Day 4: The Family Jewels 06/09/07 Saturday

In the morning, we woke to the same meal as always: beans, rice, boiled guineos, and squeaky cheese. Squeaky cheese was made there on the ranch, from the dairy cows, and is something to behold. It's not cheese in the sense that we think of it. It's not completely solid, not pasteurized, and certainly not mild in flavor. I'll use five adjectives in order of weight:
acidic, spongy, pungent, white, stinky. But delicious in its own way.


As kind of a relaxation day, we didn't hurry ourselves up much today. I really had only one goal: to take a horseback ride throughout Los Limones (our ranch), become familiar with the types of terrain, and gain a practical understanding of the size and boundaries.

That turned out to be a pretty lofty goal, but it was a blast nonetheless. We decided to start out by having the hands gather up 5 horses, and began by going to look for some monkeys. After about 20 minutes walking near the river, we found some howler monkeys chilling in the trees above us. Unfortunately, my camera doesn't get a good zoom, but we could definitely watch them as they climbed a little higher to shout down at us. Those little guys have incredible lungs. I would say they can shout at least as loud as any dog can bark. In fact, they sound a little like a sustained big-dog bark. And they certainly don't have an aversion to letting you know how they feel.

We continued on through dense underbrush, avoiding wasps and mud holes, into the large grass plains, known as the Llano. Actually, Mando is thinking about changing the name to Llano Grande. From here, it seems like you can see forever. And the exciting part about this section of the ranch is that in every direction you look, pretty much as far as you can see, is our family's land. And eventually it will we partly mine :). It's plain green as far as you can see, with the speckled dots of brown, black and white moo cows.


The cow hands decided to do a little showing off, and bolted off into the distance, getting a cow in their sights, chasing it down, twirling their lassos, and loosing pretty well placed shots, catching one around the neck, and bringing it to the ground no problem. Nat, me and Chris naturally gave some pretty enthusiastic applause. I actually have a video of this, if anyone's interested. After that cue, i decided to do my own russlin. But, without a lasso, we simply ran the horses into a cluster of them, and chased them around screaming. I'll tell you, it sounds simple and childish, but you haven't lived until you've chased around 800 pounds animals screaming.

The ride back was nice, but there was a river running through the ranch, so we had to do a little wading. Luckily, the horses know what they're doing and i just had to pull my legs out of the stirrups a little to avoid getting wet.

That night was pretty uneventful, and we drifted off around 9 PM.