Monday, January 05, 2009

Our 24-hour trip to West Virginia was much fun. We hit the road at about 3pm on Friday and arrived at Beau’s friends’ farm just before 5pm. Jesse managed to sleep only about 45 minutes - that was the extent of his nap for the day. Oops.

Anyway, the evening was relaxed - Jesse took to “Uncle” L and “Aunt” M like a champ. We had a nice dinner and then spent most of the night chatting and laughing. The jilted bride, A, arrived just before 10pm, so we got the scoop on the canceled wedding straight from her. Turns out the engagement is only slightly broken - the groom freaked out a bit and wanted to just postpone their wedding, not break things off completely. They’re working on reconciliation so we’ll see if a new (smaller - this one was going to be 250-300 guests) wedding is scheduled in the future.

Jesse did pretty well in his tent again, although we think the new surroundings and lack of nap threw him off. And I made the bad decision not to bring his blankie. Fortunately, they had a similar blanket on hand (their grandson’s) that Jesse latched on to when we put it in the tent with him. But he had a restless night, which meant that Beau and I had a restless night. I think Jesse finally settled into deep sleep at about 3:00am or so. The last time Beau reported the time was 3:30am. Jesse then woke up at 7:30am, so we think we got maybe 4 hours of sleep that night.

Saturday morning was more of the relaxed. It was a bright, sunny day and they live in a really lovely area with beautiful views from their windows. After breakfast, they all went out for a walk around the farm. They have beef cattle and one horse and just started to expand a pond into a lake. They took the two dogs (Australian shepherd and St. Bernard) with them and had a grand time. I stayed behind, drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the quiet. A eventually came out and we chatted a bit until the others came back.

Jesse then went down for a good nap while we continued just chatting. Beau and I decided we were interested in buying 1/4 of beef. They have about 5-6 steers currently (Angus mixed with Hereford and/or some other breed that I can’t remember), 5.5 of them are spoken for already. We thought we’d ask my parents if they’d be interested in splitting the last 1/2 steer of beef. L&M have a local butcher they work with since they sell the beef themselves rather than selling to a larger operation or sending them to a slaughterhouse. So the appeal of truly organic, reasonably priced beef is too good to pass up. We do have questions about aging (that we didn’t think to ask at the time), but I think once we know about that we’re pretty much going to buy. Now we (and my parents) just need to figure out how we’ll store the beef from 1/2 of a steer. Fortunately we both have separate freezers, it’s just making the room when the time comes.

Anyway, we hit the road for home at about 3pm, with a quick stop at Hardees to appease my burger craving and got home at about 5pm. The whole first 30 minutes Jesse said, “I see cows!” and various other stuff related to the trip. We think that’s his first whole sentence. It was a good visit - easy and relaxing and much needed. Now it’s back to the grind of normal life in Northern Virginia.