Road Trip Results

I've been helping Mel in Cornelia, GA with her homesteading endeavors for about a year now. A slew of emails back and forth, comments on her YouTube channel, and phone calls. She calls her channel, "One Woman & Two Acres." She moved from Orlando, FL to a purchased site unseen two acres and a crumbling down double wide trailer in the north Georgia mountains about two years ago. She knew what she wanted and went for it.

The difference between us is I actually have a decade or more experience and she did before the jump to full fledged homesteading. I've watch her stumble and tumble her way towards a more self sufficient lifestyle. Since I was going to be up in her neck of the woods picking up my new angora, I decided to give her a lesson in butchering a chicken. She decided to video tape it for her channel because she thought it would be a hoot. She's a lot like me and a kindred spirit. She wanted someone who knew how to butcher chickens too stand by while she did it. Me, I've butchered more than my fair share over the years. Want to see the results? There are even cameos of me and my #2 daughter in here. Watch...

 

Butchering the rooster might have been a bust but look at what I did come home with.

Dubu, who I showed you earlier. He's five pounds already at four months and will be about ten pounds  when fully grown. He has started blowing (releasing) his baby coat. All I have to do is run my hand across his body and can get a handful of wool. I spent Sunday with a slicker brush and pulled about 2 ozs in fifteen minutes! Still a couple of more passes with the brush to go over the next week to get all the wool off of him. I never work on my bunnies for more than fifteen minutes at a time.  They get so restless.

But that's not all I found. We found this sweetie!

Yes, it's a blue eyed white baby angora, and I do mean baby, bunny. It's 5 weeks old. My daughter promptly named her "Snowball." No, the name isn't Gaelic, but it describes her to a "T." I haven't sexed it yet so I don't know if I have a buck or a doe. Right now, it's about half a pound, but that will fast over the next couple of weeks. It'll be about seven pounds when fully grown. As dense as it's fur is now, it'll be a grand wool producer no matter what the sex. As my daughter said, "It's so stinking cute, you can't say no to bringing it home." I didn't either.

I'd call the trip a success! With Melody, I laughed until my sides hurt and it felt good! I'm alive and excited to be alive. The drive was killer though on my back. It will take a few days more to work out all the kinks. I had forgotten how steep the Georgia mountains could be off the interstate after spending so much time on the coast. I've had enough of driving the straight up and downs to last me a few months, but by then there'll be snow up there and cold. I'll plan my next trip up there after it thaws out. 

I sure didn't miss the Atlanta traffic! Geez Louise! Four lanes of weaving in and out between cars is the stuff of my nightmares for a while to come. I've lost my edge (and nerve) for big city driving. The D.C. Beltway has nothing on Atlanta traffic and it wasn't even rush hour! The traffic snarls and construction made the bypass we were on took an hour longer than it should have. It kinda made me want to get out of the car and kiss the ground after surviving it. I probably would have if it wasn't so hard to get down there and up again.

So that's the results of my road trip. Fun, fun, fun, nail biting panic, fun, fun, fun!