Garlic, Garlic, and more Garlic

I've been working in the vegetable and herb gardens at Primo. Emily is the head grower, as well as the bee-keeper and pig feeder. It's been fun learning about planting, and I've been doing a lot of weeding as well. Last Tuesday was my first day, and I just did a few hours. I watered a bed of newly planted peas and prepped a bed and planted some greens. I got to pick some raspberries, which were really tasty. On Wednesday, I started at 9am, which is a little early for me (understatement of the year?). I picked fava beans. And I picked more fava beans. For about three hours I picked fava beans. They're really hard to to find, because the pods look the same as the stalks and the leaves. My back hurt a lot after doing that, but it was lunch time by then.

After lunch we started the immense amount of garlic harvesting.

There were three sets of beds full of garlic, I'm guessing at least 400 bulbs altogether. The steps for harvesting garlic are:
1 - pull up garlic bulbs from ground, keeping roots and leaves intact (pretty tiring and back-breaking, especially in the hot hot sun)
2 - clean bulbs by pulling off one or two layers of skin/paper/leaf (fairly tedious and time-consuming)
3 - tie together in bunches
4 - hang bunches for about two weeks to dry out and cure

The garlic has to be kept cool while doing this until it's time to hang them. As soon as the bulbs are out of the ground, they have to go in the shade. All the cleaning and bunching has to be done in the shade. I worked with Emily and her assistant Kelly on Wednesday pulling up three beds of garlic bulbs, cleaning and bunching them. It's actually pretty gratifying work to harvest garlic. After dying in the sun while pulling it up, it's beautiful to see the bright white bulbs all cleaned and tied together.

Thursday I had the day off and decided to bike to downtown Rockland and Walmart. I was incredibly pooped by the time I got back, but I love riding my bike so much. Ben and I went to dinner at the bar at Primo on Thursday night, and the food was pretty awesome again. And again it was comped, which is such a great way to get paid.

Friday I worked in the gardens again. I picked a bunch of edible flowers for the kitchen. It's incredibly how many different types of edible flowers there are growing here. I can't remember all the names of them, but I remember having seen some of the at dinner the night before. Around 10 or so, I started on pulling up three really long beds of garlic. All by myself. By the time they were all pulled and I had brought them into the shade, Emily came over and said it was lunch time. After lunch the two of us cleaned all of it. We just finished cleaning it around 4:15, so we had family meal (Primo's staff meal, around 4pm every day), and finished bunching it afterwards. This afternoon I saw Kelly hanging them beneath the porch of the restaurant.

Yesterday and today Ben and I both had the days off, so we've been taking it pretty easy. Last night we realized that something was going on with our fridge - it was not keeping cold anymore! Since this is a new fridge, and it's been flashing "lo dc" we figured something funky was going on with the batteries. We checked them, and sure enough one of them was really low on water. For more information about why this is bad, go to wikipedia, but the basic story is that if the plates in the battery are exposed to air, the battery will kind of fry itself out or something. This morning we went to Autozone and traded in for two new batteries. We now have to see if this will completely solve the problem; we're not sure if the batteries are getting charge when we're plugged in, but we got one thing taken care of.

In a few minutes we're planning on biking to the next town over to see "Dark Knight" - if the rain doesn't come down any harder...


-Lily

Driving up the coast of Maine

Right now we're headed towards Rockland, ME up route 1. Last night we stayed at a Walmart in Biddeford, ME and decided to see a movie at a theater close by. We saw Hancock, which was great, but real story is the theater we watched it in. Smitty's Theater isn't the typical theater, it's set up for "dinner and a movie" with long tables flanked by columns of the most comfortable reclining chairs we've ever sat in in a movie theater (they were basically really nice office chairs). A waitress comes by before the movie and during previews and takes your order for some decent food (think Friday's or Chili's) at very good prices. We split a large soda, a big chicken quesadilla, and a brownie sundae for $13. Plus we were able to get in for $5.50 each using our now void-but-nobody-knows student I.D.s . We're totally going to another movie there on our way back down the coast!

Yesterday we stopped at Kittery Trading Post to get a couple camping and RV things and some kitchen equipment. I can't believe how big the outlets at Kittery have become. I don't remember so many outlet malls when my family would go to Kittery when I was little. The Trading Post hasn't really changed, though.

We're starting to feel pretty comfortable with the camper, especially after being home for a few days and taking care of a few little things. Today will be our first day in Rockland, and I might be working my first day at Primo tonight. Needless to say, we're pretty excited.

-Wax

Honk Honk - Camper Updates

Yesterday we got to Waltham to stay for a few days and do some stuff on Inigo. One really important issue was not having a horn. We played around with it for a few hours today, and with a little help from my dad, we finally figured out how to get it to work! We totally high-fived each other when we fixed it. So now we can honk at the idiots that think it's a good idea to cut off a 10,000 pound vehicle going 60 mph. Another mechanical thing we wanted to do was change the oil and oil filter. Of course that took longer than expected, but it was really quite simple. And messy.

