I Love Camping in My New Canvas Tent, so Why Not Give Camping a Try?
I love living in the country and I also love being in the forest. Going camping is one of my greatest loves.
There is something about camping that just makes it special. When you’re camping it’s even better than living in the country. When you’re camping you’re out the birds and the animals, you feel at one with them.
I’ve been camping since I was very small. My parents used to take me camping when I was very young, and of course back in those days there was almost nobody else doing it.
You could camp just about anywhere, wherever you wanted you could pinch your tent and you are camping. But now there’s all sorts of rules and regulations about where you can camp and where you can’t. It drives me nuts.
Speaking of tents I’ll have to tell you about my tent. I used to use a small hiking tent when I was younger, but now I’ve upgraded to a canvas tent and I love it.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to canvas tents of course. They are bulkier and heavier and you couldn’t possibly go hiking with a canvas tent in your pack. But I’m a bit old for hiking now, and I carry my tent in the car so the weight and bulk doesn’t matter.
But we’ve been out camping in some seriously bad weather, heavy rain, strong wind and more. And usually when we go out we do so with a bunch of other people, and I’ve been out camping when their tents have leaked and blown down and our wonderful new canvas tent is upright and dry.
Of course you have to take some precautions, I usually put out some extra guy ropes, pegged down against the wind, because you need to use your head. But some of these new lightweight camping tents just don’t cut it when it comes to bad weather.
If I was sitting in a tent with my family in wild weather it would be a canvas tent any day. More expensive than one of these cheap Chinese tents, heavier and bulkier, but give me a good canvas tent when you’re camping any day of the week. Read more
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The Country Is Full Of Birds, And Birds Are My Friends
I’ve already said how much I like living in the country, I really do.
But one of the good things about the country is the birds. Birds are the most amazing creatures, I love them.
Out here there are just so many birds. Dozens and dozens of birds. It must be because they like the trees around me because there’s always birds and they sit in the branches of the trees and pick off the pods with their beaks and hold them in their claws and eat them one by one slowly.
I love birds but it is a shame to see them damage my trees, and they do damage them breaking all the bits off. If you look under the tree you can see all the tree lying there. Well not all of it but a lot, there’s broken tree all around.
Mainly they’re parrots, I don’t know. They so colorful that I just love to sit and watch them in the trees. I even get them sitting around my veranda, sometimes if I’m lucky I get them sitting right on the window sills. And they’re so colorful that I just sit still so I don’t scare them away and watch them.
There’s damage to the trees like I said but it’s still great having them around and I love it. I could shoo them away when they start damaging the trees and then I wouldn’t have the damage but I’d rather let them come and sit on my veranda. If I scare them away they might leave for good.
Its got to be so much better out here. I’ll bet there’s no birds like that in the city. Too many people to scare them off and no trees for them to wreck wither.
And it’s not just birds, there’s so many animals, and as I love animals I’m happy. I’m surrounded by animals and birds too.
Its good for the soul I think. Having birds and animals around is a part of nature and a part of life. Its not sterile like in the city. Birds and animals for me any day. Just right now as I was writing this a whole bunch of them flew right past the window. I can see one of them sitting on the veranda in front of me right now. Read more
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I Have A Boat, It’s Just Great Having Your Own Boat.
I have a small boat myself. Just a small aluminum boat, about 11 or 12 feet long. Its got its own trailer so I can tow it, I don’t need to put it on the roof of the car or anything.
It was raining and blowing hard when we went away last week. The kids had school holidays so they said they didn’t want to spend the whole time at home, so we went away. And though it was raining hard at first it soon stopped and got sunny so it was really nice.
And it was a really nice risort and the kids loved it. So many things for kids to do. The killer of a good holiday is bored kids, if you’ve got bored kids then they aren’t happy, and if they aren’t happy you aren’t happy. But here there was so many things to do for the kids.
