It's Been a While

Three and a half years have flown by.  I was completely unable to keep up with the blog and home projects for the simple fact that all I did was work, sleep, and take care of the girls.  That said, things have settled into a good rhythm.  The house is pretty much the same as I left the blog a few years ago, which is quite comfortable on my end.  The eldest child is halfway through university, the middle child is in high school, and the youngest is trudging through her last year of middle school.

As they do, some of the young trees in the orchard died over their first winter, and one was senselessly massacred by deer when I didn't notice that the cage around it had popped open on one end.  At least they had a good snack on the apricot tree.  We lost the apricot, plum, and mulberry trees, as well as the Northern Spy and Calville apple trees.  We've planted a Yellow Transparent apple tree which is thriving.  On this spring's agenda is to replace the Calville, Spy, the mulberries and the apricot.  I have a herd of 4-5 deer at any given evening in my yard, so the battle rages on.  They eat everything that isn't covered or caged!

I had a few great gardening years, but between this year and last year, we totaled two tomatoes.  Two.  I've tried everything but nothing can really remedy really wet summers.

I grew up foraging with my mother and aunts and the past two years I've really honed in on wild mushrooms and fungi in general.  We've done a lot of camping and hiking:  we've enjoyed the Great Smoky Mountains and the Adirondacks, and so many small forests!  I've come across more rattlesnakes than I'd like, more bears than I'm comfortable with, and more narrow hiking paths than you can shake a stick at, but I wouldn't trade any of it!  

Our camping adventures really made me realize that while I love the great outdoors, I hate sleeping in cold puddles when there's a downpour.   In the Smokies, there was such a deluge that my 14-year-old tent's rainfly sprung its first leak--or should I say leaks?  We couldn't escape dripping water and it was that night that I pledged to save enough money to buy a camper.  

So, that's exactly what I did a couple of months ago.  We had admired an Apache pop up camper that was in the site next to us while we were in Tennessee.  It had zero canvas and I had never seen another like it.  We lusted after an Oliver travel trailer, but those start at a price that is way, WAY out of my budget.  A used pop up was in the budget, but I didn't want the headache of having to make sure the canvas ends were dried out completely before storing it for any length of time, and the "for sale" listings were littered with pop-ups that had to have their canvases replaced or patched.  I wanted something solid, so we started looking for an Apache, only to find that they're not made anymore.  They had a heyday in the 1970s, but did I really want a 40-something-year-old trailer?  As fate would have it, I did.

I had a notification on Craigslist that a 1975 Apache Royal was about an hour away.  I messaged the seller and scooped it up the next day.  While the previous owner did a lot of work on the mechanical aspects of the camper, very little was done to the interior.  The details on that will have to wait just a little bit longer, but here is what it looks like from the outside.

1975 Apache Royal

It looks complicated to put up, but it's not!