Wes and Jan see the US Wanderings and Side Trips

Turkey Day 2007 Nov 24, 2007

The Thanksgiving holiday was pretty low key for us this year. Our grandson was home from school and our son-in-law, Brian, had to work on Friday and Saturday. So, we went to our daughter's home in Aurora for a few days. We planned to leave here on Wednesday, but the weather reports were predicting a pretty large snow storm for Tuesday night for Aurora, CO and western Kansas. So, we moved up our departure to Tuesday morning. Wes was not feeling very well, so we took our time getting ready to go and he got a couple extra hours of sleep. We drove two vehicles. Wes had been working on our son-in-law's Tahoe and we needed to take it back home to them. We visited with the grandkids during the evening and turned in early. Wednesday morning, Suzy and I headed out to the grocery store early to get all the Thanksgiving "supplies". The crowds weren't bad and we were finished in good time. We did some other shopping and had a good lunch and picked up a supply of DVDs for the holiday. After a quick dinner, we went out to the movie. We saw August Rush. It was a very good movie and no one was even killed.

Thursday morning, our grandaughter, Zoe, joined her classmates from church in delivering Salvation Army dinners to those in need. Our grandson, Zack, headed to the park for the annual church Turkey Bowl (commonly known as the challenge of the inept and out of shape). Of course there were delays with the Salvation Army, so I prepared our family Thanksgiving dinner which we ate about 4pm. We spent the evening visiting with the Boneha family, who joined us for dessert. Zack and their son, Victor, have been best friends for a long time and Victor enlisted in the Marines and left for Basic Training about the same time Zack left for BYU-Idaho last summer. It was great that they were home at the same time. It was great to see how much they have both matured and changed.

Wes still was not feeling well, so he went to bed early. The rest of us watched a couple of movies. Friday morning we headed for home. It was snowing lightly and according to the weather station, it should clear up by the time we got to Limon about 87 miles away. Wrong!! The closer to Limon we got, the worse it got. And that was the story all the way home. The roads were icy, wet, snowpacked, just a mess. There were lots of vehicles in the ditches, so we just took our time. Our normal 3 1/2 hour trip took us about 5 hours. We were excited to see snow on the ground at home. It has been extremely dry this past summer and fall and we need moisture for the crops and animals. It snowed again during the night and we had a nice cover this morning, but it soon melted when the sun came out.

Pheasant hunting season began the first weekend of November and we have been hoping that no one will kill our "personal" pheasants. We leave food and water out for them and they stay pretty well protected in our windbreak. We have posted "no hunting" signs around our farm, but sometimes people don't pay much attention to that. I was excited to see a flock of them this morning.

All in all, a very good Thanksgiving.