Mammoth goes on a rather boring trip

Monday 10 May 2021

So here we are at Crane's Mill Park COE campground, visiting Bob & T. It wasn't a bad drive but still took over five hours. Here we are going through Fort Worth:

I think going through Austin would have been preferable than detouring around it, because we ended up in a lot of traffic on smaller roads. Maybe next time we'll take the "Pickle Parkway" and pay the outrageous tolls.

We're getting ready to eat dinner and we'll go visit Bob & T in the morning. I saw a bunch of gulls on the water, and just now (at 6:00) a flock of ducks flew by, with distinctive white patches in the wings. There were about 10-15 of them. I've no idea what they were of course--didn't have the binoculars because I was talking on the phone. Typical.

I'm still having trouble writing trip descriptions. This is a place we've been to before and didn't particularly want to return to. I looked up a bunch of locations to search for the Golden Cheeked Warbler, but I'm not sure when or how to explore them. Not too enthusiastic about anything. Sorry.

Bingeing on Donna Ball K-9 mysteries again

Land of the Free, and Deadfall
by Donna Ball

It appears I just can't get enough of Donna Ball's dog mysteries. Even though she insists on repeating what I consider a deathly sin in detective fiction--beating up on the heroine's friends and family. You know what I mean? It seems like that if you can't keep the suspense alive without killing/maiming/fatally wounding the detective's husband/mother/sister/girlfriend then you're not writing an imaginative story. How much misery can a side character endure in one series? Why not introduce new characters to beat up on?

But no, she did it again and she did it so well I could barely stop reading, let alone slow down and savor the situations.

Deadfall did not commit the cardinal sin, and while all of the detective's friends and family played the usual roles, none of them got beat up, kidnapped, or arrested. Guess I shouldn't tell this; however, it just goes to show she can write an absolutely gorgeous mystery using people previously unknown to the reader.  I loved it, as always.

Adventures in cooking

Working down my recipe to-try folder, I made
Sort-of-Thai Noodles
Adapted from "Garlic and Sapphires," by Ruth Reichl
 

The headnote says, Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine, says that everyone loves her Americanized version of Thai noodles.

Well. If you like pork and shrimp and eggs and rice noodles, green onions, sugar and fish sauce...what's not to like?

My answer: this dish. I found it impossible to stop eating the stuff, but it wasn't good in any sense of the word. It was just fattening.  It didn't need pork AND shrimp AND eggs--that was way overkill.

My personal mistakes were to use the wrong kind of noodles and then overcook them; use the amount of pork the recipe called for when half that much would have been plenty; and skip the peanuts. I just don't care for them. Oh, and I missed the lime juice. Chefs are always overdoing the citrus, so that was probably a pointless addition. But I'll try sprinkling a little on just to see.

I could see this dish working with (a) more fish sauce (b) less sugar (c) only an eighth pound of pork, for flavoring, and (d) the rice noodles cooked very, very gently.

Very unusual dog book

 The Dog Who Came to Stay

by Hal Borland


Who doesn't love a dog story?  And in this case, it's a human story too--two humans, to be specific, and two dogs who come into their lives on a rural Connecticut farm. The dogs stir up their already complex routines and bring them out into the sunshine. And rain. And snow. Usually when they didn't really want to. Isn't that why we get dogs, to make our lives difficult?

He writes poetically when describing the countryside, the farm and the gorgeous days--winter, spring or lazy summer, there's something lovely to be said of all. But I'll add a quick warning for the fearful of heart--there is a chapter about hunters and poachers and the anger that ensues when hunters find out that although Connecticut issues hunting licenses, the entire state appears to consist of private property where the owner's permission is required to take a deer. Or anything else. He sympathizes with the hunters, but he's learned to say no...just as we have with fishermen. For every nine people who do their thing, pick up after themselves, and leave quietly, there has to be that one person who tears down fences, leaves gates open, and brings his friends Joe Bob, Bubba and Dickhead with a case of Budweiser and a bad attitude.

All that bellyaching aside, Hal Borland writes a great book.

Oh, no--here comes another cozy

 Here Comes the Body
by Maria DiRico

I'm going to read another of these before passing judgement. There are only three in the series. I really liked the heroine, daughter of an ex-mobster who is going straight by opening a catering service. Mia is running the business for him and gets to deal with all the weird and annoying customers. She's my favorite kind of heroine.

The best way to label this book is "lively." Amusing but not all-out funny, although the mother-in-law-zilla parts were almost laughable. Also enjoyable were the ways that Mia dealt with the bride whose only real interest is to upstage her sister's wedding.

No depth at all; nothing particularly knotty about the murder mystery; and really, nothing to remark upon at all. But I enjoyed it.

