Freestyle Homemaking: Month Long Road Trip: Week 1

I've really been struggling to get these photos posted :( . Now that I have been using wordpress on my new blog, I am more annoyed with Blogger's software than ever. But I need to print out our annual Blog-2-Print book of photos so I will be slogging through this.

Our car was PACKED tightly. Sleeping bags, tent, bed mats, and camping chairs were packed in the roof carrier, but extra blankets, pillows, clothes, cooler, travel games, snacks, 5 gallon water jug, work laptops, 12 mason jars of food, dry goods, the camping stove, diapers, cutlery, pots & pans... were all in the car with us.

We left Grandpop in charge of everything on the farm. It was a big job and kept him very busy. We are so grateful that he was willing to do it though. Our trip would not have been possible without his help.

Our house was in a terrible state of neglect after 3 months of intensive focus on gardening, harvesting, and canning. I held us up a little by trying to get the kitchen to at least a fairly clean state, but oh my, there's still a lot of deep cleaning and catch up that needs to be done. We drive off to our campsite at around 4pm and luckily it was not too far away in George Washington National Forest.

Luckily, Aaron is an experienced camper and hiker. We bought a nice easy pop-up tent that went up in about 5 minutes. No messing with poles. We did not have a camping stove and bought one that the internet recommended. It worked great. These plastic rim soup plates were also perfect as they could be a bowl or a plate. Eating outside was great and we all enjoyed it when the weather was nice. A few nights were rainy and many were chilly.

We hiked 3 miles up the High Knob trail in George Washington National Forest.

Baby A road in the backpack carrier a lot on this trip. I think he really liked walking along in it.

Baby A also learned how to drink out of our Camelbak very well during the course for the trip.

Baby A enjoyed sleeping in the tent I think. He could wake up and crawl all over everyone. He has been drinking 2 bottles of coconut milk each night. One as he is falling asleep and another one around midnight/1am. If he hasn't had enough dinner, then he drinks a third bottle at around 4 am. He needed his diaper changed in the middle of the night too because that was a lot of liquid. We had bottles in the tent with us when we were not in bear country, but some nights hubby had to get up and get them from the cooler in the back of the van.

Camping with a toddler is challenging. My biggest concern was making sure that everyone had warm jammies and warm blankets to go over their sleeping bags on the coldest nights. My old wool army blanket proved its worth and we decided to buy a couple more of those along the way as it got colder. We camped out in freezing temps on several nights.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was visiting Joel Salatin's place, Polyface Farm. He is a farming genius and I love his books. He has an "open farm" policy and visitors are always welcome to stop by and poke around for self guided tours. His ducks are on a rotational grazing system with moveable fencing. I loved this automatic waterer that they had set-up. We'd need a lot more spigots to make anything like this on our farm.

They also had this light weight moveable shade since they are on pasture.

This is the house that I most wanted to see. It's called the Raken House. It's a system for combining rabbits and chickens. The rabbit manure falls on the deep bedding below, the chickens scratch it into the mulch, eat any bug larvae growing in the bedding, and turn it into what Joel calls "the best compost" on their farm. Yes, that is what I would like to do too.

The Raken house also had wood paneling up half of the sides. I understand that well, because I find poultry are quite hard on the high tunnel. They have upper "windows" that could be propped open for ventilation, which is essential to rabbits and chickens well-being.

They also have a significantly easier watering system with 5 gallon buckets feeding into small tubes and a metal nipple at each cage. It's clear from the chicken wire that they also have issues with chickens trying to roost on the rabbit cages, a problem that I also have had with putting chickens and rabbits together. This is one of the reasons that I am in favor of stacking rabbit cages about 3 high, like they do at the fair. The lower cages can go directly into the bedding and the upper trays can be emptied and carried to other parts of the garden or added to the deep bedding.

They were more than half way winterized when we visited. They had their hay stored up for winter, lots of piles of wood chips ready for deep bedding, the rabbit and chicken tractors were all stacked and stored away.

This is a newly constructed rabbit cage platform. Keeping rabbit cages back-to-back seems very efficient as well. It's also described in the Storey's guide to raising rabbits. I'm not sure how many cages each 5 gallon water bucket can efficiently run to or how they keep the rabbits from chewing on the tubing anywhere that it touches the cages.

They had a beautiful shop and porch swing.

We visited Monticello and had a lovely time imagining what life was like on Jefferson's plantation.

Of course, the gardens were my favorite part. This is a type of bitter melon.

Our guide at the house told us that the kids were welcome to each pick a spinner gourd to take home with them. Apparently, in Jefferson's time the children played with them like tops.

The Jefferson's family cemetery was very fancy.

There was a huge thunderstorm toward the end of our day and rather than setting up our tent during the thunderstorm warnings we opted to stay at a hotel.

We had a beautiful campsite on the Clinch River.

I brought 12 of my pressure canned meals for easy dinners.

Our camp living area on the Clinch River. There were not many other campers at that time of the year.

Baby A loves stickers and magnetic pages. He did incredibly well riding along in the car.

We hiked in Jefferson National Forest. The fall colors were beautiful as was the weather.

We also hiked in Natural Tunnel State Park.

Baby A really liked helping set out the plates, but we had to be careful to watch him so he didn't fall off the bench. (He did once at one of the later camp sites).

We visited the old Bon Ami mine in Emerald Village North Carolina. It was very well done and interesting, with a museum and a lot of mining equipment.

The funniest thing was the potty car. The two seater was for regular workers, the one seater was for foremen.

Some of the minerals in the rocks glow under black lights.

At the end of the tour they gave us each a 2 gallon bucket of rocks to sift through.

The kids were thrilled with their findings.

We went to Ripley's Believe It Or Not in Gatlinburg Tennessee. When I was originally planning out our trip I thought we'd visit some well know sites like Biltmore mansion, Dollywood, and Graceland. But then when it came down to it, those places EACH would have cost our family more than 300$ and reading the reviews online, I didn't think the kids would enjoy any of them particularly.

Ripleys Believe it or Not had several entertainment centers in the town. We got the three pass and went to the museum, the aquarium, and were planning to go to the Haunted House (since it was almost Halloween). But when we got to the haunted house, kids under 5 were not allowed in, so I had to take baby A out and wait in front. By the end of the orientation though, the other kids were all too scared to go in as well. They said we could go to one of the other activities and we ended up going to the 5D movie, which was great.

I thought the museum was mostly creepy and little sad. I liked the science type exhibits, but their were a lot of exhibits about people with unique circumstances, like siamese twins or born with no legs, like the circus. I'm not sure whether they would be excited to have those traits make them famous.