WHERE'S THE WATER????

*Can't get pictures to upload - will try later

We’ve fallen into a routine of spending the “early” Saturday morning hours cleaning (De’Etta) and working on the “House Repair List” (Mike). We then spend the afternoon doing something “fun”. During the week the sky light cover had fallen out in the big boys’ room. Mike and Josiah are seen peering out of the ceiling…wouldn’t that be a scary sight to awake to? They spent the a.m. discovering that we need to add insulation to the ceiling and rewire some things. UGH.

Saturday, 22 October, we continued our search for water. Earlier in the year, we had driven to the Reservoir with great hopes of finding water. There is a lovely state park that we found on the internet with sites right along the water. Imagine our surprise when we finally made the time to go exploring and discovered that there is very, very little water in the Reservoir. I’m not sure what happened. I’ve heard a couple theories. The most credible is that they had planned to build the dam and so built the state park and homes right where the water was to be….but for some reason the water didn’t arrive. Now we have great camp sites along big canyons but no water in sight. The state park did have some nice hiking trails, buffalos, and a playground. Unfortunately, I saw a rattle snake over 8 feet long crawling across the asphalt and that sort of squelched the excitement of finding the hiking trails. We’ve still not tried them.

We decided, on this Saturday, to go south of town and investigate the other Reservoir on the map. We debated long about taking the canoes. We decided this would be a scouting trip and left them behind. This turned out to be a good decision. It was incredibly disappointing. Here we see a boat ramp but obviously no WATER for your boat to slide into.

We did find some great ATV trails in the basin of the Reservoir and discovered that the new van is not made for 4 wheeling. Yes, the picture is staged. Mike continues to drive our vans through any terrain that takes his fancy and we’ve yet to be stuck. I, however, got stuck quite often trying to get out of our DRIVEWAY in Alaska.

We had been watching fields for the past few months. They had some green plant. To tall for lettuce we thought in July…and as the year went on…YES to tall. Maybe pepper…..but where were the peppers? Finally, this Saturday we saw the fields were “blooming”. We stopped the van so that those who were curious could get out and explore. We found the plants to be drying out but to be full of fluffy, white COTTON! We had studied the Industrial Revolution in September. Being able to see, touch and feel the cotton plants brought home the study of the Cotton Gin like nothing else could. The kids also were able to understand more about how hard it would be to spend hours picking cotton in the hot southern sun. This will be a good connection for them to make later in our studies.

After giving it out best shot we had to admit that we were not finding water. We headed to the base’s Rec Camp on the Lake. We’ve always found water THERE! Mike and the older boys played tennis. Arielle thought it was too hot to play so she, Zander, Nolan, Stacia and I walked through the campgrounds and met people. We plotted a future camping trip. We threw rocks in the lake and we played on the playground. It turned out to be a fun day… not what we’d set out to find….but a fun day nonetheless.