Jane and John – we travel and we ranch!

We are currently located in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley just outside Luray, VA and we’re surrounded by mountains and gorgeous rolling ranch and farm land at our RV park.  We initially came here for a couple of days and when we leave later this week, we will have been here for over two weeks!

As a quick recap of what we have been doing for the last month we have been on the road, we left our little ranch in the Texas Hill Country on tax day, April 15 and headed for the Mineola (the Mineola Civic Center) to attend a Winnebago rally.  Mineola is a very nice small town in NE Texas and

John made an ugly little girl

it was quite the contrast to the hill country with its pine trees and sand.  The civic center was quite nice with great banquet facilities and the catered food was really tasty.  As a bonus, there were very large open fields where John got to fly a plane he brought along.

After leaving Mineola, we made a beeline for Chippokes Plantation State Park in tidal Virginia which happens to be across the James River from Jamestown and Williamsburg.  We were meeting up with our RV (and boating) friends Bob and Judy at the park and we were going to do

Jane and John at the Jamestowne visitor center

some more volunteer work there.  John takes care of the park’s weather station and helps out doing some computer maintenance there and other odd jobs.  Chippokes Plantation State Park is about a 1200 acre actual working farm with nice camping and period houses for rent.  While at Chippokes we actually managed to play tourist this time (last summer we worked the entire 10 days we were at the park) and visited Historic Jamestowne.  Getting there is a little fun (at least for the first couple of times) since you have to take a free ferry across the river.  We stayed at Chippokes for about two weeks and left for an RV park in Luray, Virginia which is very near the Shenandoah National Park.

John thought there would be some good sightseeing in the area and sure enough there was.  The Shenandoah National Park was created by the CCC in the 1930s (like many, many other parks and public works) and was designed primarily for automobile sightseeing along the mountain ridge.  We drove this 105 mile long “Skyline Drive” and the scenery was very nice – not spectacular, but nice.  It was good to visit there.

Next on the sightseeing list was the Virginia Military Institute’s “Hall of Valor” civil war museum in nearby New Market.  During the New Market engagement of the civil war, the VMI cadets were called upon to augment

Monument to the 54th Pennsylvania - New Market battle

the regular Confederate solders and saw action.  10 VMI cadets were killed in this battle.  The New Market story was quite interesting and is certainly worth reading about.

Another popular attraction in the area is Luray Caverns – billed as the “Largest Caverns in the East.”  We have been to the granddaddy Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico years ago and didn’t think anything could top that and weren’t particularly interested in visiting Luray Caverns, but we did anyway and weren’t disappointed.  Luray Caverns is quite a bit smaller, but interesting nonetheless.  There is quite the oddity in the caverns – an organ that strikes the stalactites to make the musical notes.  This project was one man’s dream and obsession and after we heard the organ play a recorded piece, we weren’t very impressed.  The music was a little weird sounding – don’t think this will catch on in other caverns .

John has been eager to finally rebuild our website and it actually happened over the last seven or eight days and he just put the finishing touches on it today.  He has been banging and fussing away at the keyboard for what seems like an eternity.  Also there are more pictures added to our gallery, so with this blog entry, we are pretty well caught up!

We leave here later this week and head for the Annapolis area where we will party with the Rohanes/Topleys/Josselyns/French celebrating Quinn Rohane’s graduation from the Naval Academy.  Should be lots of fun during commissioning week.

That’s it for now!

Hello WordPress!

It was a long and painful migration from Serendipity to WordPress blog software, but the deed is done   I had to copy/paste/hand edit some 70-odd posts and later I discovered I made a bunch of extra work for myself.  Oh well…

Another change

With the old blog software I had to use Google Groups for email notifications of new posts, now email notifications are integral to WordPress via a ‘plugin.’  Like before, it is your choice to unsubscribe at any time or you can even select which category you would like to receive notifications.

Other..

We are on our summer trip (part I) and enjoying beautiful weather in Virginia near the Shenandoah National Park.  More later.

Oops..

We haven’t communicated in, umm, several months. Tempus fugit.

It seems like only a couple of months ago we returned home from traveling last summer. It is always a joy to leave for new adventures and always a joy to return to the little ranch God has provided us.

So many things have transpired since our last entry.

It has been a long, cold and wet winter. Thanks to the cyclic weather phenomenon called El Nino, we had a very wet fall and winter, both frozen precipitation, and

Pretty in white!

liquid. We have had 1) rain, 2) sleet, 3) snow 4) frozen fog, and 5) pea sized hail at various times over the last few months. We are NOT complaining about the precipitation. We also have five to seven year periods of not much moisture, so we graciously accept the mud, the dirty vehicles, and the cold weather (but there is a little grumbling at times nonetheless….)

Moving along to some geekey things, John uses the winter for indoor projects. On the short list was to totally rebuild a couple of websites he created initially and maintains. John’s favorite web editing software, Adobe GoLive was an ‘end-of-life’ product so John finally decided it was time to move on to a current Adobe product called Dreamweaver. After a couple of weeks worth of on-line video training, he dove in and got the job done. The first effort was a remake of the sudansouth web site (the missionaries in Southern Sudan), the second effort was a complete rebuild of the Friends of Grayson Highlands State Park web site.

He built another web site for nephew Jason’s wife (Christine) that turned out okay as well.

He has had an objective of totally rebuilding the janeandjohn.org web site, but it is like the cobbler’s children not having shoes – he can’t seem to make the time to work on janenadjohn.org.

Our dear neighbor on the other side of the fence to the north finally sold the property. The neighbors were divorced a year or two ago and Marjorie was able to stay in the house until it was sold. It was a bittersweet moment to see the storage pod for the new owners dropped off today after closing. We all need to move on and it was with great delight and anticipation we met our new neighbors today. They seem nice and John was happy to find out the fellow was a woodworker.

Buck’s new “house and yard”

Marjorie endowed us with her pet axis deer (Buckaroo or ‘Buck’ is now in his new home) and her two pet whitetail deer are still in their high-fenced pen on her old property which she wanted on our property. Buck and the whitetail does are used to being around each other, so we don’t know how that’s going to work out. The whitetails were not interested in being walked around to our property. Speaking of Buck, we completely redid the fencing and gates in most of our catch pen and Buck has a pen of about 60 feet by 120 feet (I think this was the size of the lot of our first house!) It took the fence guys about three days to redo the enclosure and they had to build ten gates.

Buckaroo the axis deer

So what’s this about a 19,000 pound boy!?

John has wanted a bulldozer for a couple of years and has been reading and investigating and watching the classified ads and even made an offer a year ago on a dozer about 45 miles away. The dozer is the ultimate guy toy but it is more than a toy – it will be another useful hand around our little ranch. This dozer was purchased from an Internet auction (IronPlanet.com) and the inspector’s report about the condition (and 50+ pictures) was very accurate. John is thrilled to have another piece of useful equipment on the property.

Glamor picture

For those interested, the dozer is a 1999 Komatsu D39P-1, 90 HP turbo diesel, three forward, three reverse speeds, only 1246 hours of use. Joystick steering and a joystick to control the 9′ 3″ wide blade. It is interesting to note the blade on the front of the dozer weighs about 2,200 pounds, about 400 more pounds than his Kubota tractor.

Sorry about such a long time between updates May God bless and a fair wind and a following sea to our friends and loved ones…

Jane and John continue reading…