The Next Stop

We are finishing up our projects here at Graham Equestrian Center in Maryland and are setting our sights on Arizona as our winter destination. Not sure how everything will work out yet but I am confident it will. We are selling our bus before we leave here and we haven’t decided how we’ll get to AZ. We will either fly there and ship our stuff (Joe said I have to pare down even more  - NOT happy about that) and get an RV there, or we’ll get an RV here and drive to AZ – I like this option best because then I wouldn’t have to get rid of anything. And we are still looking for a ranch to work at out there (or multiple ranches). Again, I’m confident that things will show up when needed – our part is to step out in faith. :o)

It’s been a great experience here for all of us. Jadyn started out being afraid to ride horses to saying, “Hey mom look – one hand.” Joe has done a lot of work here building fences, repairing fences, washing/painting barn, taking care of horses and the list goes on – and he’s been able to get some riding in too. I’ve enjoyed coming up with different menus and implementing them each week – and going to the different farm stands to get the best deals.

Next time I think I’ll write about this really cool cider mill we went to. We’ll have to go back to get some pictures first. Until then, Adios Amigos…….

Taking a Mushroom Trip!

Ok. It’s not like it sounds. It’s actually a Mushroom Festival in Kennett Square, PA. And the area boasts 60% of all the mushroom sales for the US. Jadyn is especially excited about going because of the children’s activities. When I was researching the festival I told her they had a Monkey Maze and that’s all it took to get her going! “I wanna go on the Monkey Maze! I wanna go on the Monkey Maze!” Ok. I was saying that too. :o)

We took US1 to get there and all along it were yard sales. It was like somebody sent a flyer out letting everybody know it was national yard sale day or something. We went over the Conowingo Dam and the view was very beautiful. We’ve been this way a few times already visiting Holly, the barn manager of Graham Equestrian Center (where we have our bus parked) and to get our raw grass-fed cow’s milk.

 

As we are driving through rural America I’m noticing something interesting: every tenth of a mile there’s a mile marker that marks the mile and the tenths. So it’ll say 0 miles and 0/10, 0 miles and 1/10 and so on. I don’t know how many miles or tenths of a mile we drove until we finally arrived in the little town of Kennett Square. I think every person in the city and surrounding states were there because it was so crowded and the free parking (on the streets) were taken or it cost $5 to park in a garage or somebody’s yard. So we circled the vicinity like a carrion feeder until we finally spotted a space and pulled in. Thankfully it was only a couple blocks away from one of the entrances.

                 

After paying a $2 admission fee we donned our wrist bands and started our trek among the mushrooms. To our dismay we didn’t see much in the way of mushrooms, only a couple small booths hocking different varieties. And then we saw……….THE CHILDREN’S RIDES! Jadyn immediately became a tape recorder playing the same tape over and over: “I wanna go on the rides! I wanna go on the rides!” OK. I did too!

We had fun on the Monkey Maze – although she freaked out a little bit because she kept running into the walls. You walk through the maze with your hands in front of you, but all the walls are clear so you can’t see them – not well anyways. So she kept running into them. She had fun in the hall of mirrors and then the big slide at the end. I felt a little bit like a monkey for paying $4 for like 4 minutes start to end. But, she had fun and that’s what counts. We went on other rides (thankfully the adult rode for free with the child) and then moved on to see what else (besides crowds) this festival had to offer.

       

There were a lot of vendors there selling mostly over priced food, people selling t-shirts and other things. We realized we had to get out of there because we were getting very hungry and didn’t want to get lured into eating everything there. As we were heading out we came upon “The Mushroom Exhibit”. We saw some very cool displays of the different stages of mushroom growth and at the end we played a free game of put-put golf which Jadyn enjoyed. On the way back to the car we gave our wrist bands to a couple with children so they could save themselves $4. They were surprised but glad.

                

On the way home we stopped a grabbed a bite to eat in the next town and then I took a nap on the way back to the ranch while Jeanne drove. I happened to be awake though when we crossed a rather large bridge spanning with width of the Susquehanna River and felt that familiar tingle (don’t like heights tingle). It seemed like Jeanne slowed down on purpose as she was driving close to the edge. Hmmmm. Before we arrived home we stopped at our favorite dairy farm for fresh ice cream – Broom’s Bloom Creamery. A sweet end to our day.

       

Raw Milk in Amish Land

We recently drove to Pennsylvania to acquire raw grass-fed cow’s milk. For those of you that don’t know, pasteurized milk is VERY bad for you, but raw milk is healing to the body.
According to Nina Planck, author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why:
Pasteurization came about as a result of urban dairies springing up in the late 1800s and early 1900s to supply milk to the growing population, and to control disease conditions occurring during that time period. Owners put the dairies next to whiskey distilleries to feed the confined cows a cheap diet of spent mash called distillery slop, and the quality of “slop milk” was so poor it could not even be made into butter or cheese.
Conditions were un-hygienic, too. In one contemporary account cited in the Complete Dairy Food Cookbook, distillery cows “soon became diseased; their gums ulcerate, their teeth drop out, and their breath becomes fetid.” Cartoons of distillery dairies show morose cows with open sores on their flanks standing or lying in muck in cramped stables. Bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis were common, and cow mortality was high. The people milking the cows were often unsanitary and unhealthy, too. Dairy workers could taint milk with tuberculosis and other diseases.”
Public health officials decided to pasteurize the tainted milk instead of cleaning up the unsafe and unsanitary practices. So now it's dead milk because pasteurization kills the good and the bad (btw  - there wouldn't be ANY bad in it if it weren't for continued unsanitary and unsafe practices in producing cow's milk).  
With pasteurized milk, lots of the calcium winds up getting into blood vessels calcifying the inner walls to promote cardiovascular problems, or entering joints to create arthritis, and you get mucous and phlegm in your body which attracts diseases.
With grass-fed raw milk you build immunity, which prevents disease.
So, with that being said, we had an awesome trip over there to get the milk from an Amish farm.

The countryside was beautiful and it was really neat seeing our first Amish horse-and-buggy caution sign. :o) Then we saw a plow team and a couple buggies hitched up at the local country store.

                        
            Here’s Joe drinking his first glass of raw, grass-fed cow’s milk.
                              
                                  It was creamy sunshine in a glass. YUM! :O)