So I am going to go on the assumption here that after 6 parts to this Daniel Boone Homestead epic, you are pretty sick of hearing about the mud. Well come Sunday morning we were all sick of hearing about, seeing, and being in the mud too. But we couldn’t get away from it, so sadly, neither can you. The night was rather cold, and we were all curled up under as many blankets as we could find to try and keep warm in our tents. It didn’t work well. So come morning, we were all just muddy, wet, and cold. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
I actually got up before the sun and took a strollfast paced walk run to the bathroom. And I am pretty sure I saw Bruce hanging around outside. I just snapped a quick picture since I didn’t want to disturb him, he looked so content.
I think he was becoming one with the mud, or I could have had one too many of those lovely drinks from our lovely bartender and imagined the whole thing. Hard to tell which it was.
The night prior we had decided that we would just get the truck out of Birdsboro in the morning. We all had a long drive (let’s hope ours wasn’t as long as the drive up), and it was still muddy, and we just didn’t want to stay anymore. So we had to face the music and pack up in the mud.
By Sunday morning our tent looked like a tornado had struck it, I couldn’t put things away neatly because everything was muddy, and I didn’t want the muddy stuff touching the clean stuff, so I had just let it all go where ever it went and pretty much just shoved it all in plastic bags when we were ready to pack the car.
As the tents were brought down, we saw all the glorious mud underneath. Of course it made folding up the tents a tricky situation, but I think we all survived, and our tents just look all the more worn in!
Now I am going to take a slight departure from the mud and packing up (don’t worry we’ll get back there) to show you a glimpse of just how some of these pictures get composed. I can tell that by now, this being part seven of our series here, you are asking yourself What happens behind the scenes of all those beautiful pictures? Well in the spirit of learning, I thought I would share with you how the following picture was put together.
Rachel walks back from filling up car with lots of muddy boxes and bags Bruce: You know you’re taking pictures of everyone else, but none of you. Rachel: You think everyone wants to see me like this? Bruce: Yeah. Rachel hands Bruce camera: Okay, but only if I can get a picture with the captain. Captain: My wife’s gonna love this.
And there you have it! A masterpiece. That’s magic people, you can’t force that.
Moving on.
Once our individual camps were down and our cars were packed, we all teamed up and broke camp. It was all done in lightening speed. Before anyone could even blink all the tents and tarps were down …
the fire pit was filled with water …
and the truck was packed.
And of course the kids had to get in one last battle before we left. I think they found that mud monster I had seen earlier in the morning. Don’t shoot till you see the white in his eyes!
Scratch that … SHOOT! FIRE!! DO SOMETHING!!!
After we were all packed and ready to go, we decided to go out for breakfast. Everyone was looking especially dapper and mud free.
Except for this one crazy lady who wouldn’t leave us alone. She followed us here and she wouldn’t leave. And she brought the mud with her. Who let her in here anyway? SECURITY!
All in all, this weekend was an adventure. We had fun because we survived it. And we get to be a part of the story.
Remember that time we went camping in Arizona?
Oh yeah, and we had to cook eggs without a spatula.
And the mud monster came out at night.
And he was sending me text messages.
And then we found the spatula as we were packing up Sunday morning?
This is the view I had of the colonial encampment after coming back from the battle. As you can see, there are rows of MUD in the grass. I know how much you all love hearing about the mud, so I can’t very well leave it out of this portion either, now can I? I just love the look of these tents all lined up, it’s one of my favorite vies at these events.
The kids decided not to watch the battle with us because they were having so much fun playing together. I snuck over after the battle to see just what the kids were up to, and the tallest one was giving orders to his “troops” and they were all too happy to follow. They darted in and around the tents to get a good shot at the “enemy.” It was too adorable. I am sure they will all make find Rev War soldiers one day.
