Then they started eating the squirrels

When our children leave, they LEAVE!  With one in Seattle, one in Portland and one in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, only two are in our time zone.  Brynn and Chad and their four live near the coast of North Carolina, while Mike and Adrienne and Kate live in Delaware.

The two in the East came for Thanksgiving, braving I-40 and I-95 respectively.

Paula appreciated the good help of her daughter-in-law in the kitchen.  This lady peels a mean potato.

There were no pictures of the feast.  I was either too busy grilling the turkey, setting the table, or grabbing things as they went by during the free-for-all known as Thanksgiving dinner.

It turned out to be a beautiful day, not unusual this time of the year for Raleigh.  The grandkids headed straight for the school playground afterwards.  We did several trials of Spin the Three-Year-Old to see how soon she could walk after about thirty revolutions.  Luckily she didn't throw up.

Annie, the bespectacled kid on the right, was very proud of her stick collection, and insisted we arouse ourselves from our post-prandial stupor and marvel at the shapes she had made with them.

Paula pulled a fast one and got help decorating the tree.

If the tree leans slightly toward the right, it's because the three-year-old concentrated on that side, and considering her reach, most of her ornaments ended up on the bottom half of the right.

Paula has always mocked the long, tapering glass ornaments and calls them "torpedoes."  Through the years, somehow, and I'm not saying how, they have had a much higher-than-normal mortality rate.  It's kind of weird how she'll say "Ooops!" and after a pause, a torpedo will shatter on the floor...Just sayin.'

Kate, the lopsided three-year-old has inherited her good taste from her grandfather, and appreciates the torpedoes.

She has also inherited important talents from him, including the following:

And no, the old myth about getting your eyes stuck when you cross them is not true.  I hope.

My grandson Nathan wanted to do clutch clinic, even though only 2.4% of cars nowadays are sold with a manual transmission.  We took the Miata to the church parking lot.

Anyway, the car did make it home.

So, Thanksgiving dinner was great.  However, with a bunch of extra people and two of them teenagers, we noticed that the provisions in general were disappearing at an alarming rate.  Cereal boxes were empty in minutes.  Leftovers weren't left over.  We were throwing comestibles at them to keep them at bay, but it wasn't holding them for long.  Pretty soon, they started looking around for other things to consume...

Now, I'm not saying that Paula and the tree rats haven't had their disagreements.  They love to drop empty pine cone shards on her front sidewalk, and she no longer tries to grow tomatoes after they got a taste for them.  However, this was getting ridiculous.  Battered and fried squirrel steaks, while admittedly a Southern thang, are kind of a mess on the stove, and the neighbors start talking.

Plus, even our tomato-fed plump little tree chickens weren't going to last very long with this horde.  

Luckily, work, school and other awful things were becoming more urgent, and while gazing hungrily up into our pine trees, the kids and grandkids packed their cars and took off, figuring MacDonald's would be an OK second-best.  Even if they don't serve squirrel ribs.

We hope that your Thanksgiving worked out all right also, and that they left you something more than some relieved rodents in their wake.

Dave & Paula

Man, if I was an eight-year-old boy!

 This would be really cool!  Great big machines! Flashing lights!

Dump trucks!  Stuff twice as big as cars!  Big holes in the ground!

Yeah, except that its the street in front of our house that's undergoing replacement of the storm sewer line.  So far, only one blown transformer for about an hour.  So far...

Being fall, the yard was aerated and reseeded last week.  Fine, except that the construction guys have their stuff all over it.  They were taking a break on Paula's nice grass at about 4 PM yesterday afternoon when the automatic sprinklers kicked in to keep the new seeds wet.  

They quickly decamped to the yard across the street, probably convinced that the cranky old people had turned on the sprinklers to chase them off.  No, it was just programed irrigation karma.

The sewer project is supposed to only take three weeks.  Yup, for sure.  Uh huh.  I'm figuring I'll be able to string Christmas lights on the backhoe parked in front of the house.  

Meanwhile, the new house next door gets turned over to its owners next week after eight months of construction, just in time for the next empty lot across the street to swing into full building mode.  

We need an eight-year-old boy to enjoy this!  For a couple of 60+ year-olds, it's not that cool.

We hope that your neighborhood is more boring for pre-adolescents.

Dave & Paula

Growing older doesn't necessarily mean growing up!

And that's the great thing about Old Guys' Kite Camp!  This year's Fall Edition was no exception.  

Cape Hatteras in the Fall can be gorgeous or hurricane-ravaged or rainy or cold or calm or all of them in the morning and something different after lunch and a nap.

We lucked out and it was beautiful weather all week.  The water of the Pamlico Sound was still warm, so at most it was shorty wetsuits.

The wind was too light to kite for several of the days during the week.  So if you put together three MD's, the Co-Presidents of the largest demolition company in the Northwest U.S. and an international entrepreneur and not enough wind, what do you get?

Putt-putt golf!  Known as THE premier course on the Outer Banks, Jurassic Putt in Kitty Hawk was the site of this year's tournament.

    And at some point, the duct tape comes out.

A new GoPro station for whenever/if ever the wind started blowing again!  This one was nicknamed GoPro Bot, and was anchored in the sand to get some awesome footage.

Several people had to get some work done, but with all the COVID changes, this can often be accomplished remotely.

The traffic on Hway 12 seems to get a little heavier each year, but a morning bike ride on a calm day is still a good option.

Of course, there were days when the wind was good.  My brother and two of the other folks in the gang have become very skilled at kite foiling.  That means using a board with a hydrofoil underneath.

