Summer Catch Up–Part 1

I’m a bad blogger, a very bad blogger.  June 17th was my last post.  Yowzers!  How does time slip away like that?  Hello, is there anyone even left out there to answer that?  If you are, you deserve a medal to have hung out this long without a post! 

I’ll try and catch you up a bit on the last couple of months.  We left for vaca shortly after the last post.  We headed from Illinois to Alabama via Arkansas. Doesn’t everyone do that? 

We delivered a disk to Arkansas.  Shhh - we were a bit over-width with our load so we took all 2-lane highways between home and our mid-Arkansas destination.  Can you say 14 hours of “bliss”?  Not exactly, but the hauling job paid for our vacation so it was very worth it and we did get to see a lot of countryside you don’t get to see on the super-slabs.  Also, notice the motorcycle in the back of the truck.  It got to come out and play in Alabama. 

Our riding companions, son Joe and daughter-in-law, Kristin met up with us in Alabama.  For some reason they didn’t want to ride along to Arkansas.  I just didn’t understand that.

While in Bama, we helped friends “dump chickens”.  Quite literally.  Baby chicks come in on those white flats and get dumped out into the chicken house to grow for 6 weeks and then move on to market.
There were 30,000 chicks in the load that came in while we were there.

Did you notice you don’t see me in the pictures dumping chickens?  I manned the camera.  Lori does.not.do.birds! no matter how cute some people think they are.  [shudder]

This was somewhat of an agricultural vacation  for us.  We delivered machinery, dumped chickens and stopped by Stephanie & Lance Miller’s farm to see how cotton and peanuts are grown. I’ve followed Stephanie’s blog for a couple of years now.  It was so nice to finally meet Stephanie face to face

and see how farming is done in Alabama.  Thanks to the “other Millers” for taking time out of their day to show us around.
The cotton pickerPeanuts
We also spent a couple of hours in the Little River Canyon area in East Alabama.  So pretty. A drive I would highly recommend.

We even took a few minutes to cool off our “boot feet” in the river.  So refreshing after riding all day in 100 degree heat.
We visited Slick Lizard.  Unfortunately, the Smokehouse has been closed for a couple of years.  The sign is still funny though – “Fill your gizzard at Slick Lizard.”

And no trip south is complete without some good ole southern home cooking.  Our friend Jerimy, makes the best smoked chicken ever!

More summer to come….