All cleaned up looking good in the evening light

I got everything put back in place, or at least drying and waiting to be put back.  We used about everything I had.  At one point we had two two straps, a tree saver, and a winch extension involved hahahaha.

Spin balance?

One issue in driving your Jeep home after getting muddy is you can have issues with mud causing balance issues in your wheels.  But it the mud is still fresh, and you don’t have too much, they tend to spin themselves balanced pretty well.  The leftmost pic shows one that spin-balanced nicely on the way out.   It helps if it’s raining, which it was at the time.  The middle pic shows the wheel I popped off the bead.  It didn’t get a chance to spin balance (or get washed by running in the rain.  Quite a difference.  I needed to clean it up enough that the tire shop would be willing to touch it, which is what the pic on the right shows.  I little power washing goes a long way, but I couldn’t get it all without taking the wheel off the rim.  But the shop was good and willing to finish the cleaning, and get it all re-mounted and re-balanced.  All at no charge.  They always take good care of me at Discount Tire.  Have for decades.

If you don’t winch, you didn’t try hard enough…

I’m known for taking that attitude when off-roading.  While I was out with Zac, he got the chance to prove that after four recoveries haha.  We still had a great time and even Chloe kept saying she was still enjoying it.  We were 30 seconds from the end of the ride and I might have failed to give the mud proper respect and got stuck in the ruts you can see behind me (lower left).  Zac didn’t have enough weight or traction to recover me so we had to winch using several big bushes as anchor points.  I might have popped the tire off the rim’s bead in the process of winching (on an underground root I somehow managed to dig up with the wheel as I was coming up out of the rut), lower right pic).  The ground was too soft to use my normal jack and platform so Zac drove me home and the Jeep spent the night on the trail. (Three of us, our gear, and two dogs filled his Jeep for sure)  The next morning, my amazing wife offered to rescue me in her Subaru 🤪 by loading it full of everything we might need to jack it up and/or winch out some more (upper right).  Luckily, the spare tire change only took 30 mins with a real jack (and some wooden planks my dad saved), and I drove right out the rest of the mud bogs first try in about 13 seconds.  It was a good thing because a bad storm was blowing in right at that moment.  It took out several trees that blocked the road so we had to go the long way home.  incidentally, this was the exact same time that Columbus was getting hit with tornadoes.

The upper left shows me all safe and sound at home after the jeep spent the night on the trail. Still one of the cleanest it’s been after off-roading.  Partially due to not having mud tires flinging stuff everywhere, and partly since my new wheels sit inboard 3/4” more so I get a little better fender flare coverage. 

Do I regret not having mud tires and selling my beadlocks yet?  Hmmmm.  I don’t think so.  I sure realize how important it is to make sure you have your stuff with you even if you’re doing light off-roading.  I’m not planning any more treks for a while so we will see what’s next…

Play til you drop…

Sometimes you just run out of energy while playing and end up with your toys on your head…

Julie made us another tomato pie

These are SOOOOOOO yummy.  Cheese, mayo, more cheese, tomatoes, more cheese, and baked to golden brown and delicious.  What’s not to love.  

Meanwhile, Sophie is enjoying Percy time❣️

We might have gotten into a little mud…

…You know it’s bad when this is what your glasses look like when you get home!

Zac climbed the Waterfall in his Jeep.

I promised him a redepemption run after I had to tow strap him over it in his Ranger a year ago Christmas. Good times!

Off-roading with Zac and Chloe

We had fun angles (left pics), and good food - BLTs made by Chloe (lower right).  I thought my Jeep looked pretty picturesque in the woods (upper right).

Trying to get a good downy woodpecker pic

Julie got me one more sticker since I was keeping my Jeep

These little black cat stickers are so cute!

I got this cool pic of Julie’s bamboo shrimp

She calls them fanboys since they always sit there “fanning” their filters feeding appendages. 

Julie’s fanboy (bamboo) shrimp are so fun and cool

It’s fun to watch them collect goodies out of the jet stream and then occasionally clean off their filter “feathers” as a little snack.

Stumbled across this on the internet

The design of this watch, fae and hands doesn’t appeal to me as much for some reason, but I do like the complications.  This is a mechanical Swiss watch that has the most complications I’ve seen crammed into one movement.  It has the same movement as the Omega Speedmaster, but they included the moon phase on this one. Crazy that you can have all this running on tiny gears, springs and jewels in there.  So if you ran the chronographs as a second time zone you would have GMT, day, date, month, moon, 24hr, and time.  What more could you “need”? Hahahaha.  

Random pics from Facebook…

Facebook offered me a post from a relative who’s name or picture I didn’t even recognize, but she was posting this pics of the five of us plus my grandma and grandpa Barton (bottom pic, couple on the left).  I think the couple on the right is Aunt Suzie and Uncle Chuck?