ANOTHER DAY OF MEMORIES

Thank you everyone for your comments for Barbara and Tom.  She was an absolute JOY to know.  Always happy, always laughing, always ready to lend a helping hand.  You need breakfast?  She would make it.  And she did love her hats!!

I don't think I ever saw her without a smile except when her kitty got out and was immediately lost.  How did we find her?  I let Miss Jessie out on a leash and she made a beeline for the kitty.  Jessie didn't like kitties.  She found her up under their motorhome and she was immediately captured.  I think that was the only time Pansy ever got out of their rig.  Barbara was thrilled to have her kitty back.

Ice cream?  Yes please!!  Like me, Barbara and Tom never turned down the offer.  Everywhere we went clear across the U.S., they had their favorite spots to stop.  I think I gained ten pounds.  She also knitted ... making most all of her tops and sweaters.

This smile ... she was never without it.  Even when eating smores they provided on one of our group steam train trips.  

Being a big dog and cat lover, she always had pets and love for Mr. Cooper.  This was him barking at her out the window.  Good times and so many good memories.  I was blessed to have been a tiny part of their RV'ing life.  

  

And so another day has come and gone.  I was lucky to have Uber (actually a close friend) deliver the backdoor dinner from the lodge.  I really wasn't expecting much, but there was a TON of food here.  Half a chicken, cooked to perfection, REAL mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy, Cole slaw and a Hawaiian sweet roll.  It lasted three meals for me.

I just wasn't feeling it on this day.  I kept remembering moments from that epic trip I took with the Westerfields ....  so I watched the Pendleton Rodeo.  There's no better rodeo in the country.  This arena is the size of two football fields.  The guys not riding on this day sit in the peanut gallery on the grass.  On occasion, they scatter like flies when the horse or bull bucks right through them.  I took these pictures of my TV while watching the Cowboy Channel.  If you get a chance, check it out.

These pickup men ... their horses get a REAL workout running the length of the arena after the horses to bring them back to the chute area.  A couple of newbys forgot the pick up men actually pick them up off the horse.  They jumped off way too soon and were very slow to get up.

This guy hung on for as long as he could, even as the bucking horse jumped over the low PVC fence.  

Here's the titanium fence they put up for the bull riding competition.  Yeah, it's just PVC.  Lots of brave people sit outside the fence when the bulls come out of the chutes.  Just don't move.  You move and that bull will come right through that fence like it was toothpicks.

This guy didn't even blink an eye.  He was smart.  Last year two guys moved, the bull ran through the fence and nailed a photographer who could not run fast enough.  You don't mess with the bulls.

That was it ... I just kept thinking about all the geocaches we found as we crossed the U.S.  Tom and Barbara loved that hobby.  They even laid several geocaches of their own around the country.  You stick a tiny sheet of paper and a pencil in a tiny little container, then hide it somewhere along the roadside.  You give clues to its location in a geocaching app ... and people try to find it.  If they do, they sign the register.

I'm not that good at finding them, so I got lots of help from Barbara and Tom.  Sometimes they would look like a bolt in the fence board, but it was just a cap over a hole where the signing sheet was.  Some are in sprinkler heads ... some hanging from the trees.  They loved it so much they gave seminars every year on how to do it and where to find the containers.  

There are just a thousand more memories floating through my head.  Can you imagine how many other people they influenced??  A wonderful Human Being is now in Heaven looking down on us with a big SMILE!!