Artifact hunting, rum cake & learning to drive

Yesterday was my dad's birthday and we spent most of the day together. One of the things we've always enjoyed doing together as a family is artifact hunting.  It's done simply by walking the rows of plowed fields after they've been washed by rain and being observant as to what's around your feet.  It's meditative, nice to be outdoors and a nice time to catch up with one another.  You can spend hours covering an entire field and find nothing at all or you can have a lucky day.  One of our favorite fields to hunt yielded three pieces on his birthday including this absolute beauty.  It's very humbling to pick something handmade up from the ground and know that you are the first human to touch it since the last person dropped it, literally thousands of years ago.

We had a great dinner together and I baked the rum cake my mother always used to make.  It's this recipe by Bacardi. My mom got it from a pamphlet published in the 80's when my dad worked at a liquor store and it's a family favorite.  Sprinkles optional.

One of us nearly had a breakdown when told that we had to wait for Papa before we could eat the cake.

After dinner we hitched up the camper and had driving lessons in the big parking lot of an abandoned grocery store.  My husband and I are learning to tow and park the camper.  The towing (forward) is the easy part.  The backing up is ok.  The backing up AND parking is a disaster for me.  I just cannot wrap my head around which way to turn the steering wheel and how that makes the back of the camper move.  But we'll get there.  Thankfully I've noticed that a lot of the parks we want to visit have pull through sites designed for MUCH bigger campers than ours so hopefully we wont have to be TOO accurate.  We'd like to start camping as early as next week.