Somewhere I want to go - Day 5

Somewhere I have never been but would love to go: 
I Love Barbecue.  Living in the south for sometime I learned to recognize places to get good barbecue, (more about that later) and heard about the world of competitive barbecue.  Sometimes the food network has competitive barbecuers on TV and it looks like so much fun.  They have giant elaborate grills and smokers on trailers, so they can travel to different barbecue competitions around the country.  Inside the rigs are large unmarked jars of spice rubs, whose recipe they guard with zeal.  At the competition, they tend the fires with all the care of a steam train fire man, watching for hot spots and flare ups.  The smell of burning wood and slow cooking meat must be amazing.
Writing this, I looked up barbecue competitions, and there are many more than I ever imagined.  I think I will be doing this soon.

My Rules for Finding Good Barbecue:
1. If it is a chain with more than 3 locations, or if those locations are more than 200 miles apart: -50
2. If the location is in a strip mall: -20
3. If the building has an indoor seating -10
4. Add 5 points for each of the following that is missing; Public bathroom, doors, windows, floor.
5. If the location is a guy in a trailer with a picnic table outside +25
6. If the trailer is next to the interstate -5
7. If you are given a printed menu -10
8. If the menu has more than 10 things on it -10
9. If the menu has fish -10 or vegetarian dishes -50
10. If most of the signs are written in magic marker and taped somewhere +10
11. If the cook is also the person that takes your order +10
12. If the cook is related to the person that takes your order +8
13. If there are utensils -5, if they are not plastic -10
14. If the food is served on anything that has to be washed -10
15. If there are other people eating there who the cook has known for more than 20 years +15
16. Add 5 points if you are in a state that was part of the Confederacy

Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park

Colorado is just about as land-locked as a state gets. So our trip to Washington was the first time our kids got to see the ocean or a beach.  The idea of high tide and low tide was totally new to us.  We found out the tides are more extreme at full and new moon, and we were there in between.  Still, for people totally unfamiliar the the ocean and tides at all, it was a whole new world.  We spent most of our time at Olympic on the beach, I would love to go back and hike more in the interior.

Random Picture

I have thousands of pictures, so I thought today I would select a random picture and post it, then write the story.  This is a replica of one of the ships that Columbus sailed to the Americas.  These ships were doing a tour up the east coast and we went out and saw them when they stopped in Florida.  I forget which of the ships this one is.  Something that we learned upon going to see the ship:  You see in all the movies people "swabbing the deck".  I always thought that it was becaue of the sea water and wind and stuff the deck got wet so people always had to mop it up so people didn't slip.  The truth is, the deck is designed to stay wet.  The deck is swabbed not to get the water off, but to evenly distribute the water over the whole deck so the boards stay wet. 
They are still touring, if you are interested: http://www.thenina.com/schedule.htm

Day 2 The Pinewood Derby

Last night was the Pinewood Derby.  The car turned out great, yesterday's problem with the paint job wasn't a problem because DS already had a cool paint job planned.  He painted it like lanes on a track, complete with brown strips for the infield.  On the front the painted the word "WIN" and on the back "Start".  I loved the design.  Every boy raced four times, once in each lane.  After winning the first race by a long way, the car feel behind.  Sadly, before the last race, there were some technical issues, they were repaired, but the car lost a lot of speed.  The scouts all had a fun time.  The funnest they had was after everything was over and the boys lined up across the gym from eachother and rolled their cars back and forth between them. 

Just for Fun...Day 1

I was writing my menu for the next three days.  (Yes I only do three days at a time, I hate making up menus so I have to keep the job short or I don't do it.  That is why we have seven pizza boxes in our garbage right now. and a birthday party)  And I looked up the blog of someone that blogged about cooking in her crock pot once a day for a year.   And it made me wonder if I could do a blog every day for a year.  So here goes...day 1.

Today is the pinewood derby, we haven't done anything on his car until last night except shaping.  Last night we added weights and today we were painting it.  It is a really cool shiny black with gold flecks.  Except I wanted to put it outside to dry, and it was raining, so I grabbed an old aluminum pan to prop over it to keep off the rain.  Except the pan had ashes in it.  I got ashes all over the wet paint of the pinewood derby car, and today is the big day.  I'm such an idiot.