Bored kids can be the worst thing you can do for your holiday. They are grumpy and unhappy and keep hassling you all the time to play with them, when all you want to do is to sit and relax and read a book. Kids hassling you doesn’t mesh well with bored kids.
But no problems on the weekend, bored kids weren’t a problem for me. There were so many things for them to do, table tennis, pool, a huge jumping thingy that they loved. A swimming pool that was outdoors and heated, and they love to swim.
And there was this massive tv for them to watch in the games room and every night there was a kids movie to watch so they loved that too.
And of course the swimming pool. I can’t believe something as simple as a swimming pool keeps kids entertained for so long.
And more about the boat. It was great for a number of reasons. Firstly it was a great way to get the gear transported. The kids bikes are too big to take in the car but if you have a boat along then you can just throw them in the boat and they’re taken care of.
So the boat was great. We did a couple of days in the boat. One was on the local river just looking around, a little time spent sitting on the bank having lunch and giving the kids a swim. More swimming! And we could sit there in the sun and read our books.
And near us was a lake too and we decided to spend some time on the lake. I had already bought a tube that towed along on the boat behind so that the kids could ride on it. They did it last summer and liked that so I decided to throw that in and was glad I did. In fact it was hard to get them off of it. Read more
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The Weekend Is Dusted And Done.
It’s all done, the weekend I really mean. And was it a great weekend? I loved it, though getting up quite so early was a little hard. Way too early for me.
I got up at around 5 am, really really early for me. It was way dark and it felt like the middle of the night. Wow was it hard to get myself out of bed, but I got out because I knew that I had a good weekend to look forward to.
I had to get going on time to meet the other people, so I picked up my friend on time. But it took quite a while to get all his stuff packed into the car, we were stuffing things into every space we could find.
It was raining by the time we got there unfortunately. That was a shame as it has been such good weather lately, the one weekend I want good weather its raining. But thats weather, you cant do anything about it can you?
We were camping (not great in the rain) and so we had to get there and put up the tent and so on. We were lucky that by the time we got there most of the rain had stopped. There was still a little but nothing like the rain we had on the way. It’s not pleasant putting up a tent in the rain is it? And it was a long drive there too.
And along the way there were all sorts of new speed limits, damn, I hate getting caught for speeding, so I observe them. Read more
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I Have A Few Cows And I Love Them
Cows.
I really love cows. They’re such lovely animals to me, almost a half ton in weight but so gentle. I’ve never seen an aggressive cow. Bulls maybe, but not cows. Even my kids can pat them as long as they’re feeding them, the cows don’t necessarily like being patted but they’ll stand there and be patted if they’re getting fed. They just pull back a little when you try and pat them.
You won’t get to pat them a lot unless you’re feeding them hay. They like their hay and when the grass is short and there isn’t too much because winter is coming and the grass isn’t growing. But I have a good supply of hay.
Now that means of course that youre committed to feeding your cows every single day. Once there’s no feed in the field then they need hay each day without fail. So you cant just go away for a few days and leave them or they starve. So you’re committed to them.
I feed them myself. I like my holidays though so when you go away you have to have something to do so that the cows are fed. I do this.
I have a good system. I keep a couple of my paddocks fenced off with the gate closed so that when one has good grass in it I can keep it that way. The cows eat my hay until I have to go away and then I can open the gate and let them in there and they have plenty of food for a week or so and I can go away knowing my cows aren’t starving.
And when I open the gate to the paddock with the grass they’re in there as fast as they can, because they’ve seen all that grass when they look through the gate.
Then when I come back I shoo them out of that paddock and back into the one with no grass and I start feeding them the hay again.
Right after breakfast I feed them their hay. They get 1 1/2 bales of hay every day but if it’s too cold I give them 2 bales of hay and they eat the lot. And they’re not silly, they know when feeding time is, they’re waiting right out the front of the shed for their hay.
They got 2 bales this morning. But finally the weather is warming up and the grass is beginning to grow again. Good, because I dont have much hay left. But now it doesnt matter because they’ve got grass to eat. Read more
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