Solar Eclipse- PistachioLand and Roswell

PistacioLand was a landmark that we discovered when researching places to visit along our route. It is a pistachio farm that holds the honor of having the world's largest statue of a pistachio. It was kind of a joke stop, but it ended up being a big hit!

  

Their pistachio ice cream was SO GOOD. Between White Sands, the ice cream, and the upcoming first night sleeping in a van, the kids were having the best day of their lives. 

We unlocked a new Elliot face!

Free samples of flavored pistachios! 

We had very low expectations for the PistacioLand country store, but it ended up being super fun!

Annie is such a beautiful, adventurous, fun-loving girl

The giant pistachio!

Shells up!

We stopped in Roswell a couple hours later. The UFO museum was closed for the day and it would put us behind schedule to see it in the morning, so we opted for a photo shoot outside. 

The drama!

We found some BLM land a short distance outside of Roswell that allowed dispersed camping. We rolled in after dark but were still able to find an open clearing without trouble. We whipped up some hot dogs and then were off to bed.

Solar Eclipse- White Sands

We were lucky enough to have another grand adventure with the Hays! They flew down to Sahuarita, then we road tripped to Texas to see the April 8 2024 solar eclipse. We first met the Hays when we moved into the Sahuarita Ward back in 2013. Four families got together to form an FHE group- the Hays, Halls, Baggs, and Bloods (aka H2B2). We were able to see the Halls in Sahuarita (they still live here) and the Baggs in Texas! It would have been cool to get all four families in the same room, but we settled for seeing the whole group in a one week period. 

We picked the Hays up on Thursday afternoon. They got to drive by their old house and meet up with friends at the park, then we had dinner with the Halls. 

During our FHE days, Colby and tiny baby Alice were the only kids. Now look at this pack!

Kiddos playing roll-a-creature

A  feature of this trip that we were very excited about was that we rented RVs. The Hays rented a class C RV off of outdoorsy.com, and we rented the Flythe's camper van. It was very educational comparing the two during our trip. The Hay's big RV had more amenities, but had TONS of problems (read on, dear reader, for a thrilling account of the various vehicle problems). The camper van was a 12 passenger van that our friend had removed the back two rows from and welded in queen size bunk beds with huge storage drawers underneath. Most camper vans only have 4 seatbelts- the Flythmobile has 9, plus two five point harnesses you can use to belt yourself onto the beds. The Class C RV had a bathroom, kitchen, and water tanks- but it was SO LOUD while driving it around. It rattled really badly and got terrible gas mileage on top of the reliability issues. 

I digress. We decided to rent RVs because I thought it would be interesting to try out not having to set up and take down tents like we usually do, and also because we could have more flexibility in our schedule. There were a couple of nights that we drove past nightfall and were able to park and sleep with minimal hassle. That ended up being a huge advantage for this particular trip since we were determined to find a cloud-free area to watch the eclipse. 

On Friday morning, we loaded up and drove 5 hours to White Sands National Park in New Mexico. This stop was an absolute hit. I'm determined to come back for a two day stay sometime. 

The visitor's center was a really cool building. We only scratched the surface of looking through the stuff here. We were hoping to make it to PistachioLand before it closed, so we could only stay for a few hours. 

We drove around a bit and found a parking area with what looked like good hills for sledding. It was a super windy day. It was sunny and probably in the 70's. I was worried the sand would be hot, but it was delightfully cool and shockingly soft. The dunes are actually is finely powdered gypsum. 

Isaac's immediate reaction upon encountering the sand was to HULK SMASH

So majestic

The white sand went on forever. It was a surreal and awesome landscape. 

That's Aaron in the distance, chasing after the tinier dot which was Isaac sprinting happily into the unknown. 

This picture does a decent job of showing off how steep our selected cliff was. You had to WORK to get those sleds back up.

I was a bit underwhelmed with the sleds. Even with the wax and the steepest cliff we could find, they wouldn't go very fast. 

Handsome guy with a sled alert

Jumping off the cliff was a popular activity. You have to jump forward, knowing that you will free fall down into the soft sand. Aaron is shockingly good at doing long jumps into the open air. He was the undisputed jump champion. 

Mining into the sides of the cliffs was also a hit. It made sugar sand waterfalls as we dug around. 

We played in this one spot for around 3 hours. The adults down to Isaac all were plenty entertained that whole time. There's a few short hikes that I would like to check out when we visit again. 

Elliot was determined to dig a super deep hole. 