Kitty had started roasting dinner for us while I was away watching the boys in battle. She was cooking a beef and pork roast over the open fire. She had turning the spit down to a science and they both turned out perfectly cooked. I boiled up some carrots and potatoes to go with it, and it made for a very hearty meal.
The men arrived back from the battle, proudly marching through the camp. I actually didn’t see the end of the battle, and I never bothered to ask who won, but I am sure whether they won or lost, they put up a good fight in the end.
Not all of the guns worked properly while fighting, Kris’ gun didn’t fire at all. It can be very frustrating when you want to be a part of the whole thing and you can’t because of a non-functioning gun. I believe Art’s gun was also having a little trouble in the battle. Here he is inspecting it afterwards.
Before dinner was served, Kris and I went to explore the Homestead. There were living historians there that took the time to explain to us a little bit about Daniel Boone’s life and the time he spent here. Here is one of the first rooms we visited. Check out the videos to hear some music and a good explanation of this room.
We also toured the rest of the house. It was set up as it would have been during Daniel Boone’s time. Check out this Wikipedia page to learn a bit more about Daniel Boone and his life. It’s very interesting. I always thought of him as a frontiersman, a pioneer, which of course he is, but he is so much more! I learned a lot about him just from our small tour.
Here’s a rare shot of Kris and I together outside the house, Art was kind enough to take it for us.
When we headed over to the blacksmith shop, the blacksmith offered for Kris to climb in and take a closer look. I snapped a quick picture of the two of them. The blacksmith was a very engaging speaker and really gave us some great insight into Daniel Boone’s life.
Kris took this shot of me taking a rest after walking so much. I have a hard time standing and walking for a long time because I have a bad back and shin splints, so I laid down for a bit to try and take a small rest. I think Kris did an awesome job composing this picture. I very rarely like pictures of me, but I really like this one!
As the night wore down, we all were very tired. There was of course some after hours spirit to be had, made by our favorite bartender.
Hey woman, make me something strong!
Okay Bruce didn’t really say that, I just thought it was funny. But Debbie does make a mighty fine drink that always seem to make me feel a little bit lightheaded at the end of the night!
We even had a first on this trip! Debbie has been doing this for 8 years now, I believe, and she admitted that this was the first time she has ever drank in 3 inches of mud!! How about that! Glad we could be there to experience this first with you!
There were also some snacks to be shared, and some lively conversation to be had.
We were even joined by Janie for a little bit!!
But, even with all the good drinks, food, and conversations, everyone headed off to bed a little earlier then usual. Fighting with all the mud can really wear a person out!
To see all the pictures from Saturday afternoon/evening check out my photo album here.
After lunch the boys had a battle. First all the colonists formed up in the field behind our tents, and the coordinators came around in their orange shirts and checked all the guns for safety.
While the calvary looked on to make sure their troops were doing as they were told.
The First New Hampshire had a small turn out of guys this time, only four! But they joined up with some other small groups and all together they were rearing to go battle some British!
There was actually a strong showing of colonists overall. Because this was a Continental Line event, we saw groups all the way from Virginia. Usually we don’t see them at the events we do, because it’s too far for them to travel to our events and we don’t travel to theirs (though we will be doing another Continental Line event in VA this year). So it was neat to see colonist groups from NH to VA, and all points in between.
After the safety checks, it became just like the modern military, hurry up and wait.
They brought their guns up …
Then they brought their guns down …
Then they finally headed off to battle.
Oh and it wouldn’t be a post about the Daniel Boone experience without mentioning some more about the mud! Here’s a bit of what our captain had to say about it:
Just a quick note to intrepid few that made the trip to Boons. Never in all my years have I ever seen that much deep mud. Flanders field in France was the only one that could have surpassed it.
I literally had 2 inches of red clay mud caked on the bottom of my petticoat. Lindsay took this picture for me as we were headed out to watch the battle.
The battle started with some fighting going on around this little house. I didn’t get any pictures of that part, because we decided to set ourselves down in front of the lower field to make sure we could get some good pictures and videos of the guys.
