Camping on the Farm

We spent the better part of last weekend camping out on a nearby farm with my girls' scouting troop. Although we certainly didn't live the 'farm life' since we didn't really spend much time with the animals or doing any farm-ish chores, we still managed to have a fantastic time spending two nights camping out there.

And even though we didn't do many farm activities, we did learn a bit about farm life, like the fact that roosters crow all night long and all day long, and it has nothing to do with the sun coming up (and everything to do with that hen he was chasing all weekend). Horses are also quite noisy at night and only quieted down for about 4 hours the entire first night we were there (not including the ones that paced their corrals all night long). They spent the rest of the night whinnying to each other from the farthest fields to the nearest corrals. I also found it interesting that the shaggy horses they had on the farm were often the oldest ones. Apparently, old horses don't lose their winter coat, but keep them year round. The horse C rode was a whopping 30 years old! That's really old for a horse, and really amazing for one that can still be ridden.

C with Maggie, the 30-year old horse that was still pretty feisty. She even needed some help controlling her.

A with Bailey

K with Snickers

It's doubtful the girls noticed they were not allowed to touch the big animals on the farm because there was one thing they were allowed to touch: the kittens! If you ask any of them what they liked about the weekend the most, they would each say it was the kittens - hands down. If you asked Mike and I what we disliked the most about the weekend? You guessed it, the kittens. We were so sick of hearing about and seeing those kittens by the end of the weekend that we banished the girls to the other side of the field while they held them. It is astonishing to me how one thing can so completely obsess three individual people for such a long time. Literally every waking moment we were there was spent with a kitten in their arms, asking if they could go get a kitten, or talking about wanting to go get a kitten. You get the idea.

I'm not even sure how many kittens there were since they all started looking the same to me after a while. I'm pretty sure there were at least 5, and while someone said they had names already, my girls gladly took the liberty of renaming them all. I remember hearing Tiger, Syrup, Snowball, and Butter as some of the names. Surprisingly, I only came home with one picture of them with a kitten. I guess it's probably better that way.

By the end of the weekend, Tiger got smart and found a spot where no one could get to him.

Besides riding horses and obsessing about kittens, the weekend was filled with tons of other activities. The girls made marshmallow guns, went looking for bullfrogs in the creek at night, spent time wading and swimming in the creek during the day, took a hayride, looked for fossils, climbed in caves, went for a nighttime hike to the top of the mountain, sang around the campfire, cooked s'mores, played Frisbee, painted birdhouses, collected chicken eggs, jumped on the trampoline, and explored all the nearby fields. Whew!

The hayride

K bouncing a friend on the trampoline, trying to "crack the egg"

Some of the group around the campfire

Heading up the hill on the night hike

The small group of us that made it to the very top of the mountain (around 10pm). We lost several people along the way. It was a tough hike up that hill (especially in flip-flops, oops!)

One of the many magpies on the farm

The second night that we were there, we got to see the supermoon. It's a fairly common event that happens every 14 full moon cycles or so, but it was a completely new experience to see it out there on the open fields in the total darkness of rural life. The technical name for it is the perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. It's pretty easy to see why the name 'supermoon' stuck. The moon that night was shockingly bright. It was so bright, in fact, that I was able to clearly see my own shadow on the side of the mountain as we hiked at 10 o'clock at night.

Creepy.

The supermoon! (ok, so it wasn't quite that big)

We were all completely exhausted by the time we left the farm Sunday morning. I am amazed at the energy of the farmworkers out there who spend all day working on that hot, dry land! Thanks for the fun weekend!