Just driving into Ruidoso, NM, last Saturday I knew we were going to enjoy our stay there! Who doesn't enjoy seeing deer just calmly lying on the ground instead of running towards, away from, or into your car on the highway as you would see in SW Oklahoma?! It was such a beautiful site! And we saw many over the next five days!
And then the scenes like this - the mountains, the pine trees, spectacular views. It was beautiful!
Our house was beautiful, too. We found it through vrbo.com (Vacation Rentals by Owner), as usual. I like having a big, nice kitchen, but actually, this time I didn't cook very much. I still would have brought the kitchen home with me if I could have!
The owners are from Texas, so we had lots and lots of Texas decor. We liked it - felt almost like home! A neat thing is that we found out that the man is a hot air balloon company owner! He has won lots of awards in the hot air balloon industry! That explains why there was a lot of hot air balloon decor, too! I found myself finding hot air balloon things in the downtown stores, as well.
One fun thing we did was visit "Pillow's Funtrackers". The owner, Jim Pillow is actually a former resident of Tipton Children's Home, that my husband now over as director. He was adopted as a young teen and credits his faithful Christian life and success to those loving parents who adopted he and his siblings. It was great to meet him!
Our children enjoyed the go karts! Here Zachary and Jacob are racing!
Lauren is so funny! It never fails, if she knows have the camera out, she'll pose some goofy pose! I wouldn't be able to do two things at once. I would have wrecked! Ha ha!
One thing Pillow's Funtrackers has is a huge maze. You stamp your card on the time machine, then get several markers punched along the way, then race back to the clock to be the first one back. It was so much fun! Joe cheated! Can you believe that!!!???
We visited the "Flying J" Ranch for a shoot-out, chuck wagon dinner, and Western music show. Tyler and the others all practiced shooting a pistol with wax pellets.
They had fun comparing who did the best. I think Lauren did, actually!
Although we're not big Western music fans, this group was great! They were funny and talented. And it was clean! That's a buggy these days!
The food was really good! It's so much fun eating from a tin plate and drinking from a tin cup! Just like a cowboy, huh?!
Our family enjoyed being in the rental home. The owners leave puzzles for the guest to do. This one was very, very hard, but we had such a fun time doing it together! Well, most of us contributed. Joe tried to help, but he put a lot of pieces together in a row that didn't go!! Ha ha! He was disappointed we took them all apart, but we had to! We didn't want to stop until we had it done, so several of us worked hours and hours at a time!
I wanted to take a picture of each of the kids in front of the house at this bear carving.
So many of the homes had these kinds of bears! Small ones....big ones....cute ones!
We bought one for our house with our last name on it.
It will always be a great reminder of our vacation!
We ate at so many wonderful places! I will spotlight them on
"Life's a Bowl of Cherries" starting next week.
Looks like a great time with your family!
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