Gardening In My Roots, Rainy Season

 That appears to be what we're experiencing. The garden rows are separated by little lakes, and only mid-calf waterproof boots are letting me wade through.

This amazing Bok Choy is a puzzlement to me. I planted tons of Bok Choy and Brocolli in little pots indoors, and nursed it along. It did not do well at all. When I finally transplanted it outside, sometime in March, it was two inches high and sorry looking. 

The brocolli all died. But at the same time I transplanted the Bok Choy, I filled in the empty spaces in the garden with seeds. So...that's the puzzle. Are the two amazingly beautiful healthy plants (one shown above) from the ones I transplanted, or the ones I started from seed?

The picture below shows what happens when you ignore green bean plants. The experts say you should never touch your bean plants when they're wet--it spreads diseases--so what could I do? They've been wet continuously for over two weeks!

So I picked them. Hang the experts.

Mammoth Carries Children, part 3

 Apr 13 - Apr 15, 2021

On the way home we spent two nights at Hank's Creek, a "highly developed" COE campground. Very, very nice. Both this and Double Lake are perfect stopovers on the way to the coast.

This one had a large playground, soccer fields and other such amenities for kids. They really enjoyed the playground the first day, although Ethan was under the weather and didn't last long before he wanted to sit down. The second day it rained a little in the morning, but when we went to play in late afternoon there was only a little water left on the four seats that tilted around. 

For reasons I don't recall, I took no pictures at Hank's Creek. But here we are back at home, and one week later, staying at Cedar Ridge while we drop the kids off.

 

Mammoth Carries Children, Part 2

Friday April 9, 2021- Monday April 12
Sea Rim State Park

If you recall, we were here approximately one year ago at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. A governor's order sent us headed home after one night of camping. I'd had this trip re-planned for six months and had no intention on cancelling it again.

We think the site was next to the one we'd had previously. It seemed higher in elevation than the other because, at this one, we could see the ocean from the picnic table. Just as before, the ocean was wonderful; choppy sometimes, a bit chilly, awesome. I saw very little of it.


It was windy the whole time we were there, which helped with the mosquitos.

 

So here's what we did for four days: diapers; breakfast;

 

 

 

go down to the ocean and play on the edge:

 

 

 

 

 come back to Mammoth and do lunch; 

naptime (jogging for me!!!); afternoon walk;

dinner; bed. 

I don't really remember all four days. On one of them my jog took me around the day use area and past the brackish, shallow pools where signs proclaimed "Do not crab near alligators".  I saw movement in the water and realized I--or at least, Molly--was being tracked by one. A small and very active alligator. Later Ed came down to the edge and induced the little gator to swim all the way across the pool to where he was standing.

That's an alligator below:

There were birds here and there, but nothing spectacular. Just the Sanderlings, Pelicans and gulls. I mostly just left the binoculars in the bag and didn't frustrate myself.
This is our campsite.

Clowning with my stuff:

Mammoth Carries Children

 April 6-8, 2021
                                                            
                                                             I have found out that there ain't no surer way
                                                             to find out whether you like people or hate them
                                                             than to travel with them.
                                                               - Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

This next trip went completely undocumented. Our brains were pre-occupied, not to mention our hands, legs and whole bodies. We'd agreed to babysit Edward's two boys while he was in the field. Twelve days of it.

So here is what I remember of those lost days, and it's very little.

On Tuesday, April 6 we traveled to Cedar Ridge. Edward brought the kids and spent the night with us. And on Wednesday morning, he left and we packed up to travel.

 

Double Lake Campground April 6-8 leaving 9th, Site 060

Double Lake Campground was lovely. There's a walking path all around the lake, and right by water's edge I saw a little bird that I think was a Sora. I'll never know, of course. I took the binoculars and camera on the trip, but never took either out of the bag for the duration.

The lake seemed very small and not a 'boat' destination--that's if we ever get the boat out of storage and on the water again--but still a great bird-watching spot. For canoeing it would be supreme.

We took the boys on several walks around the lake. The biggest hit was when I had them along and I found a big tree that was mostly on the ground but on an unlevel slope of it. When I pushed on the log, it bounced.

Fun stuff--bouncy log. They couldn't get enough of it but I soon tired and wanted to walk onward. It was too chilly to swim in the lake so we mostly just did a lot of walking. And a little running--that was fun.

 

 

I did get in a nice long jog on the trail with Molly while the boys were napping. The trail was apparently laid down as a thin, narrow slab of asphalt, Just the right width for jogging. But it was pretty old and the asphalt had buckled and heaved. It was even more unlevel than a dirt path would have been.

 

But it made for a great jog! That was the best part of the two days.

