We're Home/Final Vacation Pictures

We made it home as planned on Friday evening about 6:30 p.m., which is 14 hours of total travel time.  That's what it usually takes us, so the trip was par for the course and traffic was smooth.  We got the dogs picked up at the PetsHotel and they were very happy to be home.  Maya had to see the vet while she was there because of diarrhea.  She is still on the meds for a couple more days, but she is much better.  Echo was the only cat that was immediately friendly when we got home and he's been like velcro with me ever since.  Unless he's asleep, he's been pretty much keeping me in his sights at all times and snuggles whenever the opportunity arises.  At bedtime he has to sleep with as much of him as possible touching me and he just purrs and purrs and throws in head butts as he deems necessary, probably because I've just finally fallen asleep and stopped petting him.  Let's just say I haven't slept through the night since I got home.

I'm going to load up this post with all of the rest of the pictures from vacation because I have other posts I want to get to with finished quilts and some fabric for sale.  Now that it seems I am starting a Kaffe Fasset collection, I have decided to get rid of a bunch of my 30's fabric and my Christmas fabric since those are two of my least used collections.  I selected the fabric to sell yesterday, but need to take pictures, so keep an eye out for a post in the next day or two with my offerings. 

Speaking of pictures, I'll state up front that some of these are not the best.  My camera is just a little pocket Casio as a photographer I'm not, so I do the best I can with the equipment I've got, which means if something is moving, like an animal, it's probably going to be a blurry.

I'll just go in chronological order with this last post and the pictures.  We departed the house in Kerrville about 6 p.m. on Thursday night.  We pulled off to check out a house for sale that we kept seeing on the way into town and one of their neighbors had this in their front yard.  This picture is pretty indicative of much of the damage we saw around town. 

One of the houses on the street leading to ours had built their front porch around a huge oak tree that was at least a foot in diameter. Not the brightest move in my opinion, but at least when it fell during the storm it fell away from the house or they would have had much bigger problems.

Since it was early evening, we took the scenic route to the ranch down Highways 41 and 83.  There are ranches all along those roads and many of them have a lot of great wildlife.  We weren't disappointed.  It was just the right time of day and with the storm the night before, the wildlife was out in force.  We saw several herds of Blackbuck antelope (more on that species later) and several herds of Axis deer.  We have Axis at the ranch, but we didn't see any this year.  Here's a picture from the internet of a couple of bucks.  Aren't they pretty?  When you see an entire herd of them it is quite a sight.

We also saw either Elk or Red Stag along Hwy 83, as well as 6 Llamas at the ranch across the highway from the entrance to our ranch.   Hmmm, maybe those llamas that suddenly showed up at the ranch somehow crossed the road????

We took a slow drive through our ranch and were not disappointed.  We saw not one, but three male Blackbucks that were either black or turning black.  They don't turn black until they are mature, and we've only ever seen one full black one at the ranch before, so it was quite exciting to see so many.  As we made the return pass, I was about to get a decent picture of the darkest one that had come back out of the trees when a truck came from the other direction and scared them.  I had gotten an "on the run" picture the first past through, but it's not good at all.  Blackbuck antelope are one of the fastest animals on earth, if not thee fastest, and they don't wait around if they are startled.

Here is a picture of a male Blackbuck that has not yet turned black.  I tried to get out for a better picture and he bolted, so this is the best I got.

And here are two other Blackbucks, one that is completely black and one that was starting to turn.  This is an awful picture as they were on the run, and on the opposite side of the van from me, so right below this picture is a picture from the internet of a mature male Blackbuck.

I thought that was it for the animal pictures, but then I remembered that we had another little caterpillar stop by as we were packing the van.  This one is fuzzy and I finally had to relocate him/her to the grass so they didn't get stepped on during one of our many trips in or out the door.  Maybe he just came to check out the new porch :-).

I already knew that I had a package of goodies from Jackie waiting for me at home because the tracking information told me at had arrived.  Jackie had a great Memorial Day sale.  I figured I wouldn't be able to participate as I wasn't about to use the unsecured McDonald's connection and risk exposing my PayPal account, but by some small miracle, I had a good enough connection at the house on Sunday morning that I could actually load pictures.  Normally, the neighbor's connection is like being on dial up so loading any kind of picture is usually out of the question.  Anyway, I got a small order put together and managed to get it all done and paid for just before the connection died.  It must have been fate for me to have these fabrics to add to my new Kaffe Fasset collection.  Most of these will be used with the Kaffe fabrics I bought at Creations.

 

During the trip home I had daylight all the way (on the way out we drive during the night to start) so I got more dishcloths done, a total of 8.  Here they are.  A commentor on the last dishcloth post asked about the pattern.  I will post that in a different post soon.

I started finishing off some of the dishcloths yesterday while I was watching Hallmark movies in my sewing room.  I actually got a lot done in my sewing room yesterday, but mostly cleanup stuff so nothing fun to show.

And that concludes the documentary about the Kerrville 2010 trip.  I am leaving again in a few weeks to go home and visit my family, but DH is staying home as it's just too expensive for both of us to travel and to have to pay for pet care.  I found cheap plane tickets way back in January and we did the same for him last December when he went to see his family for two weeks.  You gotta do what you gotta do when both of our families are many states away and you have as many animals as we do.