 8th of October and Terry and our son Shay left the 9th to go deer hunting. The picture above shows the "mighty hunters" and their "trophies." We were just excited that they each got one. Then on the weekend, Jill's husband Dan went back with them and he got one about the same size. The next week we went to Shay's and cut and packaged all three of them. We made hamburger out of all of ours except the tender backstrap steaks. We will make jerky out of all of the hamburger. We are so excited to be able to to that. We have two dehydrators between us and lots of spices. I think we ended up with about 26 pounds of hamburger that will make about 15 pounds of jerky!

While the guys were hunting, Jill and the kids and I went to Utah to Sarah's and canned pears. It was lots of fun and the cousins had fun playing together.
Sarah's husband, Ryan, was a good sport and entertained the kids and cooked for us!
Jenna and Kamber are such little girls. They tried a couple of times to get the boys to play dress up or other things with them, but the boys refused.
They spent lots of time playing games on the computer and
playing video games on the TV.
JT is really good to amuse himself. All he needs is an empty box!

In October, Terry's brother Ron who lives in Emmett, needed to have some surgery. Terry went home to be there for that and I stayed because we had committed to Shay and Heidi that we would watch their kids for the weekend so they could go hunting and try to fill Heidi's tag (but they didn't get anything.) I had lots of fun being with Shay's kids.

Marissa and I played dominoes and then everyone came in and we tried to make a domino train that would fall down. We didn't have too much luck with the curves so we finally made one that was just straight lines and it worked really well.
We had fun carving jack-o-lanterns. They all did a good job.
We got to help Jill's family carve pumpkins, too. They turned out pretty scary. It was fun being around family at Halloween time. That night we stayed at the Condo and handed out treats to all of the little goblins while Jill and Dan took the kids around the neighborhood trick-or-treating.

The Weather has been unseasonably good all the month of October, even though all of the Church members have been praying for moisture! It has been fun being close to Jill's and Shay's families. We have been able to go to their football games and dance classes and some of their other activities. It is fun to have grandkids come knocking on our door to visit all of the time. I think we could kind of get used to this. The time is going by really fast.

Camp Hosts at McCormick - We are done!

The "fire ban" is lifted! We finally got to build fires. It was nice to see fires going around the Park in the evenings. We had to loan out our barbecue and our electric fry pan several times when campers would come, not knowing they couldn't use briquettes or build fires, and that is all they had to cook with. We got to have several wiener and marshmallow roasts before we left.

The previous camp host planted several tomato bushes before he left. We sure enjoyed the tomatoes. He planted big ones and cherry tomatoes also. They were a real treat!

If there were ripe tomatoes when some of the Park crew came in, we shared. But, we ended up with the biggest part of them. I will miss having fresh tomatoes off of the vine.

Since we retired, we haven't gone to Church in the same place for very long. Terry thought he would be off the hook for having to give a talk in Church. Well, we stayed just long enough in McCormick and going to the little branch in Halfway, Oregon, to have to speak the week before we left. They are very friendly people and we really enjoyed getting to know them.

Last Saturday, two days before we left McCormick, we took our pontoon boat home. It had rained all the night before. When we got up that morning, there was snow on all of the mountains around us. Terry let me turn on the furnace for the first time!

When we came back from Emmett that day, we saw the wild turkeys. There aren't too many times that you travel from Cambridge to Hell's Canyon that you don't see any turkeys--that is until turkey season opens They seem to know when to hide.

We also saw our first mountain sheep up close. We had seen one other one, but it was quite a ways away up on the mountain ridge above the dam. This one was hanging out along the road as we came down off of Brownlee Dam. Other campers had told us one was there, but we hadn't seen it. It has a tracking collar on it and was pretty scroungy looking. I get confused (Terry says that is not unusual) because the goats look like sheep and the sheep look like goats.

This is a picture of the park coming down from the top of the dam. It is a little blurry because we are moving in the truck.

They planted flowers and built a little fence by the restrooms at McCormick this year. When we got there, only part of the flowers were doing very well. But after lots of care, they finally exploded! That was usually the last thing we did in the evenings is go water the flowers. Lots of campers commented on how nice they looked.

This is Steve, one of the head maintenance guys over McCormick and Woodhead Parks. He usually did the lawn mowing and anything else that needed done. When it was hot, they started early in the mornings and when he showed up at the park, lots of times we were still in bed. Even when they started work later, towards the end of the summer, we were sometimes still in bed. We told them we were "retired" so we got to sleep in! Steve was the guy we called if there was any trouble. It seemed like most of the trouble happened on his days off, but he was always there for us. He is a retired police office so he could handle anything!

Susie was a maintenance person. She had to put up with all of the guys and always accused them of assigning her to "restroom duty." When she would come with Steve to mow the lawns, he would tell her, "Go ahead and get the restrooms, Susie. I'll start on the lawns!" But, the restrooms sure got cleaned good when she did them. It was lots of fun visiting and getting to know her.

Terry, another head maintenance guy, came with Steve to do the restrooms the last day we were at the Park. I think that at least the mirrors got cleaned that day! Terry and his wife also own and run a bed and breakfast at Oxbow.

It was a pretty dreary day the morning we left. It kind of matched our mood. It was a lot of fun being Camp Hosts. We worked with great people and met a lot of really nice people. We hope that we get to do it again sometime. They fed us a great dinner of all-you-could-eat giant prawns. I could only eat four, but I think Terry had at least ten! And then they even gave us a gift certificate for Home Depot.

We got back to Emmett in time to attend a funeral of a good friend. He was our age and died suddenly of a heart attack. You never know! We are so glad that we have the opportunity to live our dream and feel very fortunate to have good health and be able to do the things we want.

We are headed to eastern Idaho after we stay here in Emmett for a week. We will stay in Jill's parking lot in Rexburg. Terry is going hunting with Shay. Jill and Dan just moved into a house in Rexburg and I think she has a few projects for her Dad to do while we stay there until after Thanksgiving. Jill and I are going to Dugway Army Base where Sarah and Ryan live, fairly close to Tooele, Utah, to can pears. Thanks for reading out blog and sharing all of our adventures so far.