Another Quaker midwife tale

 Taken Too Soon

by Edith Maxwell

See my review of Judge Thee Not. This one had a better plot, I think, and an interesting historical narrative mixed in with the murder. The actual murder and the uncovering of the culprit was anticlimactic--much more interesting was now Midwife Rose figured out the family history behind the young girl who was "taken too soon." 

And as usual, the birthing of babies was the best part of this whole book. I do wish she'd give up on the mysteries and just write straight midwifery stuff.

The Last Tea Bowl Thief

 

by Jonelle Patrick

Charming, utterly. How not to love such a twisty, time-traveling tale?

I don't want to give any details--it would spoil the surprise. I will say that at many points I was teetering on the edge of my seat, ready to weep at the sad luck of the three main characters whose tales alternated through the story.

Loved it.

Review of How NOT to RV

How NOT to RV;
The Rvers Guide to RVing in the Absurd
by Jennifer Flower

I hate to admit this, but the author's particular style of humor and storytelling did not go over well with my particular appreciation of humor and story reading. Best I can suggest is, try it for yourself and see what you think.  I've had the same reaction to several famous humorists that pretty near everybody likes--for example, David Sedaris--so It's possible I just don't have a snickerbone.

Maybe I'd have liked it better if she told her stories straight, beginning to end rather than end-to-beginning. For example, "To show off your RV competence, be sure to drive away with your sewer hose connected to the sewer hookup, until it pops loose and...." She adopted the opposite approach to the old joke-telling methodology--instead of hiding your punch line in digressive details and then popping it out at the last minute, she chose to prefix every story with the punch line. It got old for me.

But I must say that she's an admirable person and a pretty good writer. She seems to approach new situations with an observational, not a judgemental, view. I like that very much. She should consider (if she hasn't) writing some travelogues of her journeys.

Couple of books read during the last vacation

 Judge Thee Not

by Edith Maxwell

Just finished the next Quaker Midwife Mystery--Judge Thee Not. As usual, I'm ambivalent. The midwiving and birthing scenes are great; the personal associations are so-so, but this time they left me feeling unresolved; the mystery is meh. The mystery was a little better than in the last one, building up to a good puzzle, but the denouncement just didn't do anything for me.

I'll probably read another, but I have a hard time raving about them.

One Shot At Forever

Easy to pick up; hard to put down, and full of details that take you back to childhood in a small town. If you had a childhood in a small town. It's a detailed look at the personalities and the players of an Illinois rural baseball team who suddenly, magically almost, started to win games. A lot of mini biographies mashed together and strung on the winding string of a baseball season where winning, against all expectations, just happened.

I expect anyone who likes baseball would like this story. Maybe not love it, love as in totally wanted to read it over and over and rejoice in every victory, but like it just fine. That's how I felt, anyway. The author did his research well and yes, I admit he could have hyped up the excitement by changing the facts a little bit, but he didn't. And that is admirable.

Colorado City State Park and home

Thursday, March 18 2021 

bye, La Vista:

On this day we traveled to Colorado City State Park. Happy to be back in a state park--with room to roam, I promised Molly a good long jog. We got almost a full hour of slow jogging, but with a whole lot of stopping for smells.

But first there was the getting there. The route that Google had proposed involved FMs, and I try to avoid FMs. So when choosing between two alternate routes, I checked them both and somehow decided that the middle one did not have any FMs. Nor did it have any Ranch Roads. FMs can be good and they can be bad, but Ranch Roads are not for the foolhardy or the drivers of RVs. However I would point out that the Ranch Road we took up to the Davis Mountains the previous day had been very nice. For a car--not a 32-foot RV towing a car.

Anyway, the route I chose was to take US 67 north and then head up to I-10, take it a little ways east and then proceed north again to I-20. But as soon as we started off north from I-10, instead of going directly north on TX-18, stupid Google took us on FM 1053 up to somewhere in the arid desert until we ended up on TX-329 and went over to Crane. So we ended up on an FM despite my plans.

When we finally got on US-385 north from Crane, we found it a great road--a four-lane divided highway with almost no turns. Soon we started seeing oil pumps all over and knew we were nearing Odessa. In future, note that 385, even though it's a little out of the way at the southern end, is a better route.

Colorado City state park was very nice. The sites are open, so you can see every thing your neighbors are doing. Which you don't especially want to see when what they're doing is driving on the grass to make an unnecessary U-Turn to get into their campsite,  then backing into their site by cutting their truck tires into the dirt beside the gravel road, thereby obliterating the ground squirrel burrows there. I hope the squirrels had a back door.

