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We have been up here about a month now, and we are still settling in.  Of course, BUDGET TRUCK RENTAL may have had something to do with this as we had to make a second trip down to get a U-Haul to bring all the stuff up from the house.  My mom and grandmother came along so granny could decide on some things to get rid of, which reduced it enough that we only just fit everything into the truck! 

Said Moving Truck

We also had a trailer and a minivan full of stuff to bring along that were full of all the last minute items that grandma just couldn’t part with!  The trailer was not loaded well, so about half way through the trip, when my grandmother nearly lost control in a fishtail, I traded the trailer onto the truck, a move we should have done to begin with. 

The Van and Trailer

It took two crews of volunteers to load and then unload the things we packed for the move.  Now that the dust has settled, the truck is returned, and we are nearly done clearing out a room in the upstairs of the house to use as our living room, it is all up to us to sort everything out and make sense of it all.  Grandma’s stuff is more that we can expect her to do in any hurry, so she will need a lot of help with it all.  None of the outbuildings is usable at this time due to the things that have had to be put into them! 

My Mom

Since we have been up here we have been able to shirk off enough of our responsibilities to go out a few miles in almost every direction and see some of the local villages and towns, as well as a couple of small cities nearby, such as Lewiston, Logan, Richmond, Smithfield, and Cornish, all it Utah, and of course Preston, Weston, and Franklin, all in Idaho.  We have been up to Deer Cliff for supper, and to Willow Flats.

Deer Cliff is an unassuming little place local to Preston, Idaho, which serves some of the best fish and steak meals to be had. 

Of course the prices have changed since this sign was made many years ago.  I would not charge less than $0.25 for a raw egg now.  The decorating may be a little dated, and you may even find it has a little to be desired, but don’t let that put you off going for the food.  It is worth even the drive into the mountains. 

Simplicity is everywhere, actually even in the food.  But when you order a steak, as I did, then you get a steak.  Try the iced tea, they will serve it to you in a glass like the one pictured at center.

Further up the canyon is Willow Flats.  It is a lovely place to camp, with both the flats as pictured above, and the mountains which surround it, as pictured below.

With so much to do to clear all of the outbuildings, it is no wonder that we have skived off a few times! 

Since being up here I have spotted a few deer, and not just the ones along the road with their legs sticking up in the air.

Yes, that’s right!  Shot from a moving car!  With my camera, that is! 

The boys are not due back from England till the 19th, and when they come back it’s right off to school and to work on the house!  I am not sure they are looking forward to it! 

Kelsey J Bacon

Fairview, Idaho

So far the life in Idaho has been busy trying to settle in on no budget at all.  The cost of coming up here followed by  the cost of the time spent packing rather than working has been a swift kick in the butt, precisely where the wallet resides.  It’s all work, work, work…  I have a few jobs to do to keep my grandmother happy, and some jobs to keep my immediate family happy, and so far I have not been able to settle into a routine that allows me to post on the Prospering Peasant, or on here, or to get some photography started.  There is just too much to do.  I have not brought my camera out with on many of the drives we have taken locally, but in the weeks to come, I certainly will. 

What I have not been shooting photos of has been the many routes around here that lead up and down the valley, and eventually into or through the mountains that surround us on all sides.  Really, we live in the mountains, but in a large valley on a flat floor of fertile land waiting for the seed, and for the irrigation pipe.  Irrigation was installed here by early pioneers in the area, and for that I am thankful. 

Our set up here consists of one acre divided into half for lawn and house and out buildings, and half for grazing, but with no irrigation on either side, except where the neighbor allows us to run a hose under the fence from his lines, so when he waters his field, we can water our lawn. 

On the other side of the street there is six and a half acres of grazing field, half of it irrigated, and all of it growing nicely.  A local guy puts cows on this field and usually arranges something like a cow for us, however, this year he is paying property taxes and for the water shares instead, as the cows he has cost so much that he only has a dozen for the season. 