The colonists pushed the British past the house and into the lower field.
I got some pictures and video of a group of loyalists, who were the first into the field, but I wasn’t sure who they were, so I asked if anyone knew when I posted the video on YouTube. I got a response from lgrzerostr:
It’s the Jagers!! loyal to King and Country! HUZZA!! (there are umlauts over that a in Jager)Signed “a happy lobsterback”
Eventually all the British moved down into the lower field and they were handing out some good volleys to the colonists.
The Indians joined in the battle and were seen ducking in and out of the bushes, putting up a good fight.
Once the colonists were in the field completely, our guys were right up front, which was great. Most times I have a hard time getting good pictures of them because they always seem to be towards the back side of the field. Our captain had a few things to say about the battle as well.
We also had a battle, that turned out well. We captured a gun position, that went over well with the attending British commander. After the battle he conceded he never expected that to happen. It was done safely and swiftly. Stunned would be a good explanation.
Unfortunately I missed that part, so I don’t have any pictures of it, but I did get a fun series of pictures that shows each step of them lowering their guns to shoot at the British across the field.
And here is a picture of what they were shooting at.
I also was able to capture a few videos of the action:
After a short break …
The boys started to move forward.
Pushing the British even farther back …
Overall it was a great battle, probably one of the better ones I have seen. They were nice and close to the audience in the field and we really got a good view of all the action.
To see all the photos from the Saturday battle, click here.
I know, I know you are asking yourself by now “When is she ever going to quit talking about the mud?” Well let me tell you, we could not get away from that stuff while we were there, so don’t go thinking you’re going to get away from it here. It was dang muddy. It was messy and slimy and no fun at all. Alright, so certainly it could have been worse, much much worse:
But it also could have been better much much better:
But we did our best to protect ourselves. The boots came in handy and really finished off the ensemble don’t you think?
Lori started off the day with shoes, but she gave up and just decided to go with the all natural look.
And hey with mud like this we figured we could make a little money for the regiment by selling tickets for mud bathes just like those high falootin’ salons in New York City.
What do you think?
Well we ended up only having one taker on our offer, and really we weren’t too keen on letting her stay.
So we gave up on the whole endeavor and moved on to the next thing on our to do list.
Getting lunch ready!! A woman’s work is never done. Pretty much as soon as breakfast is over, we move on to preparing for lunch. Debbie made us a lovely pie. And yes she is rolling it out with a bottle of Pam, and no she didn’t want me to get that on camera (sorry Debbie!!), but if you are curious as to why she is, you may recall from my last post that we found we were missing quite a few kitchen necessities when we arrived here. A rolling pin was one of them! In this photo from left to right we have Debbie, Kitty, Lindsay, and Lori. Lindsay really put in a lot of time helping us in the kitchen this weekend. It is always appreciated to have an extra set of hands!!
Baking a pie over a fire is truly an art form. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes you get a burnt pie. This time it looks like it worked really well for Debbie.
Getting the pie out of the cast iron pan is always difficult as well because everything is extremely hot and you don’t want to leave it in there because it will just keep cooking even off the fire. It makes the job a lot harder when the only gloves you have to work with are thin work gloves or one left-handed thick glove. (Don’t even ask us where the right handed one ended up!) But Debbie’s a pro and she got it out of there and we got to eat her beautiful and yummy pie as a prize.
Lori made us a very lovely fruit salad to go along with her lunch, and Kitty cut up some more fruit for a compote to go with dinner.
Once all the preparing was done, it was safe for me to wander around the grounds for a bit. In my travels I happened upon Jeffrey and Kolby hanging out under a tree.
They were sitting there chit chatting and chewing on grass. I could not for the life of me tell you why they were doing this, but I can tell you that it was probably one of the cutest things I have seen to date.
Now when you get to look at and take pictures of a scene like this one, well this just makes the entire weekend worth while, mud and all.
