Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Blog Challenge, Yellowstone and camping

There is camping and there is camping. I have not been camping since the 1980's. Then it was with my husband and 4 children. We had a large family tent. I had recipes for homemade quick packages for biscuit mix, pancakes,fried cookies and other easy to fix food. We had coolers for meat and water. You picked out a packet added water put the pan on a camping stove and cooked away.

Clean up was made as easy as possible and the camp site was kept cleaned. Keeping track of children was a main goal. We camped a couple years at large church roundups. Lots of children's activities, speakers, and music groups. Usually went on into the evening with entertaining music so you crawled into sleeping bags and zonked out. Next morning you crawled out at dawn to cook eggs, bacon, and pancakes and start the round of entertainment all over again. Brain boggling but a good way to pour in scripture til your brain waves were fully charged.

When I was in High School my dad hayed for a small dairy herd. I took in one horse on loan per the winter months from a boy scout camp in the area. The deal was in order to keep the horse I had to help with the hay. I rode an old fashion trip rake while Dad drove the tractor. It did not have a release lever on it because of its age so Dad would watch the rake and when it was full he would signal me and I would stomp on the release lever with all of my 80 pounds of weight to release the hay and start a new rake full. Dad drove the old Chevy pickup around the field picking up the mounds of loose hay with a hay fork and my job was to push the hay around in the bed of the truck and stomp it down so we could get a really full load into the back. That meant the hay was often up above the sides of the truck several feet so once I was on the top I couldn't get back down until we took it into the barn and unloaded it.

The camping came later during the fall and spring. The hay was soft and springy, plus it smelled good to sleep on with blankets. One of my cousins would come out and we would have pizza parties, do homework, read poetry and sleep in the hay. Years later when I had livestock of my own I remembered that the cows from my youth were eating the hay we played in and slept on.

This week some of my family members returned from camping and visiting Yellowstone. They told about seeing the Bears (some grizzly and Bison and all the wildlife) but, they had a lot of family at their outing and they had a house to sleep in somewhere close to the park. They brought home lots of pictures but I have not seen any of them yet.