Harvest Season

Its been a rough week or so, what with Phelps quest and the Bigfoot travesty. So understandably, blogging has been at a low. I sent the camera to Philadelphia with Casey so that he could take pictures during his ACS trip. All of the zero pictures Casey took should be posted soon. While Casey was gone, I spent some time in San Francisco with some college friends. We had a good time up there and hopefully I will get some pictures from them up on the blog.  

In the meantime, we set out to the Stanford gardens to check on our big fall harvest. As many are aware, Casey has gardened every year of his life. This first summer in California was no different and it even seemed like a great opportunity to try some new crops.  After all, California is nicknamed, "America's salad bowl".  Similarly to UW, Stanford has community gardens with plots one can rent and garden. It isn't as nice as Eagle Heights and the plots are smaller and more expensive, but it is right near work, and one could potentially garden all year long.  Casey just loves it.  Here he is next to his plot, surveying his bumper dirt harvest.

Looks great! Here's where the gophers dug under the tomato cages and the somehow got full grown plants out. Maybe back through the hole they came in through, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon?
This is the culmination of a long, noble battle Casey fought, and eventually lost (much to the amusement of his boss, who compared him to Bill Murray in "Caddyshack"). At one point Casey even tried feeding them Juicy Fruit because of advice he read on the internet. The people that run the gardens don't seem to be too concerned about their extreme vermin problem.  I have never seen anything like this.  We would have animals eat our produce in Wisconsin, but they never took the whole plant right out of the ground.  Through an elaborate system of chicken wire, Casey did manage to protect one basil plant that we harvested on Saturday and ate on a pizza. yum. 
I guess gardening is over for now. The whole thing is very disheartening.  

obligatory cat pictures

As indicated in the previous post, Elsie really didn't seem to care at all when we got home.  After Casey went to work the next day,however, she had to be touching me at all times and spent most of the day sleeping on my legs.

While I promise that I am going to resist the temptation to just fill this blog with posts of Elsie pictures, I will have to post some, since that seems to be the only thing on my camera.  Part of the problem is that I have a life long goal of getting Elsie on Cuteoverload.com.  I really think that Elsie has what it takes and is way cuter than a lot of the cats on that site.  Still, most pictures of her seem to look more fat than cute. The camera really does seem to add 10 pounds.
Okay, one last one for Casey. I assume he took this, since he thinks it is cute when she sleeps on her head.  Also, Elsie is the only other one that lives with us, and she doesn't know how to use the self timer.

We have actually been in California for about 3 weeks and really have no pictures to post about.  Casey is heading to Philly tomorrow to go to the ACS and see Russ and Rachel, and my friends Katie and Gordon are coming to town on Sunday.  So hopefully, these events will make our life appear more exciting.  I guess I should have posted about Phelps Quest, since that seems to be the only thing that anyone on television can talk about.  I really feel like Michael Phelps is ruining the Olympics and that it totally isn't fair to call him the greatest athlete of all time.  There is no other olympic sport in which a person is even eligible for like 50 gold medals. Why are there so many swimming events?  Its ridiculous.  I saw on the Today show, that he can basically live off of the money he is making from this olympics for the rest of his life.  How is this possible? Who cares? Still, I have basically been enjoying watching the olympics, even though I now feel sorry for all the American gold medal winners who aren't Michael Phelps.

Home!

After leaving Wyoming, we still had two days left in the car.  It was sort of a blur.  I remember that it sucked and it was hot and I was grumpy.  I also got a horrible heat rash across my back.  We pretty much drove straight for the last two days, stopping only for gas and food.  Here we are at a KFC, where I enjoyed a KFC snack pack.

Casey really thought this picture was going to be hilarious.  I'm not sure if it is or not.  I guess it is sort of funny that I might have a huge plate of fried chicken for a snack.  Anyway, the worst part of the drive was entering California over the Sierra Nevadas.  The Corolla was really struggling with the trailer and downgrades were even more terrifying (until I turned off the overdrive and went down in third gear. duh.) I was really afraid that Casey and I would get stuck at Donner Pass and be forced to survive the winter on Wendy's.  That would truly be a nightmare. 
After the Sierra Nevadas, the rest of the trip was smooth sailing.  Before we knew it we were home and enjoying a delicious bottle of California wine! Here we captured the warm reception we received from Elsie, who was eager to get right back to ignoring us.

