Thursday, July 19

We hiked about a mile before checking into Abreu on this morning.  The crew made bricks to start.  Some scouts dug dirt, others sifted the dirt to separate dirt worthy of a brick and that not worthy.  Once they had enough good dirt, they added water and mixed by hand.  The one thing they would have added in the old days that we did not was straw.  Once they mixed to the appropriate consistency, they put the much into molds. They molds were set aside to dry and then recycled later...

Next we got to enjoy Root Beer.  You have never seen boys and men stand in a long line craving Root Beer until you go without soda for some time.  Everyone bought and enjoyed 2 - 3 glasses...

While we were enjoying our Root Beer, we caught a chicken and let the boys pet the chicken and allow others interested hold the chicken.

The Grand Finale at Abreu was a Goat Race!  We raced our sister crew...  Our goat (Jimari) coupled with our team of scouts, was awesome!  Our Crew worked together working to get Jimari to run, walk, and basically moving forward continually while our sister crew tried pushing their goat.  Our Crew and Jimari won by a LONG shot!

After all our fun at Abreu, we hiked on to Bear Caves.  Along the hike we learned that the native Ponderosa Pine have distinct and pleasant aromas.  The female Ponderosa Pine smells like Vanilla, and the male smell like Butterscotch!  All were smelling the trees for the next 10 days!  Although we saw no caves with bears, we camped in a nice field that lended itself for great sunset views, mule deer, rabbits, and jack-a-lope at dusk.  We saw no jack-a-lope, but Ruffles has been looking very hard...  We also got some time to play football!  Right before the sun set, we had a nice heard of Mule Deer that came through our site and grazed in the open field.  We all were quite excited...

During our Rose, Thorn and Bud session, we talked about choices around alcohol and tobacco, and then did some star gazing.  All were amazed at the amount of stars and shooting stars that we saw!  No light pollution nor haze and pollution lends to a very dark and clear sky at night!

All in all, we hiked about 6 miles, and then ran a bit while playing football...