Father & Daughters Trip

Sorry the posting is late. Okay, not really sorry, just kind of sorry. I don't want to disappoint you but I was having a wonderful time. This is our father and daughters trip that we take once a year and spend three or four days together fishing, horse back riding and piling on as many bodies as we can fit on Dad's four wheeler to explore the alluring dirt two-track roads. Our aging knees and tush get a bit sore but it's our jaws that get a real work out as this slumber party is a chance to discuss politics, livestock, children, exchange recipes and lie. You heard me - lie. My sister, Lana, and I insisted that we were in Mexico and went about the huge ranch to prove it to anyone dumb enough to believe us.


We took pictures of a small Corriente herd of a Mexican breed of cattle that supplied roping calves for the family that manage the tens of thousands of Angus beef that roam this ranch.

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and we snapped shots of the ...

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two burros that are pastured next to the ranch house

along with the ...


wild horses ( okay they're the ranch horses). It's obvious they're too well bred for the scraggly mustangs I'm familiar with. Unfortunately, the barbwire fence does give an air of domestication but I did try to exclude it from the picture. I even stood on the four wheeler but wasn't high enough to shoot over the fence.

What was our older sister doing while we were busy lieing - laughing. She's a lousy liar. Probably comes from being a school marm. Dad said he couldn't believe he'd raised such big fibbers. Yeah! Well, who told us all those whopping fishing and hunting stories when we were a child?

So, why he was caught off guard when he asked,"Let me pay for the groceries. What did they cost?" and I replied,

"Don't worry about it. Groceries are cheap in Mexico."?

There are a few pictures we need to hide until we're ready to fess up to not being in Mexico. This one for instance. It pins us down to being in Wyoming. We grew up in the Big Horn Basin on the other side of the Big Horn Mountains and never knew the county extended this far, interesting.


Now this picture I'm not so sure about since Dad and I are from Wyoming. We could say we were sneaking back across the border, Wyoming border, when we took this picture. And, we were. Only it was from Montana that we had slipped into, not Mexico. My grin that's contorted into a grimace was because concentrating and smiling at the same time was just too much for me. I was trying to figure the angle, like a pool player with a tricky shot, for the camera was in my outstretched hand aiming back at us.



Other photos weren't such a challenge to take. It's hard to make this country look bad.








It was tough but we had to look at this scenery every time we stepped out of our bunkhouse.



Then when we rode horseback or with the four wheeler along the river we had to look at this...


and this ...


and when we got a close up this is what we saw.



One morning, Dad took off with Shane, the rancher, and we grew bored. Bored children get into trouble. We stole Dad's four wheeler. It was his fault, he'd left the keys in it. Now, we don't know anything about running ATV's but, if you leave the three of us alone... We didn't come back for hours. It wasn't long before we began to call Lana, Creamy - as in,"Come look at this Creamy." Only because she was squooshed when we went up or down hills like the cream in an Oreo cookie. Dad eventually came looking for us just like when we were little. He knew in which direction we'd headed and unlike when we were young, we didn't get in trouble, he just grinned from ear to ear at the sight of us smashed together on his four wheeler.

I did say we went fishing but Dad's the only one that caught any fish. My sole fish got away and Lana's fish just nibbled at the grasshopper her big sister, Susan had caught and put on her line. She wouldn't hold a grasshopper but, she wanted to find a rattlesnake to kill herself.

A short distance from the bunkhouse Dad had killed one with a stick the night before. It was so badly beaten it wasn't worth photographing and all but one rattle was missing. Not much good to hang on your board by your desk and I guess a grasshopper wouldn't be as impressive. So the brave girl, who wouldn't handle grasshoppers, held a rock in each hand whenever she left the road so she'd be armed and ready to kill a snake.

We found one dead on the road. It too was missing most of its rattles. It's a dangerous place here in Mexico.

The only thing I've failed to show you is a picture of us on horseback. Susan caught a shot of Bess, my horse, and I coming up the road but, Susan's not available for this blog. So you'll just have to wait and see what a potato looks like on a horse another time.

Thanks for your patience in the delay and I'll be talking to you in a couple days.