camping

March started off with the spring break. We spent three nights at the camp. This was a first. We cooked, read and hung out at the camp. It was a haven for the dogs. The kids and Kylo were gone for long stretches of time. The weather was rainy and wet, but that didn’t stop anyone from having a good time.

March was also unusual in a different way. We are not a movie going family. We watch movies at home. But we did see two movies this March. These were Kung Fu Panda 4 and Dune 2. Both were awesome and made for nice times.

Other than that it has been a lot of driving for us. Tanya is determined to get her driver’s license next month. We have been pushing to go driving every evening, and also mornings on weekends. That means we spend a lot of time in the car aimlessly driving around. She is making good progress.

As we get into spring, projects are beckoning. These include a much needed renovation of our kitchen countertop, insulation of Leena’s room and Tanya’s bus-mog camper project. The bus-mog is a vehicle that Johan has put together. It has a Unimog front and a school body, welded together. The bus-mog is being made into a camper. Tanya spent time insulating it to get the project further.

March ended with Easter, organized by EB Hopster the bunny. We had our usual chocolate and treat style fun.

Kylo Ren the dog: Let me tell you the most exciting thing that happened to me this month. In case you don’t know this about me yet, I am the official duck chaser of our household. Random Pennsylvania duck couples come to lay eggs by our backyard pond. Now, this might sound cute to you, but the ducks are no picnic. They tear up the carefully planted water plants and eat the goldfish in the pond. Plus they poop all over the place. So whenever the duck couple lands, my job is to go running to the pond in a tearing rage and frighten the bejesus out of them. It’s a lot of fun!

So the other day, I was out in the yard on my duck chasing duty with Leena. The ducks quickly flew away, leaving the hunter instinct in me dissatisfied. I wanted more! And so I looked around. And there was Lazy Laurie, the chicken, giving me her usual disdainful look. Lazy Laurie is brown, but that look made me see red! So I went after her in a tearing rage. I had her in my mouth and was going to do her in once and for all. Now, I always look at Leena as if she is a tiny, swattable insect, but she earned my respect that day. She yelled and ran in my direction, and just as I was about to take a bite out of Lazy Laurie, she put her fingers in my mouth and pulled so hard that I couldn’t shut my mouth! While I was trying to get my mouth free, Lazy Laurie ran in the coop. I went after her, but Baby the chicken puffed up and went at me. At that moment, feeling outnumbered, the fight went out of me. I went back to the house, only to be scolded big time by mom and locked up in the crate. What a sorry end to my adventure.

Lazy Laurie the chicken: Well folks, I happen to be the chicken of the month. I would have used the phrase, “the flavor of the season”, but “flavor” sounds a bit risky. As mentioned above by the monster Kylo Ren, he tried to kill me. My dearest human mom Leena saved my life. While I am number one on the pecking order, Leena certainly tops me in rank and status. Once Kylo Ren was overpowered and confined, Leena came back to find me. I was in a state of shock. My mouth was lolling about and my eyes were glassed over. She got worried and so she took me inside the house. There I got royally pampered right in front of Kylo Ren’s nose. I was first hugged and sang to by mom. When that didn’t do the trick, they got me some cream and butter to eat. Seeing fresh cream got me back to my senses. I greedily ate some. My humans were so happy that they gave me multiple helpings of cream, followed by bird feed. I am happy to report that at the end of my feeding, I was back to feeling normal, and was able to join my sisters in the yard once again.

I was once again the star of the show when the humans had a bit of a nasty surprise in the form of some spring bugs emerging from their basement into their living room. Their usual course of action would be vacuuming followed by bleach cleaning. However, after years of living with us, they have gotten sufficiently trained to consider me as their first line of defense. So they brought me in.

You may not know this about me, but along with being chicken number one on the pecking order, I possess some additional qualities that set me apart. They include my fastidious attention to detail, my pro active nature and inclination to take initiative. Corporate America could learn a whole lot from me. Using the above-mentioned traits, I went about my pest control job with diligence. Carefully and painstakingly, I picked up and ate every last bug that had dared to invade my human family’s coop. My humans were most impressed. Imagine being impressed by my ability to eat (hehe). Humans are easy to impress. I am happy to report, that following my pest control and their clean up, the human home is now bug free.

EB Hopster the bunny: Hello there. Before calling it a day, a word from me. I am, after all, the animal of the month. No easter month can be complete without a blog from me.

To the uninitiated, I am EB Hopster. EB stands for, you guessed it, Easter Bunny. I go all over America and Europe leaving chocolate eggs and various treats for kids on Easter day. If you have been especially good, I leave a note for you to read. You can find one such note in the pictures below. This year, at Elf land, I was helped by my Elf assistant Tanya, who explained the layout of the land to me, so that I could leave treats in appropriate locations. I made sure that Easter at Elf Land was a success. Thanks for the applause. Time for me to destroy some tulips.

It came out over breakfast this morning. The story of Johan’s French love who he actually brought over to the US. I should be devastated. But I am a sucker for good stories, so here it is!

When Johan was 21 or 22, before he went into his electronic school in The Netherlands, he went to France with his buddy Hans for a camping trip in his Citroen GS break, a station wagon. They went to campground Chanteraine in the South Eastern part of France. It is close to Nice, France. They both worked for their living expenses while camping. Hans was cleaning the toilets and Johan was doing electrical and mechanical repairs at the campground.