(Later I checked--the burrows were a little farther off the road so they were safe)

The park is ideally located to be a one or two-night stop on the way from home to out west somewhere. But, sadly, it seems to fill up really fast on weekends. I originally reserved Friday night at site 118, which is a pull-through site. But then when I changed the reservation, 118 was full so I had to reserve the site next door, which was a back-in site. No big deal, but being able to leave the Jeep hooked up would have saved us twenty minutes in the morning.

Add to map: 19, 21 and 25 are good sites.

The lake was small and fairly low, so I doubt if we'd ever want to take the boat there. There wasn't much in the way of bird life, but there might have been foxes about--plenty of ground squirrels for them to eat. On our jog, Molly and I went through the campsites (a lot of them) to a little fishing pier, then around on the road a long way, almost to the boat launch. There were cabins out there, too.

Friday Mar 20?
On to home. Nice boring drive--I have no notes about it, good or bad.

NOTES
1. When planning routes, be especially aggressive about eliminating FMs.
2. I really need a dripping water feature in my bird bath.
3. Strongly avoid private campgrounds. Except possibly the expensive ones.

Day 6 Very long and scenic drive

 Wednesday March 17

I got the bright idea of going to look for Golden Eagles. They had been sighted all along the highways in the area, but most often at a prairie dog town ten miles north of Marathon on highway 385.  And that's where we went.

But the wind--which was supposed to have died down at 3am that morning--was still harassing us. We were lucky to see this one bird:

A few dogs were out and about, but mostly I think they were sheltering underground from the wind.

From there we went out the road to Marfa and beyond, me scanning the sides of the road for birds of which I saw None! Nada, Nilch, Zilch, Zero. And then we took a scenic drive north up some little ranch road, to join TX-16 and circle the Davis Mountains to the West, then get back on highway 118 to cut directly through the mountains and all the way back to the RV park.

 

 

I will herefore name Highway 118 the Wonderfully Wicked Way. It seems to delight in taking the most scenic route directly up, over and through every mountain it can find. Our drive was marvelous. Of the many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who visit the Davis Mountains every year, almost none of them were encountered on that drive. It was glorious. And lonely. Gloriously lonely.

 

Eventually we ended up back at Davis Mountains State Park, where I made a quick stop at the bird blind and the dogs got a little walk. They hadn't gotten to walk hardly at all for the day, which was our fault for hauling them around in the Jeep. I promised Molly a nice long one when we got back.

 

 

 

 Spotted Towhee:

Chipping Sparrow:

And she got one. Round and round the RV park. It was so late in the day (after six) that the highway was clearing, so we walked along the road to the bottom of the hill and then back up. We got in a good solid thirty minute of walking, at the least. Poor, long-suffering doggie.

La Vista:

Tuesday at Davis Mountains State Park

 March 16, 2021

I believe it was Tuesday morning when I finally saw birds at the RV park--a Canyon Towhee

 and a Curve-Billed Thrasher. Both were so gray and dull that the camouflage made them nearly invisible on the dusty ground.

After that we went to the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center and then to Davis Mountains State Park.  The nature center was superb! But the building was closed to the public, the park was very crowded and the bathrooms were out of order. We left the dogs in the Jeep and speed hiked to the bird blind--no birds--then walked quickly through the plant exhibits back to the Jeep. As were were getting close, I discovered two things--(a) porta-potties, and (b) a dog poop station.  So all our haste was pointless. We could have relieved our bladders, taken the dogs, and walked at leisure to enjoy the plants.

But instead we watered the dogs and gave them a walk in the parking lot, then meandered through the mining exhibit. It was a recreation of an old-time copper mining operation with all kinds of cool rock samples.

Anywhere we went, we could see the McDonald Observatory in the distance:

After that, we got back into the Jeep and went on. It was still unpleasantly  windy even though the cold front should have pushed through by then. Interesting thing about the nature center--when we arrived at about eleven o'clock, the parking lot was packed. But when we left, it was clearing out. We could have spent a couple more hours there.

Some random scenery:

So on the to the State Park. There we drove the Skyline Drive and stopped on the top of the hill to see the view:

It was nice, but way too windy to enjoy contemplating the horizon. The chin strap on my hat got a good workout.

And then back to the bird blind. Awesome!

I saw:
Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Lesser Goldfinch

Dark-eyed Junco (pink sided race)

Acorn Woodpecker

Pine Siskin

Field Sparrow, I think

Ladder-backed Woodpecker
Black-Crested Titmouse
White-Winged Dove
Bewick's Wren
House FInch
Northern Cardinal
American Robin

And while I was watching, some non-bird visitors came to rob the suet:

I could have stayed there a lot longer, but the day was winding down and it was time to go back to Hasta La Vista RV Park. Lovely day, despite the wind.