Wyoming

Wyoming really was pretty awesome.  Here Casey took an informative picture about Wyoming Winds at a rest area, after a discussion with Marta about a windy rest area.  We think this is what she was talking about even though it was, disappointingly, not windy at all that day.

We took a 30 min. detour off I-80 to a town called Saratoga, WY. Casey has been wanting to go to a hot springs since I have met him, and we have always been foiled. Actually, the truth of the matter is that he is always foiled because I veto the plan. We almost stopped in Colorado once, but it was snowing out and I didn't want to drive another 6 hours all wet. When we were in Mexica, we got on an unmarked dirt road to "Agua Caliente" but I vetoed that, too, because I didn't want to die in Mexico. So Casey found Saratoga on a hot springs website and made reservations for us at the hot springs resort in town. The resort was super cute, with about 30 rustic rooms surrounding the hot springs. They had a series of tubs of different heats, and I assume they all drained into this large swimming pool, which was a really comfortable temperature, like a warm bath. Here's Casey enjoying a Busch light:
Then they had some uncovered and some tent-covered smaller hot tubs. Some of these were almost unbearably hot, especially during the day. At evening after dinner, they all filled up fast, especially the covered ones. Most of the people at the resort seemed to be middle aged couples, we think from Colorado. Here's me enjoying the healthful benefits of one of the covered mineral hot springs:

The town also seemed pretty awesome and it seemed like it would really be a nice place to visit longer. There was a big river through town and they offered float trips, fishing, and all sorts of other outdoor adventures. There was also a public hot springs. When we got there, most people were actually in the public swimming pool, which was not free, even though there was a river next to the pool, and draining into the river, was the hot springs. So, if you are a traveling vagrant and don't have enough money for a chlorine pool, they also offered this option:
(The sign says "hobo pool", but the camera strap is in the way.  argh)

As you can see, many wandering homeless people took a break from hopping freight trains to partake in the slightly murky water. It actually did seem like a really nice hot springs.

I would definitely recommend Saratoga to anyone traveling the mighty I-80.

I would also recommend listening to John Hodgeman's book, "The areas of my expertise" on audiobook.  Underbakke turned me on to the audiobook version, and it made the whole trip (and visiting the hobo pool, in particular) much more entertaining.

Nebraska

After making it through the glorious land of Underbakkes, we arrived in the great state of Russes and Rachels. The first (and only) item on the agenda was getting a Runza! Has anyone else (besides Russ and Rachel, of course) been to Nebraska?  There are seriously like 200 Runza restaurants.  They even had Runzas in towns of 300 people. So for dinner, we HAD to stop.

The Runza appears to be similar to many regional food items, in that there is smooshy dough with meat and spices and cabbage inside. They seem to have russian-german roots. 
I guess Russ talked a bit about Runzas and even tried to make some? Anyway, during the Runza experience, Russ seemed to always be on Casey's mind. 
Here we tried to share with you the inside of a Runza, not knowing that the inside of a Runza, much like vampires, cannot be photographed.

Getting Gas

I assume that the trailer also compromised the gas milage, and it did seem like we stopped a lot more often for gas. Luckily, Casey was there to capture these precious moments on film.

I thought we were going to have to spend a lot of money on gas.  I guess we did, but it was less than $400 for 2200 miles.  So, that's better than 22 mpg.  That's not bad. 

Getting serious about blogging

Okay, I have to start taking this blogging business seriously or casey-emily.blogspot.com will end up like caseyandemily.blogspot.com. They have one post from 2005 that says "hi yall".  Thanks a lot, jerks.  I hate Casey and Emily for taking the best Casey and Emily related blog name and wasting it!

Next on the agenda is the drive out west.  The first thing you should know is that we drove all 2200 miles with a 2,000 + lb. trailer on the back of my 1996 Toyota Corolla.  This was TERRIBLE, and we will never do that again.  

It was impossible to go above about 60 mph with the trailer on the back. If we were going uphill the max speed was about 40. We weren't really counting on the trailer slowing us down that much and the trip took a whole extra day. In addition, having the trailer also made it difficult to stop anywhere that would require putting the car in reverse.