Daytona Bike Week 2012

This past Saturday we loaded up the bike and headed to Daytona with some friends we've met over the past few months. The air was a crisp 60F when we rolled out of Old Town and headed down the road, but by the first stop it was warming up enough that we had to shed the first layer off. By the time we hit Daytona, about 2-1/2hr later, it was in the 80's(F) so we were down to shirt sleeves or sleeveless as it were.

The first stop was the famous Bruce Rossmeyer's Daytona Harley, in Ormond Beach. There were thousands of bikes/rider's there and all the well known custom shops were there showing off their latest designs. We also got to meet some celebrities

From there we headed over to the Iron Horse Saloon, a must see when in Daytona whether its Bike Week or not!

After that we decided to head to the hotel to get checked in and get out of the heat for a bit to chill and rest up for the next day down town at Daytona Beach.

First arriving at Ormond Beach













Custom bikes and cars





















The celebrities Michael Ballard and Angie
Butch and Teri













The Iron Horse Saloon












Next day at Daytona Beach















After spending a couple of hours with several more thousand bikers at Daytona Beach we stopped in to an oyster bar for lunch before hopping back on the bikes to head for home. It was a great ride, with surprisingly little traffic, and what a great weekend it turned out to be!

The Approach and Passing of a Storm

Around 7pm last evening a thunderstorm came rolling through, so I tried to capture it with the camera.
The sun is still lighting up the trees in the foreground as the storm approached





















All we got out of it was about 15 minutes of rain with a little lightning and thunder, but south of us in Chiefland and east of us in Gainesville they got some hail out of it. It was also a bit strange because it came from the southeast.

Our New Grandaughter

Baby Leona, sleeping with big brother Trey and Pappa Dude next to her

New Grandaughter, Last Night's Dinner, and Firewood

On Friday morning we were awakened by a phone call from Germany that we had a new Grandaughter! Little Leona Joy Wise was born around 1:25am (EST) and weighed in at 8.25lbs and 21.6 inches long. As soon as I get some photos that I can upload to Blogger, I'll share them!

We decided to try a new recipe for Sheppard's Pie last night and it came out fantastic!

Golden whipped 'tators on top and underneath meat and veggies











Then this morning I helped out a friend, and bartender at the OTT, by cutting and splitting up an oak tree that had fallen in her yard. This thing was huge and it was a good thing that another of the patrons had a hydraulic splitter or we'd be splitting for the rest of the month.

We divided the wood 3 ways and this was still my portion. I think we're set for next winter!











Next week we'll get back to the decorating of the loft so we can get some more photos of the inside of our cabin posted.

First Glimpse of the China Loft

I mentioned our strategy for retirement in an earlier post about taking 1 task and completing it by noon, but today we worked a couple of hours of overtime. I think this shows that it was worth it!

The first glimpse of the China Loft guest suite












We built the bed frame from scrap cypress wood left over from the house and then took an old headboard and upholstered it with silk that we brought back from Beijing. It was quite the undertaking for us, since neither of us had any experience at either one of those jobs!


On another note, this was dinner last night.
Shrimp curry with homemade naan!
















The curry we've done before, but this was the first time we've tried our hand at naan. I think the recipe is good, but we still need to work on our technique.

Well it's quittin' time now so I think we'll get cleaned up and cruise around with the top down. We'd take the bike, but it's in the shop getting the 20,000 mile check-up to get ready for Daytona bike week!

Grillin' Pioneer Style and Other stuff

So as I said in earlier post's, without the luxury of a nice Weber grill I've reverted back to cooking pioneer style over the fire pit. There's good points and bad points abut this. Good: Nothing like wood fire grilled flavor, back to nature, a sense of accomplishment when it turns out right. Bad: You need to plan about 4 hrs ahead to let the wood burn down into coals, You have to make sure your grilling poles don't get close enough to the fire that they become part of the fire, The wind will always change direction in order to blow the smoke in your eyes at exactly the wrong time during a critical step such as when it's time to turn whatever your cooking over (in this case porter house steaks).