I left the boys to continue on with their grass chewing and I wandered over to the Sutlers. This event probably had the most Sutlers I have ever seen. It was quite exciting. There were two seperate rows of Sutlers, and each row had Sutlers on both sides, so really four rows of Sutlers! This is a peek in just one of the tents.
Oh and here’s another view that makes the whole weekend worthwhile (sorry guys).
After my travels I came back to the tent for a wonderfully yummy lunch. Lori made us a stew that had beef, turnips, beets, potatoes, and carrots. Usually I don’t like turnips and beets, but I thought they were so yummy in her stew!! Maybe I really do like them and I just never knew it!
To see all the pictures from this part of the day, click here.
Next up will be pictures and videos of our brave men in battle!
When it came time to cook breakfast, we had a few problems going on. The first was our fire. If anyone has ever cooked over a fire, they know how difficult it can be. A fire is much hotter then a stove and it’s extremely difficult to get low heat on it. Because of how hot our fire was, the sausages ended up looking blacker then normal in order to get them cooked all the way through. But our captain did his best to keep those puppies moving around in the pan.
Even though they looked overcooked, I thought they tasted fine. Cooking over a hot fire is always an adventure and a half!!
The second problem we had was that we could not find all of our utensils. Kitty had intended on making egg sandwiches, but our spatula was no where to be found. We also had a few other things missing, so Bruce and Dan went out to my new favorite place, Wally World, and picked up some necessities for us. Now that’s what I call hunting and gathering!! Since the spatula is a special one that is period looking, we couldn’t get one of those anywhere nearby, plus we thought we knew where it was, it just wasn’t here. So Kitty had to adjust her meal plan, and ended up making scrambled eggs instead.
In addition to the food, we needed some drinks. We have two coolers that we fill for the day. One has just plain water, the other is water with lemonade, iced tea, fruit drink, or some combination thereof. Lori was kind enough to put it all together for us this day.
And of course there was freshly brewed coffee made right over the fire, which was greatly appreciated after a sleepless night because of the cold, and a morning filled with mud, mud, and more mud.
But regardless of the mishaps at breakfast, it was enjoyed and it filled our bellies for the beginning part of the day.
Oh and have I mentioned the muddy red clay? Everything we had suddenly became Adobe, we no longer felt like we were camping in Pennsylvania, as Bruce put it “Remember that event we had in Arizona?”
Now see if we had thought ahead, we could have found some creative uses for the mud other than letting it cover everything we owned. We could have built a house with it:
Or we could have even built our very own mud wrestling pit:
Hmmmm I guess we’ll have to keep those ideas in mind for the next time we find ourselves unwittingly in Arizona.
After breakfast I decided to wander away from camp for a bit. Bad idea. As I stepped away, I got held up by gun and sword point.
Oh what’s a fine lady to do? Well, run away screaming of course! Isn’t that what you would do?
If you want to see all the pictures from the morning click here.
Once we had arrived safe and sound, we had a good decent night’s sleep. It was beyond cold that night. We had brought our down comforter and we were still chilly to our core. It’s unusual for us to be cold because we keep our room quite chilly at home, but this was cold and damp air which is just the worst. When we woke up the red clay/mud problem slowly became more and more apparent. We had laid a towel at the front of our tent to try and keep things clean in there and in the morning it had already started to be quite covered with red clay.
And the reason this happened was because there was mud EVERYWHERE but especially in front of the tents because where ever there was more traffic, there was more mud.
The night prior we had gotten the 411 that everyone had headed to Wally World and bought pairs of rubber boots and most of them intended on wearing them all day. When we first awoke, I didn’t want to spend the money to go and get that stuff. I figured we could make do with what we had. I sent Kolby out to play with his 21st century clothes on and his shoes that were already filthy from the night before.
