Seattle - Day 2

Second day in the city, it rained. Lucky for us, we have reserved the camp site for another night so we don't have to pack up our tent in the rain. Also, the tarp over the tent was set up very well, thanks to Pramod, and we didn't get rained on in our sleep!!

Rainy day, we went to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. It was great! We got to see some glass work in action while a team worked on a flower--Putting glass together, another team worked on a tiger--making textured glass & shaping it, and the last team was blowing glass bowls. Very cool. I liked it more than the museum itself. There were some pieces out that were designed by kids and made into glass by professionals. Those were really fun. The gift shop also had some amazing stuff that was just too expensive and breakable to bring home with us.

We then drove to China Town/the International District to walk & eat. It was like a different world there, and the parking was a little cheaper.

Since it was still somewhat rainy, we decided to go see a movie. Not very Seattle specific, but there's only so much touring one can do before they need to relax (and I don't mean the 1/5 days in Seattle--I mean the 2 months that we've been traveling). There was a theater by our camp site that had $2 movies! Only $4 for the two of us. What could be better than that? How about $1 Tuesdays? So we decided to see two movies: Day and Knight and The Last Airbender. We liked them both for very different reasons.

Seattle

We arrived in Seattle around noon. Because we dropped mom off at the airport at 5 am, a 7 hour drive got us there pretty early. We had some errands to run: getting the car oil changed, finding a FedEx to return Pramod's broken phone, and checking into our campsite. None of this was actually done in Seattle. We camped about 30 minutes south of the city in Federal Way.

After those errands, we went for our first tour of Seattle. I don't even like to drive in Boston, so I knew it was a mistake to be driving into Seattle. Those streets heading down to the water are scary! I'm glad they checked out our breaks when we had the oil changed -- not that anything was wrong with them, just for peace of mind.

The parking situation is expensive. The very illusive street parking is $2.50 per hour. Other advertised parking was $8 for 2 hours. After driving around for a while, we settled for $9 for 3 hours. Now I guess that's not too bad, but I don't know what we'll do when we come in for a full day tomorrow... ugh money stresses me out!

While downtown, we checked out Pike's Place Market. It reminded us a lot of the market in Mysore: lots of people, noise, things to see, and strong smells (fish, food, and flowers especially).

Missoula, Montana

I haven't blogged the entire time we've been in Missoula. I've been much too busy relaxing and spending time with family. What can I say? I'm a home body. I love spending time with people I know and doing a few spectacular things mixed in with mostly the every day.

One of my favorite things to do was Grandma's physical therapy exercise with her. Bill made this great tape with her exercises put to classical music. While these were exercises designed for an older woman, we put in additional movements to make it more difficult for us (Mom, Pramod, Bill, Marty, and myself). We did things like doing a sit-up with every leg raise. It was really fun!

After the exercises, we usually all did a short, easy yoga class after.

Grandma would rest during the sun salutations then join us for the seated poses. It's amazing how well she gets around on the floor!

We also had a great tubing trip, volley ball game, tennis practice, and some very nice meals.

It was really nice to be comfortable for the last week! Thanks to all you Andersons (and Heard)!

Yellowstone National Park - Wyoming

Yellowstone National Park is amazing!!

Black Hills - SD

Mount Rushemore

Crazy Horse

Badlands - South Dakota

The Badlands: not much to say except to put of pictures. It was well worth the 10 hour trip!

Oh and we loved the camping! We spent Thursday making the drive from northern Minnesota. We arrived around 6 that evening. We spent a while driving to our campsite -- you have to drive halfway around the "loop" to get to the free campsite. We set up camp, ate and played UNO until it was too dark to see our cards (which was pretty dark because the numbers are big and the colors just became different shades of gray). There was a beautiful sunset!

The next morning (there was a bison standing right in the campsite): breakfast, packing up, then we did a short hike (not even a mile), but it was 95 degrees today and very dry so that was enough.

Weeding

Pramod and I decided that in our free time we would weed. We made a plan to weed every row once before leaving the farm. With 40 something rows, we needed to weed 1 row a day (plus we plowed some of the rows with Paul in order to plant in them).

We started slacking by the end of the time here and some rows were more work than others (ex. tomatoes dominate the rows and its harder to get down under the plants). We didn't get them all done, sadly. Another problem that we found was that those rows that we weeded at the beginning of our time needed to be weeded again at the end. We did actually weed a couple of rows twice. They just keep coming back.

We put paper bags around the base of the squash plants to discourage weed growth. The nice thing about this is that during the winter the paper will decompose and just be good for the soil. Some plants have large enough leaves that they need weeding when they're small but they'll shade out most of the weeds later.

Paul told us that after plowing and planting seeds, weed growth isn't bad because it helps protect the seedlings as they begin to grow. As they get big enough to need all the sunlight they can get, however, weeding is very important.