So what is on the menu?
BBQ roast beef sandwiches (potluck for derby)
Macaroni and Cheese
Tamale Pie (crock pot from the website)

In the beginning...

And now....maybe the end...If I don't get interrupted again.

At least we know what the booming is.  But we still don't know where we are. 
Then another realization: the lights in the distance aren't in the distance, and they are lightning bugs.  Meanwhile, me calling for help is making the kids uneasy, so I stop doing that.  Did I mention that for the last hour the girls have been singing songs to keep up their spirits and keep the bears away?

In fact, staying loud enough to make sure the bears knew to keep away was a big focus for us. 

Since we had come to the end of a trail, but what we were on kind of looked like a trail, we decided to back track until we were sure we were on a real trail.  We back up a few yards until we came to a set of steps that were hewn into the rock.  That we were sure was on the right trail, but we couldn't find any other way to go forward than the dead-end trail we had already been on.  So we all got together and disscussed our options, which really at that point there was only one.  Spend the night in the woods.  It was about 10:30 (we told time by taking a picture with my camera, then seeing what the time stamp on it was, but we didn't want to run the camera out of batteries since it was our only light and time source, cell phones were long dead).  I knew that it was light at home before 5:00, and we were north of that now, so hopefully we wouldn't be spending more than 6-7 more hours in the dark, hopefully less. 

The next thing was to find a place to spend the night (never would the term "sleep" apply to anyone but the youngest).  We decided to hike up the trail, in hopes that if someone did come by they could help us.  (No big hope there, we had seen a total of 2 groups on this trail the whole way down, and that was during the day).  After just a few minutes we saw a lovely ditch by the side of the trail.  We weren't picky, but this did have the one advantage that we could sit in it and not have our backs exposed, which kept us warmer, and made us feel safer. 

Now that we had our lodgings picked out, we ate about half of the food we had left, (pudding and pretzels) and made arrangements for the night.  This involved all of us snuggling together as closely as possible to keep warm.  (I had been very cold in my tent and sleeping bag the night before, so I was worried about warmth).  Did I mention how rocky the trail was?  Good.  The ditch was rocky too. 

So we got all snuggled down, and started singing songs to keep the bears away. I sang Ian's favorite lullaby to him, then started on my other go-to lullaby which goes like this: "Oh do you remember a long time ago/there were two little babes whose names I don't know/ they strayed far away on a bright summer day/and were lost in the woods I heard people say/ And when it was night how great was their fright/bright sun went down and the moon gave no light/The sighed and they sighed and the bitterly cried and the poor little babes they laid down and died/"  Anyway it goes on, but luckily, after the first note I realized that perhaps in this particular instance, this song would not be as comforting as normal.

Then we heard rustiling in the bushes across the trail, very very close.  I had my camera in my hand, so if we needed to we could fire the flash at whatever-it-was if it came to close, or at least take a picture of the bear that ate us for posterity.  We all heard it, but everyone pretended we didn't and we didn't know that the others had heard it until we talked about it the next morning.

So the night went like this...3 full renditions start to finish of 99 bottles of (root) beer on the wall and any other song that the whole family knew by heart.  Every half an hour the people on the outside of the pile would be cold and the people on the inside would be warmer but sick of sitting on rocks: so everyone would switch places into some new arrangement that we all hoped would keep us warm and keep us from sitting with sharp rocks poking into anything too sensitive. 

We discovered that our oldest has bionic ears, and could hear any noise and pinpoint its direction much sooner than the rest of us, I swear she heard beetles walking on leaves 300 feet away.    Looking up through the trees we could see the sky more full of stars that were brighter than I have ever seen.  This was good, since we could see the stars it meant it wasn't going to rain. 

About three o'clock the stars started to fade, half an hour later, we could see the shapes of bushes in front of us and decided to get up.  We stood around for a while huddling to get warm, stretching out sore limbs and backs and eating half of the food we had left, and sharing a bottle of water.  Around 4 o'clock it was light enough to clearly see the trail, and we started the hike down. 

I guess the end will have to come later.