All of this is on fairly flat land, apart from the back three acres over the road, which slants slightly downward to a drainage ditch that is always full of standing water in the guise of a long, narrow pond.  The irrigation canal runs right through the center of the property across the road, so there is a bridge over that. 

The barn as I call it is not really a barn in the normal sense.  Instead it is a very large shed made of wood, and it is pretty old.  It has a main room, which could easily serve as a barn, with a dirt floor, and another room which will serve for now as a chicken coop.  It would one day make a lovely canning kitchen though as the vegetable patch is just outside the door to that room. 

There is a separate one car garage that is oversized, and could serve as a two car if the door were big enough. 

The Granary is a building built of 2×4’s laid flat and put together kind of in the fashion of a log cabin.  All of the buildings need some freshening up and cleaning out, but they are all in good enough condition to serve well to their purpose. 

The house is a two story, and is typical in its design, so much so that I have seen a few similar enough to convince me they are built to the same plans. 

More will follow, of course, and especially in the form of photos, once I get all caught up on the settling in part.  There is more to do around here than I care to talk about.  Till then…

Kelsey J Bacon / The Prospering Peasant

We have been in Idaho for one week today.  Today we got our broadband connected via a dish on the side of the house that provides a fairly decent connection.  The move up here did not go as planned, with all thanks going to Budget Rent A Truck for not letting us have the truck we booked because of a defective Air Conditioner!  What’s more, they did absolutely nothing, I repeat NOTHING to find us another truck, and the boy behind the counter showed even less sympathy or remorse!  I would like to highly advise against using their service for this and because I saw two trucks being towed during the time between our booking and the time we were meant to pick up the truck.  I do understand though that U-Haul will price match any printed price that Budget quotes, so that may be the way of getting our stuff up here! 

Back to the good news of being in Idaho!  The horses were already up from our trip up in April.  The chickens and goats all rode up with us in the truck when we drove up last Friday.  It was a long drive as we had a bad tire when we left, and as it turns out, the tread was separating on it.  Because we left at night we could not see which one it was causing the bumping, and in the end we drove the whole 500 miles on a tire whose tread was coming apart, but just did not fail, even under a load.  Well, some things just work out, where some things don’t. 

I have a lot of photo taking to do up here.  There is grass everywhere!  There are old buildings and bits of farm gear around, and lots of fences, and plants…  There are mountains on all sides of us.  The views are stunning and breathtaking all at once. 

This evening we let Pat guide us around for a drive.  Kit and I got in the truck and flipped a coin to decide our directions and turns.   This was an adventure we learned off our friend Pat, and so I liked to say that Pat told us to go one way or the other.  Anyhow, Pat took us south of the house, then north of the house, and finally to Franklin, which had we gone opposite to the direction we started out in and just gone straight down our road and to the highway, we would have ended up in the same spot.  But Franklin is meant to be the first city in Idaho, so it is historic, and beautiful.  Apparently the gas station there is also the first den of perdition outside of Utah in this direction, so it is very busy selling booze and Powerball Lottery Tickets.  The place is obviously a gold mine for the owners! 

I am off to Bountiful Baskets in the morning for a 7:15 AM pick up, so I had better get to sleep now.  I cannot say enough how glad I am to be here, closer to so much of my family, and in a place where life abounds, and light inspires.  I have officially gone country! 

Kelsey J Bacon

I love sitting on the bed at night, computer on my lap, typing away at everything I can think of in a process of creation that would astound even the most astute idiot.

What ticks me off is the number of bugs that have manged to find their way into the house at some point today, and are flying all around me, and bashing into the screen of the laptop! This, I could do without, along with the crawling on my, or flying around and bashing me in the head, and so on.

Apart from that, I just keep my mouth shut, and type happily away!

Today has reminded me of England, in the last few weeks before we left and we were waiting for the last bits to fall into place before we could go.  Not everything was going exactly to plan, but we pressed on till we got the goal.  Then there was the messing about once the chips all fell into place.  Today has been a mix of both so far. 

