Busy, Busy Weekend

Wow! Talk about a busy weekend. Friday night, we met our friends B & F at the fair. It was the 2nd to last night of a 9-day event. We had fun... we walked around, splurged on fair food for dinner, caught the free side-shows, and just had a good time hanging out with great friends. There was an Extreme Canines dog show... mostly tricks and agility. We paid a few dollars to go into the White Bengel Tiger exhibit. Gil and I are both HUGE tiger lovers and we spent more time here than elsewhere. There was a petting zoo of "exotic" animals... a kangaroo, a Scottish Highland cow, water buffalo, funky goats with 4 - not 2 - horns, zebra, etc. There was also a group of 3 guys that walked into the center of the "food alley" with kitchen stools that had metal dog bowls and water bottles attached to them. Turns out they were drummers. If you know me well, you know that I have a BIG weakness for drums - of any nation, any sort - I just love drums. One of the things on my ultimate "to do" list is to see the show Stomp! Just the thing I love. So I was fascinated listening to these guys perform. Here are a few pictures from our time at the fair.

Gil & Sara at the Fair

Sara being silly... nothing new!

Saturday morning, we woke up and hopped on the Harleys. The plan was to ride south and ride over a pass in Northern WY but just getting through the reservation was trouble enough to keep us from crossing state lines. This is some desolate country. We're at the point in summer where everything is really hot and really dry. With weather conditions like that come the grasshoppers. I don't know if you know this about me, but I absolutely HATE grasshoppers. Almost - probably - worse than spiders. I absolutely despise them. They totally gross me out and give me major heebie jeebies. Let's just say that for two of our initial three hours on the road, I was riding so tensed, stressed, and grossed out, that - for the first time in my life - I completely disliked being on my bike. We stopped in the middle of nothing and nowhere to re-group and stretch our aching tense muscles and took the following pictures. When we finally got to the interstate, we decided to just go straight home (not by the same way) because we weren't having fun, we were more than covered in hopper guts, we were tensed and aching and disgusted with the ride. We expect to get hit with bugs when we're riding but this was horrible... the road actually looked alive and moving multiple times along the way. The sting of one hitting my leg would barely stop hurting before another one hit. The impact was so hard that it would literally make me jerk a little bit, so I'd be tensed and waiting for the next one. Ugh.

As you can see here, there's nothing behind us but flat, open land. That's what it looked like in front of us, too.

This is my leg and you can see the bugs on my highway bar.

This hopper accumulation is on Gil's bike above the transmission.

Gil said this is what my face looked like for the majority of the ride... I was thoroughly disgusted and grossed out the entire way.

We got home and took the bikes to the car wash to use the power washer to get most of the bugs off. It was a horrible mess. I had plenty of house to clean and laundry to do and was starting on that when Gil left to go pick up our new fridge (yay!). He called me about a half-hour later asking if I wanted to go the rodeo in less than 2 hours. It was the last night of the fair and a friend/business associate of his offered free tickets. So, I jump in the shower right away to allow my hair time to air-dry, then vacuumed and picked up the house enough to satisfy me until mid-week, started some laundry, washed some dishes, then ran back in to finish getting ready and we were off at it again. We had a good time at the rodeo and then visited with D and his wife for awhile afterwards. We got home at midnight knowing we needed to wake up early to ride off again.


We woke up this morning knowing we were heading a few hours' north and had previously been planning to ride the bikes but after yesterday, we didn't want to encounter the grasshopper thing again and were still so tired after yesterday's trip that we didn't want to risk it. So we took the car and Karma and went to visit Gil's grandma (his dad's mom). His aunt and uncle were there, too, and we had a nice picnic lunch and visited for a couple of hours before coming home. Once here, we had to clean the car inside and out, move the new fridge into the house (yikes!) and then let it cool before moving all the contents of the old fridge into it. I'm just now getting ready to put my 4th load of laundry into the dryer and then we're off to bed.


I'm tired. Goodnight.