Weeding is definitely a problem that can be hard to stay on top of with a garden as big as Paul's garden.

Making Hay

Making hay is a process that I didn't know anything about. It turns out that it takes multiple days, multiple steps and it's really hard work. Paul taught Pramod how to drive the tractor (because Pramod was really interested and I was not), so Pramod did a lot of the steps that I didn't.

Paul's hay fields actually belong to someone else. One of the field's owners just appreciates having their field plowed annually. I'm not sure about the other field owner.

First, cutting the field. Paul has a tractor as well as a bunch of attachments that fit on the back of it. One of these attachments is a grass cutter. Just like mowing the lawn, only the lawn is really tall.

Afterthe grass has been cut, it needs to dry. This will take somewhere within 2 days if it's warm and sunny. The next step is to wait, and rake it over to help the different areas dry faster. When we first made hay, Paul told us we were going to "rake" it and I thought we had to manually rake the entire field. I was thinking that it was going to be a long, hot day. However, there is another attachment for the plow that has wheels with needles coming off so that it rakes all the hay in it's path into a pile on one side -- upside down

from the previous pile.

Once the hay is all dried up, we need to make bales of it so that it's easier to transport. This is done by another attachment. This one was really cool. It had a thing with tines that spun to pick the hay up off the ground. Once in the compartment, there was a spiral that spun to move all the hay from the long compartment down to the end where the rectangle bale was formed. Once enough hay was in the end compartment, there was a giant knife that would

cut off the ends so that it formed a perfect rectangle. Then the rectangular bale was tied and dropped out the back. This was all done by the machine, someone just needs to drive the tractor over the rows of hay.

We weren't making the big round bales, but they were still really heavy. I was not a lot of help when it came to picking them up. I was able to roll the bales closer to the tractor so that those who could pick them up didn't have to walk so far or waste their energy walking them all over the place. We all were very tired and sweaty

afterwards.

Lastly, we needed to move all that hay into the barn before it got rained on (it's been raining a lot here). That was also a lot of work, maybe even more work than getting them off the ground. But we did it and we felt pretty good when it was all done!

Map

Click to see a larger view!

Pramod and I have changed our plans a little in order to see a few parks along the way. I wanted to see the Badlands as long as we're driving through. We have also been talked into checking out the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, plus it's on our way. Pramod was also really interested in seeing Yellowstone National Park on our way. So we're having a whirlwind 5 day tour with lots of sight seeing and driving and I bet we'll be pretty tired when we get to Missoula. But we're looking forward to it!

Bee Keeping

The other day, Paul showed us his bees. He has said that you really only need to check on the bees once a month in the warm months and any time there are changes that need to be checked (like starting a new hive). Besides that, the only work will be in removing the honey in the fall.

Apparently, unless allergic to bees, a person can only be seriously hurt by a bee sting if it stings you in your eye. He always wears the hat thing to cover his face. At this time of the year the bees are pretty happy though. They have lots of flowers to explore. Just to be safe, he puts smoke in the hives. The smoke makes the bees think that there is a fire in the hive and they start loading up with honey in case they need to evacuate. When they are filled with honey, they move much slower.

When we first went to check the bees I was nervous. It is not often that a person chooses to stand so close to so many buzzing bees. Every itch I had to examine in case a bee was on me. We did get somewhat used to it though.

We were checking the hives. In the biggest one, we checked a few of the levels to see how the honey production was coming along. It seemed that this hive was ready for another super added so the bees would have more room for more honey. We also checked the two new hives. Paul started a new hive with a couple of slides from the biggest hive about a month ago. Because he did this, there were baby bees in the cells and when put in a new hive without a queen, the nurse bees fed a female baby bee the “royal jelly” to create a new queen. At this point, we were checking to make sure that there were new eggs in the cells. New eggs means that a queen was created and laying and the hive is starting to grow on its own. There probably will just be enough honey for the bees to survive the winter months — so no honey for the taking from those hives. However, if they survive the winter, these hives should flourish and be able to make extra honey next summer.

So I like the bees a lot. I think they are really cool. I've been reading one of Paul's books on beekeeping and it's really interesting. I think I'm going to try to convince dad to let me get bees to keep up in Sandwich. I don't know how everyone else would feel about it though! But if it's really just a once per month commitment, I think I could handle that. Especially if dad was interested in helping me out a little bit. One thing that was really surprising though was how heavy the full boxes are! Empty, it's just wood, but full of honey and water, they are really heavy. I'd need some help from dad or Pramod for that reason.

Contra Dancing

We went contra dancing with Paul and Becky last night! It was really fun. It was one of their friend's birthdays so she hosted a dance and there were probably less than 20 people dancing. Li (Paul and Becky's son) just got back from a Mandarin immersion camp where he bought a kung fu type fan (very large). He didn't dance, but he was pretty good at walking around and fanning some of us regularly. It was perfect.