A side story before we get to the main one: While at the campground, Johan repaired a crashed campground Unimog. The campground owner was impressed and spoke about him with the mayor of a nearby small town named Les-Salles-Sur-Verdon. The mayor owned an Alpha Romeo with a broken alternator. He asked Johan to repair it, which Johan did. The mayor was impressed. Since Les-Salles-Sur-Verdon was about 60 km from Draguignan, the nearest big town where they could find technical help (1.5 hrs via a mountainous road), the mayor offered Johan a shop and all the town’s technical work. He would be able to fix their electronics and machines and live in the nice, warm climate. Since Johan was about to start his electronics school, he turned that offer down.

Moving on, Hans and Johan were visiting the nearby beach at Verdonplage. In those days, people drove their cars to the beach. When they arrived, he saw a pretty woman with there with a Citroen DS 20, the car that he had been looking for. That was too good a combination to resist, so he walked over to the woman and asked her about the car (in his best French). While they were speaking, a little boy came out of the water. Oh! Thought Johan. But then he kept the conversation up, still hopeful. But then the husband followed. Johan wisely shifted his attention to the man and expressed his interest in the car. The man said that he was planning on selling it since their family with the kid didn’t fit well in the car. He was looking for a station wagon! Johan said, “hey I have a Station Wagon!”. They were all thrilled. The man asked him to meet him in some town the next day.

It was a mountain town (name’s forgotten). There the man asked him to follow his car. They drove to a large Chateau. Johan worried whether this was mafia(!). But the woman and kid came out of the Chateau. The man had a large tennis court and asked to play. Johan refused. They went swimming instead in their large pool. They bargained over the price over rounds of swimming. The man offered 700 francs. Johan swam a round, and asked for 2500 francs (maybe). Then the man took a round and counter offered. They finally settled on 2000 francs. The wife brought out finger food. They had a nice time. They decided to meet the next day and transfer the title at Draguignan.

The next day all the paperwork was done. As the man was driving off in his station wagon, he said something in French. Johan understood it as, “she needs love”. “No worries”, thought Johan. The station wagon that he had just sold had problems too.

Back at the campground, Johan was in the bathroom when he saw a mole next to him. He caught the mole in a bottle and brought his prize to the car. He set it down on the hood. The mole started scampering on the hood and fell promptly into a hold down to the chassis of the car. Johan got a shock and started looking for it everywhere. But he couldn’t locate the mole. He was traumatized that he had sent a creature to an untimely death. In honor of the mole, he called his car “Molly”. “Molly”, the Citroen DS, was later put into a shipping container and brought over to the US. She now lives in our barn!

After their vacation, Johan and Hans started driving direction Normandy. However, the transmission stopped working. They weren’t able to change gears. The Citroen DS has a complicated transmission, so they took it to a mechanic. He said that it had no hydraulic oil. Uh oh. The hydraulic oil was insanely expensive. The young and poor guys didn’t want to spend money on this. They went further and found a junkyard close to Normandy. They asked the junkyard guy to give them hydraulic oil. He went around with a hammer and punctured all the tanks, while they collected the oil to drive their car home.

The ride home was not without adventure. In those days, there were border patrol at all the European countries. To make his way back to The Netherlands, they had to go through Belgium first. At each border, they had to pay export and import duties. To avoid that, the boys decided to skip the border agents and take a side road into Belgium. They thought that evening would be the best time to escape unnoticed. However, once it got late, they realized that their headlights could be seen for miles! So they drove in twilight with their lights off through tiny dirt roads. Farmers from nearby farms knew what they were doing, and laughed and gave them thumbs up signs. However, they miscalculated the roads in the dark, and ended up only 300 ft behind the border security area. They freaked out and gunned the car! They drove in a frenzy to the nearest town and parked the car behind a church and jumped out expecting cops behind them. Luckily for them, the car chase was a figment of their guilty imagination and no cops followed.

The Dutch border waved them in without a second glance. To finally get the car legal, Johan drove with his dad to the German border. At first the agent didn’t want to give the import papers since the car was already in the country. Johan told him the story truthfully. The agent loved the story and asked him to drive to the next agent, spin his car around and come right back. They gave him his import papers when he drove in! There ends the story of Molly, the Citroen DS.

Molly the mole: Now hang on a minute. Molly’s story hasn’t ended without a word from me. Let me tell you what happened to me, the central character of this (mis) adventure. Here I was one minute, out for my morning sniff in the toilet, and in a bottle in the next minute! Just because I am cute and blind, humans think it’s easy to grab me. So I was grabbed, bottled and placed on a hood. But what the man didn’t know was that I was handier with a bottle than Remi (the rat hero in the movie Ratatouille). I dropped the bottle, scurried all over the hood and jumped into an escape hole before the offending man could say “mole”! This sweet but misinformed youth proceeded to look through the whole car to find me and make sure that I didn’t die from finding in the chassis. Honestly, he spent so much time on looking for me. What he was unaware of was that the chassis had a hidden hole that I had long escaped through. How did I know about this hole, you may ask. Well my friends, having grown up on a campground, I was more intimately familiar with chassis than any auto mechanic you have out there! Years later the guy did find that hole, sans my skeleton!

I watched this youth looking frantically for me all afternoon. I had a nice view of him, sitting in my arm chair on the bathroom ledge with a snack in my hand, and goggles over my eyes (Ok, the last part is a lie. I can’t see, remember?). He lovingly named his car Molly after me. I spent the rest of my days in that blessed campground, happy in the knowledge that somewhere in the world exists a car named after me.