Kris got up and wandered over to the dining fly. Since there weren’t many of us at this encampment, it was rather barren over there. But a few people were starting to get up and get things started. Kris decided he would be helpful this morning, and he started the fire for us.
Bruce was trying to get some wood chopped so we could have kindling for the fire, but because of all the oopy, goopy red clay it wasn’t working out too well.
I was walking around in my pajama pants and my shoes that were already ruined from the night before. I was trying to keep my pants up so that the mud wouldn’t cover the bottom of these like they did my jeans. It was a great look.
After all this, we finally decided that perhaps it was best to make a run to Wally World and get the boots. So we did. We got rubber boots, new shoes for Kris, socks for everyone, towels and a hope that our feet would remain nice and dry throughout the day.
(Yes I did get some interesting looks from the people behind us in line for taking this picture … “Look honey it’s that place we had heard about on that new fangled thing … the uh …. radio … it’s the Wal-Marts!!”)
When we returned it was time to start the adventure we like to call “Cooking breakfast in three inches of mud with no utensils.”
Well you know what they say about the best laid plans. Kris and I had it all planned out, we were going to be leaving our house by 10:00, we had awesome directions direct from AAA, this map had turn by turn instructions, it gave us mileage for each leg of the trip, it had close up maps for the roads that we were following so we could see if we were headed the right way, and I think it might have even made us breakfast if we had asked it to. 6 hours. That’s how long the trip would take according to our 5 star map. A mere 6 hours. I even had this conversation with Lori a few days before going:
Lori: We’re leaving early on Friday morning, we should be there around 3 or 4. Me: So are we, we should be there around 3 or 4 as well. Lori: Oh, so you’re not going to set up in the dark this year? Me: Nope we planned our day, took it off, so we could get there early this year. Lori: Great! See you then!
See last year we showed up to every single event after dark. This was due to the fact that we joined the regiment in April and Kris and I had already planned our vacation time, so in order to fit the events in, we had to leave after work, which always put us arriving after dark. And you should know that that is quite a feat when dark happens very late on summer days. So this year we planned it all better, we took Friday off, we were leaving early, we were going to get there early and we weren’t going to set up in the dark and we were going to be able to join everyone for the Friday night dinner out.
Remember what I said earlier about the best laid plans? Well we left at 10 … big props for us for leaving on time! (Happens very rarely.) Then I had to stop and buy food for the commissary … took at least 30 minutes. Then our poles refused to sit right and when the car got up past 60 mph all we could hear was a shrieking whistle from the ties …. another hour wasted fixing them. So let me show you what we saw when we arrived in Birdsboro, PA:
That’s right we arrived after dark. Now if you are doing the math, you are probably thinking …. okay leave at 10:00, a 6 hour drive, half hour at store, hour fiddling with dangs poles, probably an hour for lunch ….. you should be there by 6:30 …. it’s not dark by 6:30 these days right? Well there were two more things holding us up:
But mostly:
Our 5 star instructions had us going over the George Washington bridge and on to the NJ turnpike. If you have ever tried to drive through New York before, you are probably hurting for me right now. If you haven’t driven on the George Washington bridge before, let me give you an idea of what it’s like:
(okay so that’s a stock photo taken in England, but you get the idea.)
So that’s right, we did not arrive on Daniel Boone plantation until 9:30 at night. (Yup, you did the math right. A 6 hour drive turned into an 11 and a half hour drive.) We were tired and frustrated. I mean what else can you be when you are looking at that all day? But we made it. In one piece.
But oh, did I mention that it rained all day? And did I also mention that the field we were camping in was filled with red clay under the grass? No? Well that’s a story for a whole ‘nother post ……
The night prior we had gotten the 411 that everyone had headed to Wally World and bought pairs of rubber boots and most of them intended on wearing them all day. When we first awoke, I didn’t want to spend the money to go and get that stuff. I figured we could make do with what we had. I sent Kolby out to play with his 21st century clothes on and his shoes that were already filthy from the night before.