Oh yeah, "....it's what's for dinner!"















Luckily we have plenty of falling branches (and trees) around here so there is no shortage of grilling poles! Oh sorry, grilling poles are what you use to hold your grilling surface over the coals to cook when you don't have a Weber (and no I'm not getting paid by them for advertisement, well at least not yet!).

At any rate the fire did what it should and the dinner turned out great!

So on to the other stuff!
I was cleaning up a few of the dead trees that had either fallen on their own, or with a little help from me, and stacking the logs out at the edge of the clearing so I could use the truck to load them up and stack them over by the fire pit. The stack couldn't have been there more then 10 min before I came back to start loading it into the bed of the truck and when I reached down to grab the first log this little guy ran up to the top and looked me square in the eye as if to say: "Hey buddy, get your own stack this is mine!". So I tried not to hurt the little fella' and tried to grab some of the logs to the side and this little bugger would jump onto whatever log I would pick up, so I grabbed him and brought him up to Lightnin to get a picture.




Believe me this little guy was powerful and I was trying to hold him gently, and yet firm enough that he couldn't get out of my grip.

















Here he is on our deck rail asserting his dominance over us!
















So that's what's happening around here.

Sunrise and the North Florida Brewery

Up with the sun to get things cleaned up from the double batch brewing.

Sunrise in the jungle














Yesterday's brewing session didn't quite go as planned, to say the least! Sure I was able to tap into the spare gas connection that was installed for this purpose, but I didn't test fire the burner to make sure there was enough pressure. So we had to do the boil in the house, therefore the double batch actually ended up being 2 batches! We were finally finished at 9:30pm so it ended up being an 11 hour session.

Lightnin hung in there with me till the end and lent (no pun intended) a much appreciated hand in the operation!

This is the current North Florida Brewery, but I'm hoping to upgrade to a more user friendly system in the near future











We brewed a double batch of cream ale and by the looks of it in primary fermentation it should be a beautiful golden color! I always sample the unfermented wort to get an idea of what it will come out like and this one should be nice, light, and just slightly bitter at the end. We'll see how it comes out over the next few weeks!

Random Stuff

Spent 2 hours trimming weeds around the deck this afternoon and realized that I hadn't blogged in quite awhile. So I thought I'd share a few bits of random stuff.


Here's one of our little dragons out on the hunt. These little dudes (or dudettes) spend most of the day sunning themselves, but they are also voracious insect eaters. A few of them are finally getting used to the idea that we come and go and don't have any interest in eating them!







This is a breakfast fritatta that I whipped up awhile back. It came out really nice!











This is the view of 12 lbs of wings just before they went on the fire pit. We munched on them while watching the Daytona 500 on Sunday and Monday. What a bizarre race that turned out to be!







Lightnin and I are putting some final touches on stuff inside the house and then we'll take pictures to give sort of a photo tour of the place in the near future!

Breakfast Fortified with Gunpowder and Lead!

Our friends Rick and "Netter" came down from the frozen tundra of Missouri to visit this past weekend. Along with some sightseeing, catching up on things, good food, and laughter, we took some time to visit my good friend FC's firing range. I've been wanting to get my new weapon sighted in and we finally had a chance to do so with some expert advice from both FC and Rick.

The day started out a bit chilly here, lower 60's (F), so we dressed accordingly, but as we got going it warmed up nice. The first order of business was to get the new weapon sited in so we could then move on to some practice shooting with the entire selection of weaponry.





First shot



















Making adjustments


















"I think they got it now Robbie!"



















Safety first
























Getting a few expert tips




















It might be pink, but it gets the job done!






















Glad to have her as my backup!
















Everyone got their chance to see what they could do



























It was a good time and many thanks to FC for letting us have some time on his range! Maybe we need to rent a Bobcat to build one of these at our place!

More pictures from the rest of the weekend to come soon!

My Fire Pit Buddy!

