Over the river and through the woods

Click images for a larger view.

It was another lovely, relaxing, adventurous visit to the TN farm. This time we got to enjoy it with my parents and Chip and Ryan's dad joined us as well. I got to take some beautiful shots of the barn and the farm as well as some photos of my family.

My dad was a photographer and he enjoyed finding interesting angles and lighting with me. The old hay barn still has some interesting artifacts hanging in it. Old sacks, tires, boxes, saddles, tools, wallpaper and even an old chest now overflowing with hay and abandoned junk.

We drove to downtown Rutledge, which I had never seen. I explored an old cemetery and we ate homemade ice cream.

On the way back we stopped by Buffalo Springs. It was too cold to swim in for us but, we'll come back in the summer. One of our favorite traditions when visiting the TN farm is riding over the dam because we get to use all of dam jokes.

Chip and I enjoyed a game of "look at that". It started out with just distracting him from his usually questions he gets stuck on.

Look at the cow, look at the barn, then joking with the obviousness of my site seeing Chip said with a grin "Look at the car and look there's a vampire. "

As I stated in the last post, I'm sure I'd be chasing after the dogs to get them out of the road well, it was a little worse than that this time.
Ryan and I rode around the farm on the four wheeler and let the dogs run ahead of us. We got to the very back of the farm and the dogs took off after a turkey. We thought they'd eventually come back but, realized quickly they were long gone and had probably run off onto someone elses land. We drove around looking for them hoping they'd just run over to other part of our land. We'll hours later we still couldn't find them.

It rained a little bit and then we split up to look for them. Ryan on the four wheeler and me trekking up the steep foothills of the Smoky Mountains, up to my knees in wet fields of wild flowers, crawling under barbed wire, past an old rusty truck, onto other people's farms after anything that sounded like what could be our dogs. At least the view was spectacular.

I was exhausted so I waited at the house looking up on the hills for any sign of them. It turned out Ryan had seen them back where they had run off near the old pond. We rode back on the four wheeler but, no sign of them. Later in the evening, before sunset, Hank wandered back and we spotted Woody high up on one of the hills.

His long tongue waving as he ran. I swear he could beat Gene Simmons with that tongue. He'd gotten a small cut tongue on a barb wire or a prickly vine but, we finally had the damn dogs back and the adventures of Hank and Woody had ended.

I cooked some fried chicken in a cast iron skillet with lemon gravy and my mom made a marinara sauce with pasta. We ate outside next to the cherry trees and watch the last of the sunset. It was a wonderful time together.

At night, I got to take some long exposures of the old tobacco barn. Unfortunately, the clouds blocked the millions of stars we normally get to see.