We're still having problems with the inverter, but we're trying not to get too depressed about it. It just means we can't watch TV when we're not plugged in. Or we can shell out an additional $140 for a bigger inverter. We don't really like the idea of spending more money right now. We will probably wait it out and see how we deal with our current inverter (...no pun intended).

-Lily

Baseball HOF and gas

Today we went to the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Neither of us had been there before. Main street storefronts around the HOF go card store, memorabilia store, ice cream store, card store, gift shop, ice cream store...so as you could imagine the whole town is geared towards families willing to spend big bucks on their kids. The HOF itself was not exactly what I had expected, but we still enjoyed it. The "baseball experience" multimedia thingy was terrible though - probably the cheesiest movie I've ever had to sit through.

Today we filled up the tank at the tune of $161. Ugh. We calculated 8.3 mpg, which is a couple miles less than we had expected. We'll be trying to bring that ratio closer to 10 mpg by keeping the tires filled with air, getting our load lighter, slow acceleration, and choosing our routes wisely (which doesn't help mpg but helps our bottom line). If anyone has any other advice on reducing mpg in a big truck, please do tell.

Tonight we're staying at the Walmart in North Adams, Ma again on our way back to Waltham.

-Wax

After the 4th

We spent this past weekend at Seneca Lake in New York. My great-aunt Jane has a little cottage on the western side near Himrod, and she has 9 kids, most with kids of their own. So I have a bunch of second cousins that range in age from 2 years old to 30 years old. We stayed at a camp site with my mom that was about a mile or two away from the cottage, so we biked there on our awesome new bikes a few times. As short as the ride was, we were both somewhat sweaty and out of breath both ways. I think we both need to build up our biking endurance a bit more.

Ben's started feeling pretty sick, and we're unsure of whether it's just a bad cold or allergies to something in the camper. He's been a really good sport though, still cooking for me plenty and doing little things around the camper.

Yesterday for lunch, we decided to grill some hot dogs on our $20 walmart grill. Well, the grill is fine, though a little rickety, but we had a bitch of a time getting the charcoal started. We REALLY need a chimney starter. After about 30 minutes or maybe longer, we finally had enough charcoal lit to... wait another 15 minutes for it to all be hot enough to grill over. And all for a few measly hot dogs!

Last night I had better luck building a fire: I did an awesome job of getting one started in about five minutes and after a few logs had burned down to mostly coals, we set up the grill grate over the heat and put on one of the steaks. Ben sliced an onion and a potato to grill. Everything was just seasoned with salt and pepper, and a little bit of oil to help cook better. Once the onions were done, Ben chopped them and dressed them with a little aged balsamic (not the cheap stuff, this is 10-year-aged stuff that's almost syrupy) and fresh basil. Holy crap was that meal awesome last night. The steak was so juicy and tender, and the onions were really tasty. The potatoes came our really nicely too. Ben cut them pretty thin, and they cooked pretty quickly and well.

Right now we're in Richfield Springs, NY staying in the parking lot of a Price Chopper supermarket. Tomorrow we'll be heading to Cooperstown for the Baseball Hall of Fame and Ommegang Brewery. After that we're headed back to Boston, but we may take more than a day to get there, because Ben isn't really up to driving right now and I did a bunch of driving already today. Maybe we'll jump on I-90 and just get to Boston really quickly - I think Ben would feel a lot better if he could take a nice long bath. Speaking of bathing, we both used the shower in the camper today, and it's not bad. A little cramped, more-so for Ben of course, but the shower nozzle has decent pressure. Anyway, it's totally fine for when we don't have better showers available to us.

-Lily

And we're off!

"Hello! My name is Inigo Winnebago, you killed my engine battery, prepare to die!"

This morning we replaced the battery that the six fingered man killed. The thing was deader than dead - no miracle in the name of true love (or "to blave") would have saved it. Just when we were all finally packed and ready to go yesterday night, we turn the key and...nothing. What a start to our trip. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing though, because there was a pretty big thunderstorm about half an hour later, which we would have been driving in if Inigo had started right up. And now we're on our way just a day later and it's beautiful out today.

Right now we're on our way to the Albany area, about halfway to Seneca Lake for the fourth of July. Rt. 2 is a really nice drive. Tomorrow I'll post my first food blog. This laptop/wireless internet thing we have going on is pretty sweet - we'll be connected pretty much everywhere we go!

-Wax

Go Inigo Go!

So we've already had our first hiccup: I left the headlights on after the party last weekend, and the engine battery is dead. Silly Lily. We wanted to leave by July 1, but it looks like it'll be July 2 instead.

Good news though, we named the motorhome Inigo!

More to be posted as we actually get on the road...

-Lily