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Red Clover field near Sherwood
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We went for a drive through the country-side to the North of us last Sunday. The weather was (still) beautiful and the scenery equally so.
We drove part of the Vineyard and Valley Scenic Tour Route which mainly winds it's way through the rolling hills and fields of the Tualatin Valley.
It's a 57-mile/92-kilometer route of wetlands, tidy farm
fields, orchards and hazelnut groves, and towards the hills the tidy
lines of the vineyards.
As I said, we only drove a short stretch of it, but we're certainly going back for the 'full' tour one of these days.
My main reason for the drive that day, was going up to the viewing point at Bald Peak State Park, just 9 miles to the north of us.
A windy road winds it's way to the top of Chehalem Ridge. It's a very pretty drive, especially right now with the bright green leaves of spring ..
It's a very small 'park', basically only a parking area a toilet and a few picnic benches, but after you make your way through a little forest of huge Douglas Firs the view is quite nice.
There were great views to the south across the Willamette valley and it's beautiful farming country ..
OK, moving on.
Closer to home the blueberries have done their flowering, and the bees have done their fertilizing, and now the berries have appeared and (hopefully) will start to ripen ..So
far it has been a very dry spring and James has repaired the drip-lines
so we can give them a few blasts of water in the coming weeks.
We'll also start to cover them with netting soon in the hope of saving them from the birds!
He
also got rid of another item on the 'honey-do' list. We had bought a 38
gallon portable waste holding tank for our black tank, aka a
'poop-cart' ...

The plan was to empty our RV-tank once a week and haul it over to Doug's house, where we can drain it in the sewer clean-out in the yard next to the house.
Which was a fine and dandy idea, but it turns out that the whole shebang, the tank including it's smelly continents, weigh way to much for me, and actually also for James, to handle.
It turns out that we're not the only one that has that problem, and Camco has made a gadget to make this a lot easier ...
They sell this 'steerable wheel kit" for $72 at Camping world. Ha! Too much for us cheapskates of course!
Leave it to James to come up with a similar contraption and after some shopping around and a little bit of cutting and welding and painting we now have a much easier time of dumping our s**t!
I didn't do that much this week, mostly because I threw my back out .. heavens now with what .. but I did, and I'm still not moving too smoothly these days.
It was a perfect time to work on one of the new puzzles I got for my birthday:
And while I made some fast progress in the beginning it has turned out to be quite a difficult one. Which is good. It will give me more time to enjoy it!
O, and I baked a bread again. It had been some time but I'm ready to get back 'into it'.
This is a no-knead whole (or actually half) wheat bread. Despite not wanting to rise very much over-night, it did raise during baking and came out fairly good.
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It tasted fine, especially with some good liverwurst ..
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And look-ie here .. we also christened our new (yes, new!) outside Blackstone gas-griddle!
We made a 'Grand-Slam' for breakfast ..
And hamburgers and sweet-potato fries for dinner ..
So far, we absolutely love it! No more food falling through the rack of the grill and no more flames burning the food. Everything gets cooked much more evenly, you can cook almost anything on it's surface and, best of all, you can cook everything at the same time!
Well, there you have it. Life is good!