OK, since I don't have a grill down here I've had to revert back to my camping skills (Thanks to my Dad and the Boy Scouts I've had expert training!). So whenever I need to cook something outside, you know like ribs or chicken (other than fried), steaks, etc. I need to improvise.

So I've noticed that I've got a buddy that likes to hang out with me when I cook outdoors. Not once, not twice, but this is the third such encounter with this dude. He's actually pretty cool about it all. He's always stealthy too, because I'm hauling brush, branches, and logs to the fire pit and all of a sudden there he is just popping in to say: "Hey man, what's up?".

I think he's some type of "Fence Lizard" although he doesn't match up exactly with the descriptions and pictures in the books that I have, and he doesn't stick around long enough for me to turn him over to see if he has a blue throat (I was lucky to snap this shot before he bolted to the nearest tree, he's really camera shy)

You may need to click on the pic to see him, but trust me he's there! ;-)











Oh I may have forgotten to let you know what I did today! I've got a few trees that died this past year and I need to clear them so they don't fall during a storm and hit the deck, house, car, etc. So I was playing "Lumber Jack" again today. Thank goodness the chainsaw is back up and running and I made pretty easy work of the trees (only the ones that I needed to clear!) The one thing that was a bit unsettling was this dang HUGE wood spider that decided to crawl up and stand on the toe of my boot, while my hands were full loading wood into the truck!

This thing (no lie) was as big as my hand, and I swear it could have been a tarantula except that it didn't have enough hair! He/she, merely climbed up on the toe of my boot and stopped, as if to say (Again): "Hey Man, what's up?". So when I flinched (Oh and I did flinch!) He/She calmly stepped off my boot toe, gave me about a 2-inch personal space, and just waited for me to go on about my business of cutting and hauling wood! It was clear to me who's forest this was,no matter who's name is on the deed! ;-)

Back Stage at Silver Springs!

So just what do the OTT and Silver Springs have in common? Well Thunder and Lightnin for one thing now!

















So we moved down here to get back to a slower pace, a more lay back way of life. We pretty much keep to ourselves as do most other folks in the area, dealing with the occasional rif-raf that try to cause trouble where they don't belong, but mostly its nice, quiet, and slow out here. If we need to run into town for supplies we usually stop off at the Old Town Tavern (OTT) on the way home to quench our thirsts and to catch a view of TV, especially the weather channel to see what's happening. We can also get some of the local news and find out more info on who knows how to what, if we need help with anything (always a good thing to know).

This day last week we're sitting there soaking up the local info when the owner of the OTT calls us into his office, by name! Crap i felt like I was 13yrs old getting called into the Principle's office, I was thinking: "What did we do, we haven't been down here long enough to get kicked out of someplace yet!" It ends up that he was just offering us his tickets to go hang out with the Bud Reps, back stage, along with some of the other patrons of the OTT, to see R.E.O.!

Today we headed out to Silver Springs in the van with four other folks to have a great time taking in the sites and ended up back stage with R.E.O. in the process!


Silver Springs is sort of a natural wonder, amusement park, zoo, and concert tour stop all in one! It's actually a combination of 3-4 springs that meet to form a river of crystal clear water, hence the name "Silver Springs".










This is a turtle that is about 30ft below us! Talk about clear water!

















Several movies have been filmed here because of the clear water: "Creature From the Black Lagoon", and "Thunderball" for a couple!





Our seats are up on the left of the speakers!













R.E.O. takes the stage and to say we were close is an understatement!




















These guys were really friendly, nice guys, and when they took a break they spent the time mingling with us signing whatever they were asked to, like guitars, and umm Lightnin!





























It was a great day filled with sunshine, good food, a few beers, new friends, and really good music.
Here's to a slower pace of life!

Rain Dance, Well Sort Of!

We're experiencing a drought down here and the Suwanee is so low that the Manatee's don't have enough draft to get into Manatee Springs! So I thought short of a rain dance the next best thing is to wash the car. So I doubled the chances by washing and waxing both the car and the bike the other day and it looks like it worked because we finally got some rain again late last night.