Wonder whose home looking after the ranch?

Seems like everyone in Canada is hanging around down here in Maricopa. We have met a bunch of folks here and by far the majority are Canadian’s hiding out from the cold weather. And Brenda says that no one is laughing at the way she says aboat so she is liking all these Canucks too. uesday night we went to bed with the wind howling and the slide toppers flapping and it never let up all night. All day Wednesday the wind blew and the temps dropped down so most of these Canadians were wondering why it was warmer back home than down here in the sunny south.

We thought with the wind howling it would be a good day to hit Costco and Fry’s and restock our larder. Not much shopping out there in the Bouse neighbourhood so it was looking pretty bare. Now that we have that resupplied we are ready for whatever happens next. It is looking like we will be hanging out here at Papago Butte at least through the weekend and then maybe off to Yuma for a day or two, on our way back to the desert.

Notionally we are looking around at some places here that might make a winter base for us also and there are certainly lots to chose from. We’ll see how that goes though, we really like our desert lifestyle too. Hard to beat the prices that things are going for here though.

In the evening yesterday the wind dropped off a little so it was a quieter night but the temps dropped off with the wind and it was down to about 20F, so a lot of these places were having problems with their water freezing. Our rig weather the freeze like a champ though and we had no problems although I think for the first time ever we left the back furnace, that heats our tanks, on all night so it was cycling on and off pretty regular and after about 4:00AM there was not much cycling off.

Today our host here, Lee, took me and some other folks over to a local dairy to have a look around. Pretty amazing operation, 28,000 head of cattle and about 7,000 being milked on a three times per day schedule.

I actually have a video of this operation but we are not getting the speediest internet on our aircard so it will have to wait for a better time to get loaded.

While we were off doing all this Brenda had joined Hazel and a bunch of her friends were having a girls day in the house. Lot of laughter and sounds of fun coming out of their all afternoon and into the evening.

Late in the afternoon Lee and Glenn, who also has some horses here, asked if I wanted to take a ride up the wash behind here. I could hardly get myself in gear fast enough to get saddled up and go. When we leave the farm back in the fall of the year I know that is likely I will not get in the saddle until we return with the geese in the spring. So today was a great time, and we rode off into the sunset.

Just in case you are reading this from time to time Wayne that Yellow Horse is a son of your Poco Nugents Tab stud.

5.50/147.4