After the whole was the length of his arm, he switched to digging with his leg. 

Naturally, we decided to bury him when his leg got stuck in his impressively deep tunnel. 

We were originally planning to sleep near White Sands to maximize our time there, but the weather forecast for eclipse day was looking really bad for the Fort Worth area. At this point in the trip, we were thinking that we might have to drive further northeast to Missouri to catch some clear skies. We decided to drive a few hours further on Friday and arrive in Fort Worth on Saturday night instead of Sunday afternoon. It was back on the road for us!

Annie Climbs Stuff

Our friends the Seveys invited us to a cub scout bike rodeo! It was at a big scout camp on the edge of town. We were all there, but weirdly only have pictures of Annie. 

 

The obstacle course was a real challenge!

Terrified of her own success

BB gun safety

Annie was the only one who felt like doing the actual bike rodeo portion of the activity. In Elliot's defense, it did look less fun looking than the obstacle course and craft table. 

Annie was too scared to attempt the rock wall when everyone else did it at the beginning of the event. We ate our picnic lunch there as everyone else mostly cleared out. We had a view of the rock wall as we ate, and we hyped up Annie about how good she had been at trying hard things that day. With much trepidation, she agreed to give it a go- and made it all the way to the top!

The next weekend we went to Rancho's rodeo day celebration, where Annie promptly scaled another wall- this time with the utmost confidence!

We managed to get to the facepaint and balloon animals before the lines were too long. This was during Isaac's phase where his entire identity is based on which t-shirt he pulled out of his drawer in the morning. He was well accommodated! 

Annie's school sent home this picture of Annie. I guess they had a rodeo photo shoot?

Aaron has been taking the kids on monthly date nights. For Annie, these are frequently to Pizza Hut to use up her Book it coupons. 

Annie made this adorable fairy house at the park with some friends. I love this adventurous girl of mine!

Winter Foraging

Here's some more culinary adventures from my "Eat Mesquite and More" book:

Acorn cookies! These were SO MUCH WORK. I think that I picked acorns that were not appropriately ripe, because it was way harder to shell them than YouTube led me to believe it would be. I'm going to try again next year because the end result was so delicious.  

They were made from acorn flour and looked, smelled, and tasted like acorns! They turned out so cute!

Note the suspiciously chocolatey hand of my helper

Our barrel cactus dinner, featuring a cactus-butternut rice dish and cactus upside down cake! The cake was a hit, probably because we don't usually have desert and this tasted like... cake. The kids didn't love the sauteed cactus. Next time I would cut it into smaller bits and add sausage. 

The main success of the barrel cactus harvest was collecting the seeds. We put chia seeds in yogurt and oatmeal on an almost daily basis, and the cactus seeds can be used the same way. We ended up doing three rounds of barrel cactus seed harvests with different groups of friends. 

The fruits are much easier to pick than the other cactus fruits because there are no spines on the fruits themselves. We only had minor stabbings from on each of our harvests!

Some excellent helpers hard at work! You have to cut the fruits open, then scrape the mucilaginous seeds into water to rinse them off before toasting them to dry.  

The Malfoy Sisters

Cherise Gunter started a monthly date night group where people take turns planning activities for whoever wants to attend. Aaron and I are pretty sporadic attendees. When the Flythes announced a Harry Potter murder mystery night, I was super excited. Aaron was less so but he agreed to come along to humor me. As the event drew closer we realized that Breezy would have much more fun than Aaron, especially when we were assigned to be Draco and Lucius Malfoy, so she came instead!

 

Breezy went into costume designer mode and whipped all of this out for us the day of the event. She owns a convenient amount of snake jewelry and managed to make a snake head cane out of tape, paper towel tubes, a stick, and gold spray paint. I was amazed. 

Malfoy family vibes. I believe the snake in the background was part of a treasure hunt. There were also clues handed around to get us to mingle and try to solve the mystery. Jesse Hancock was the best- he kept circulating false clues about a polyjuice potion just to liven it up and confuse people. We had a great time saying "My father will hear about this!" and "Come along, Draco!"

Everyone brought Harry Potter themed food to share! I took some chocolate covered nuts labeled as "cockroach clusters."

Note the mozzarella stick in my hand. 

Lucius Malfoy kicking Dobby the House Elf

Pin the nose on He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named

Even the bathroom was decorated!

Low key hanging with Voldemort

Chelsea's Hagrid costume was SO EXCELLENT. She also brought a delicious "Happy Birthday Harry" cake that looked like it had been sat on- so on point!