Missus and I took the little one up the hill across the road for a walk with the dogs and I took this photo showing our place in the lower left where the red barn is, and due north in the middle of the picture. 

Kirynie and Karmel as we walk up the hill.

Kirynie showing her mum that Karmel’s collar came off.

It is so hot out here these days, and there are months of spring and summer yet to go!  Meanwhile, we are just killing time! 

[breadcrumbs track=”121559″]

This track is a test from an application called Breadcrumbs.  The track consists of some travel around in both the US and the UK, but is primarily our flight from Birmingham International to Salt Lake International on 29th September, 2010.  We did also fly through Paris CDG, but that never gor tracked properly due to my seat in the plane from B’ham to Paris.  I think it only picked up a waypoint or two while we were over Iceland, then started to track in the air in earnest past Greenland.  Whatever the case, it was an amazing flight, and a life changing experience as we moved from the UK to the USA! 

Today is the birthday of Christopher Hitchens.  I was unfortunate to have only discovered him late in his life, being that I am not a reader of Vanity Fair, or any of the publications he’d show up in when he was alive.  Christopher was a polemic who argued philosophically against religion.  I only discovered him in time to hope for his recovery from cancer in late 2011, however he succumbed to pneumonia, canonising his debate and leaving a void in the Atheist camp that cannot be easily filled.  He hobnobbed with cultural elite, and with the likes of Salman Rushdie, James Randi, and Sam Harris.  While his actual contributions to the debate were almost nothing, his style, his recollection, and his ability to defend his view put him among the top intellectuals of his time.  Happy Birthday Hitch!  

Kelsey J Bacon

Yesterday I drove with the kids back from Idaho where we delivered the horses and did a few repairs.  The weather up there is quite a bit cooler this time of year, but we adapted, and we had my mom and grandparents to visit with and keep us always too busy to worry about weather!  I’ll sum up each day to say what happened.

Sunday

We drove up on Saturday, so on Sunday we did a lot of assessing where things were and what we were getting ourselves into!  We also checked the horses were doing well in their new half acre pasture, and unloaded the truck, especially of feed and watering gear, and filled up more water than the horses should need for quite some time!  We also cleared up some stuff from Granny’s room downstairs and brought down a bed from upstairs.  That gave them a room to sleep in together, and eliminated the need for them to be hiking up and down the stairs every day.  It also put them into a room where there was a bathroom attached, rather than having to hike down in the night to use to loo.  Finally, we verified the chimney was clear because granny thought she had heard a bird in it, and did not want to kill it if there was one. 

Monday

The work began today!  We cleared out almost everything from the floor of the garage, and loaded it into the truck to take to the dump.  This mostly consisted of a cache of old items that David believed would have some value, saving him in the future from having to buy it as a repair part.  Of course, the first problem is that most of the cache consisted of rusted, rotted, or broken goods that really were nothing more than saved garbage!  The second problem is that to a large degree, Davis still believed that it was valuable property, and kept coming out to see what good stuff we were throwing away.  That slowed the job from time to time!  While this was going on, Dylan also took on the job of connecting the TV and a hard drive and printer so the grandparents would have al their technical work sorted for them. 

Tuesday

We took the load to the dump that we had dug out of the garage, and with granny able to park her car inside the garage, we turned our focus next to the very leaky frost free hydrant next to the garage.  The big task for the day was digging a big enough five foot deep hole that we could get into it and work, pump out the water, and get the level of the water below the joint where the frost free attached to an elbow which sparred from the main line.  In our free time we also rearranged hinges on the horse pasture and replaced the gate.  The whole family met at Arctic Circle for lunch where we were eventually questioned by the police regarding my daughter, as someone reported that they thought she might have been a missing little girl from northern Utah.  Of course she was not the missing girl, and while I was a bit taken back by such a line of questioning, I felt so much pain for the parents who have lost their child!  We went home to repair some barbed wire on the horse pasture as best we could, and cleaned up in the yard! 

