Cooking aboard or outdoors

Excellent post Raven , you should write a book,--providing you can live on your pension.

But you forget to include the cost of living, which in my area is about 30 cents a bottle.

 

Why is everything so expensive? Terrain limits cattle forage. Goats do well in mountainous terrain. Is there much goat meat served in Japan?

 

Unfortunately, goats also destroy terrain. If you ever go to the 1800 acre (730 hectares) San Diego Wild Animal Park, you'll notice immediately that the enclosures for various goats have all been denuded to bare rock, while the enclosures abutting them still have rich vegetation.

Goats are a major reason most of the Land of Milk and Honey had been reduced to wretched desert, by the time the early Zionist settlers arrived and started reclaiming the land a square foot at a time -- mostly with hired labor.

The influx of Arabs into the area looking for work was a major precursor to today's confrontation between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims....

 

if you build it, they will come....

Kobe beef is famous Hoyt. the steers are suspended in slings and fed beer. Their muscles are very flabby. translate, tender.

 

Sounds like a horrible existence.

 

Troy... are you outside San Diego? I've driven through the interesting little towns on the edge of the deserts there before, driving from San Diego to go see Palomar observatory. So very different for an east coast guy to see that stuff. Cool place.

 

Au Contraire... Where do I sign up?

 

Nah. They show them movies.

 

Like this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVa6beGcng&feature=fvwrel

 

Appalling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uODOaq2C0L4&feature=related

 

If you follow Interstate 10 west past Palm Springs and up out of the desert, you'll drive up into the San Gorgonio Pass and through Beaumont. Hang a left at Beaumont and drop twenty miles south towards San Diego, and you'll be in my neighborhood. I live in Homeland, between Hemet and Perris.

But I work in Blythe in the middle of the desert, on the California side of the Colorado River. Since I work twelve hour shifts I'm on the job 14 days out of every four weeks, and rent space for my motor home in a friend's back yard.

I grew up in Blythe. My great-grandfather homesteaded the south end of the valley in the late 1800's, and at one time owned a pretty good chunk of it.... most of the family's land was lost during the Depression.

Give me a holler next time you come through; if I'm not working I'll fire up a grill in Blythe, Homeland or Murrieta (our second home, inherited from my mother-in-law). And if I am working, I'll give you a tour of the plant.... it was the first compressor station built to import natural gas into California.

 

So they torture them, on top of the restraints and massages.....

 

That's very interesting, Troy. Thanks for the friendly offers. I was thoroughly fascinated by the landscape out there, having never really seen that type of land before. I just checked out the three towns you are talking about. Two of them are next to a place we spent a half a day in - Temecula. This was a few year back, so it was all being built up. Really cool place to live, I would imagine. Some hella good Mexican restaurants too... the kind where Mexican guys are lined up outside the door at lunch time. A sure sign you've found the right place!

The odds of me coming back out that way soon are pretty slim, since I'll be moving back onto an east coast boat within a year and it would involve a Panama Canal transit. That's not on our schedule for quite some time (after the Med). But I do appreciate the offer. Thanks.

It was a great place to drive around as a tourist...

 

Good country. I used to fly and jump out at Perris Valley -- mostly a retirement community at that time. Do you know if they still have that DC3 out there?

 

No

I have to shop online from an importer to get my baaahhhhhhhh. Sadly frozen only too, never fresh.

The mountains here are either
1) way way to step or
2) Simply covered with such thick foliage it is impossible to "live".

I am surrounded by some lovely mountains, well impossible not to be in a purely mountainous country, unless one lives in the heart of the city centre. Yet I cannot hike or even mountain bike up them, it is simply covered in such thick foliage, generally very thick and dense (and sharp) bamboo, with endless evergreens interstitially spaced it is impossible to walk through it, let alone cycle or for a goat to roam freely.