In very little wind, a foil board can elevate above the water and glide like magic.  The rest of us were impressed, as it looks very cool and is described as "like flying."  This is my brother on his board.

Kite Camp always includes caloric sins, as everyone takes turns cooking.  I think the final count was something like five gallons of ice cream.

And of course, some classic cinema.  Anyone up for James Bond as a West Virginia convict in "Logan Lucky?" 

Everyone had a great time, and except for a little bit of necessary remote work, there were not very many serious (or otherwise) thoughts the whole week.  There was redneck kiting by the Seattle guys,

and foiling complete with a kite halo,

and I began hitting some little jumps (as opposed to the big jumps by the rest of the group),

and everyone just had a good time,

until the sun went down and "Mom," (the wives) made us come in, get cleaned up and eat dinner.

Another great week of playing with family and friends.

And about that "growing up" thing....we'll do that another time.  Maybe.

Dave

"Americans? Like, from America?!"

The best way to travel is to visit someone who lives there.  The next best method is with someone that knows the place well.  By necessity we chose "B."  

So, off to Germany, Austria and Italy for three weeks with my brother and his wife and their friends who know the place well.  What about COVID?  We are now two of the most thoroughly jabbed and swabbed people we know, and where we were headed had lower rates than where we were coming from.

(Is that thing, like, in his brain?)

Anyway, once there, folks were reassuringly serious about the pandemic; we had to show vaccination proof to be admitted to restaurants, hotels, stores, etc., and masks were universal indoors.  At every restaurant, we had to register our presence for contact tracing if needed.

But the great outdoors were great and allowed us participate mask-less.  Luckily our friend is in to hiking, so we did lots of that.  This guy isn't my friend, he's my brother.  I guess he's both, come to think of it.

This one is definitely my friend.  And my wife.

At times, it got a bit on the tricky side,

with chutes and ladders and cables anchored to cliffs.

Several nights were spent in "mountain huts," whose name implies more basic accommodations than were provided.  

We were lucky to spend nights in several inns far off the beaten path

with better-than-average views.

We could - usually - find someone that spoke English, though several in our group spoke German.  In one of the "huts," a young woman on the staff said that we were the first Americans she had seen the whole season.  In the beautiful inn above, the proprietor's wife said that she couldn't remember ever having an American stay there, and that her English was mostly helpful for folks from Slovakia or the Netherlands as a common way to communicate.

OK, so it sounds like we just skipped around the mountains communing with marmots and Ibexes (Ibecies?) all day.  Au contraire!  With crummy weather the first couple of days, we ascended to an ice cave,

and checked out churches and castles.

And of course there were lots of times where we had to pile in the van and travel a bit, but we were enthralled by the scenery on the way.

It was a nice reset of perspective before coming back and being Americans in America.  We certainly admired much about where we visited, but it was good to be back home.  That is, until we opened the suitcase and realized that the bomb/drug-sniffing dogs would have choked on the dirty clothes therein.

We hope that your hikes are also enjoyable.

Dave & Paula

Hansel & Gretel, Part 2

In the original, the crummy parents took the kids out in the woods and tried to lose them, and they were nearly eaten by a witch.  What a heart-warming story to tell your kids at bedtime, no?

As you're aware, seven of our dozen grandkids live in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and only make it back to the States once a year.  They've been here for almost a month, visiting their dad's family out west, and then attending the Henderson beach reunion a couple of weeks ago.  

We also try to do something fun with them and their cousins from Jacksonville, North Carolina while they're here, such as rafting or camping or hiking.

This year we decided to try to lose them in the woods.

We took them to the mountains of Virginia and rode bicycles down the Virginia Creeper rails-to-trails path.

They had a lot of fun, 18 miles of gradual downhill following the route of an old limited rail line.  However, try as we might, we weren't able to ditch them.

Perhaps you're aware of the hazards of playground equipment.

We couldn't find any that was very scary.  

Figuring that the freezing-cold pool at the motel would slow them down, we tried that.  They figured out how to get back in the motel and found their way back to their rooms.  Great.  

Next, we found a Dominoes Pizza that was so cold you could see your breath.  Maybe loading them down with pepperoni and making a break for the van would throw them off our trail.  No such luck.

So we tried again, this time hiking up the trail to Mt. Rogers, the highest mountain in Virginia.  

We saw them trying to leave a trail of candy wrappers to find their way back, and one of them reminded the others of Park rules and they picked them up.  Our big chance!  

We re-oriented the trail markers to lose them.  No luck.

The Creepy Cave That Probably Has A Bear!?  He was apparently on holiday.

Speed on our part turned out to be a no-go.  They were usually way ahead of us.

How about one of the oldest tricks in the book - The Poison Berries Gambit?  That ought to work!

Turns out they were blackberries and were actually delicious.  Aaargh!

Our last chance was the feared Wild Horses of Mt. Rogers!

Yeah, well, they turned out to be the Placid Ponies of Mt. Rogers, more interested in whatever snacks we had than devouring our grandkids.

Driving their cholesterol levels up eating fast food on the way home was going to be waaayy to slow.

In the end, we gave them back to their parents, who had enjoyed a couple of quiet days back in Raleigh and were ready to tackle the horde again themselves.  

So, just as in Hansel & Gretel, Part 1, everything came out OK in the end.  We wished the Uzbek gang a good trip back to Tashkent as we left them (safely) at the airport early this morning.

We hope that your grandkid adventures are as much fun and that you can't lose yours either.

Dave & Paula