Sweet New England; Or, RDB Gets a Tick on Her Back and Almost Dies

So, I'm a little bit behind on blogging The Great Wanderlust of 2012.  I did a decent job with documenting the West Coast Edition of the Teach Erica Something World Tour and summarized road trip one ("up").  Next came the trip cross-country ("over"), which was captured mostly in pictures from here and there, and summarized by the numbers.  Since then...  well, these trips began 9+ weeks and 21+ states ago, so I have some catching up to do.

My first stop on trip three ("down") was the Bardo Farm in New Hampshire.  I was there nearly three weeks and could have stayed much longer. I did quite a lot of learning, and my trip was bookended by two big events:  seeing President Obama on the first day and walking the Manchester City Half-Marathon on the last day!

 In between, I spent a lot of time with great friends, helped (by some vague definition of "help") with an assortment of farm activities, and basically spent as much time with power tools as possible.  Here I am with the log splitter, the chainsaw, and a weed whacker.  Lord, could I even get any handier?

I spent some time shooting guns of all sizes... mostly at paper, plastic, and metal targets, but I did manage to shoot my share of (exploding) zombies at the Zombie Apocalypse party!  

And since I've become a little bit obsessed with PhotoGrid, here's one more collage of me and various farm animals and farm vehicles - a four-wheeler, a three-wheeler, and a two-wheeler.  It's hard to tell how adorable those piglets are from the picture but trust me:  A. Dor. A. Ble.

Other adventures in NH included getting to visit my fabulous cousin, the Deputy Field Director for Training and Internships at Obama For America; helping hold down Shadow, my friend's poor dog, while we extracted porcupine needles from his mouth (ouch!). Oh, and ALMOST DYING FROM A TICK ON MY BACK.  I hope to be back in May :)