Wednesday

Today was Jordan’s 16th birthday!

We went to get a new hydrant to replace the broken one, and we bought a new thermostat for the hot water heater in the morning.  Both got repaired, but naturally when my 16 year old jumped into the hole saying “I can do it!  I can do it!” I let him try and thread the new hydrant onto the the line.  He cross threaded it, and we could not get it to go on for quite some time, which included us verifying we had actually bought the right size.  Finally we went out to see if the next door neighbor, Ross Bird, had a tap and die set.  He did not, and he asked us to move several bags of concrete for him.  We did, then went home because it was too late to find a shop open in town.  Ross came by and pointed us to a house about a mile up the road where a man named Justin lived.  Justin works electrical and plumbing for a living, and might be able to help.  Upon going there, Justin could not find his tap and die set, so he found a pipe the same size, and ran slits down the thread crossways, and made his own cutter out of it, and worked it right in with no problem, clearing our threads and our problems.  Hours wasted, we put the hydrant in only to find that it would not shut off, so we had to take it out and clear some mud that had got into it. 

We also went to Carl’s Jr. today, and discovered C-A-L Ranch!  While there I bought concrete and a post for the receiving end of the gate on the horse pasture so we could assure the horses would not escape as the old post was a t-bar that would not stay in the ground, and was a bad replacement for a broken post that had been there before. 

Thursday

Finally it was time to clean the barn out, a job I was looking forward to, and one that promised to equal the garage times two!  When we finally finished it, we took a load to the dump of the same sorts of thing that had gone there from the garage.  We also prepared a second load to take the next day, as well as a load of scrap iron for recycling.  The barn also involved cleaning a room that is being used as a chicken coop, and putting up a roost for them, and a few racks for horse tack and saddles in the barn. We set the gate post on the pasture, and talked my mom into trimming the lilac bush for us. 

Friday

First thing after breakfast Jordan and I took that second load to the dump from the barn, and stopped at IFA to get a new lead rope for one of our goats.  We then loaded the truck with all the scrap iron, including hand lifting from the ground to the bed a 300 or so pound electric motor.  The iron recycling center paid at $160 per ton of unprepared metal, and we collected $83 from him.  We also moved a bench, worked on the garage door so it would open more smoothly, and Moved the horse tack, cleared clogged lines to the kitchen sink for better water pressure, replaced the thermostat on the hot water heater at last, and did a lot of cleaning up after ourselves.

Saturday

Finally we attached the mesh fence to new gate pole, completing that job, and loaded our stuff to get ready to go.  We took a four gen photo, and got in the truck and drove home to Nevada!  And the rest, as they say, is history!

Joan Hansen, Kiry Bacon, Kelsey Bacon, Carrie Hansen (Who collected her last name from a different Hansen!)

The house needs work, but it has got a lot of potential! 

Went out for a drive today to the far ends of the Earth.  If you have been on the Great Basin Highway in Nevada, and you have seen the desolation there, then you know just what I am on about.  America is a big country, and it is a modern country, in many ways the most advanced in the world, however, it still has places where the modern conveniences have not yet reached.  The infrastructure is beginning to be installed though, and what was once the Great American West is about to be tamed like never before.  When it finishes, I am sure the loss will be not unlike the loss of Route 66 to the Interstate, and only pockets will remain to remind future generations of a time long past.  See it while you can, for the insteps of progress will soon turn to housing developments that will cover with asphalt even this magnificent place. 

I wanted to check out the area and the traffic levels on the highway as an alternative to I-15 for the past day of March.  We need to take our horses up to the house in Idaho so they don’t eat us alive for the cost of their feed.  The tires are not new on anything, and the cost of replacing them is too high.  I’d like to keep the speed down on that drive up! 

Kelsey J Bacon