We just spent the weekend at the Coyote Moon guest cabin near Elmore City, Oklahoma. It is a beautiful little cabin, tastefully decorated, well designed and well cared for. The hosts are remarkably nice people and the location is secluded enough that you and your spouse can pretty well do whatever you want wherever you want and not worry about prying eyes. So ladies, if you fantasize about making love in a secluded woodland glen surrounded by wildflowers, this is the place. If purple is your thing like Sheila, here is the chance to stay in a purple house. If you want to get some sun without worrying about tan lines, this is the place. And, if you are looking for a place for just the two of you to spend time together without distractions, this is certainly the place. As you read more about our experience and the occasional negative comment, read it as much as a commentary on the perils of getting old and cranky as a complaint about the facility. The hosts are very nice folks who run a great little get romantic getaway destination.
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It is a little after 7:00 A.M. Saturday morning.
I am sipping a cup of coffee and munching on
Fig Newtons on the tiny rear courtyard of the Coyote Moon Cabin.
Sheila is sleeping in.
It is her birthday and we are on
vacation.
The morning fog has yet to
burn off, so the sun is simply a brighter spot in the gray western sky.
A small symphony of mockingbirds, jays and
something that sounds like a dove are serenading me.
There is a soft and fairly steady northwest
wind that feels refreshingly cool on my skin.
We left Tulsa mid morning yesterday and had an uneventful
trip down except for a huge traffic tie up south of Oklahoma City on I-35. The reason for the several mile stop and go
delay became apparent after a while when we saw a highway crew working on a
bridge in the the northbound lanes. One
of the concrete paving panels had fallen through the bridge structure and there
was literally a hole in the bridge requiring that northbound traffic be
diverted to the other lanes reducing I-35, the main north south route to
Dallas, to two lanes for several miles.
We had a late lunch at a place called Libby's Cafe in
Goldsby, Oklahoma.
It is on State
Highway 74 south of Norman and north of Purcell.
The place is always crowded.
The food is legendary.
I had a hand breaded, deep fried chicken
breast which was only so so.
But, the
home made mashed potatoes and pinto beans made up for it.
They were fabulous.
Sheila had grilled catfish with mango salsa.
I have a rule.I never order gourmet sounding items in diner
type restaurants, even high dollar, good reputation ones like this one.
It just usually doesn't turn out well.
Sheila often does and is often
disappointed.
This time she wasn't.
That catfish could have held its own in any
fancy restaurant in the world.
It was
unbelievable.
And toward the end of the
meal, one of those “what are the odds” events occurred.
I was just sitting there when Sheila suddenly
looked up and shouted “Julie!!!”
It
turned out that Sheila spotted her high school friend
Julie VanDelinder (originally from Sallisaw)
and her husband walking past our table.
They live in Stroud now. Sheila and Julie visited for several minutes.
We arrived at the cabin around 2:30 PM.
Our host greeted us in his golf cart and led us up the red
clay road to the cabin
The cabin looked exactly as advertised and the interior was immaculate.
However,
there was a medium sized wasp nest in the back door that I eventually had to
dispatch with some rolled magazine pages set on fire.
Wasps annoyed us for the rest of the weekend
looking for the missing nest and buzz bombing us as
we went in and out the door.
It took us about half on hour to get unloaded and get our
food stored in the small apartment sized fridge.
We then headed out back to relax and work on
our tans.
We passed the afternoon mostly on the rear courtyard, sunning, taking photographs, listening to the radio
and exploring the woods behind the cabin.
Before dinner, Sheila and I both took a turn in the Victorian style soaker tub. We ate late.
Come dinner time, we noticed the barbecue grill was a
little ten dollar portable unit typically sold at Walmart.
I am a pretty good cook.
I can produce a meal on anything from an open
fire to a twelve burner commercial range.
But, these little monstrosities are a real challenge.
You cannot adjust the grill height and if you
try to control your temperature by using the lid and the damper vent you
usually just put your charcoal out by denying it oxygen since the cooking space is so small.
But, I managed to get a
couple of cilantro lime chicken breasts cooked
while Sheila fixed a Caesar salad and baked fresh bread in the
kitchen on the little propane range. After dinner, we retired early. The
bedroom area is tiny but comfortable.
The queen sized bed was great and I slept like a log.
One of the reasons, I came to this particular cabin was that
I have always dreamed of owning a small, southwestern style, faux adobe cabin just like this one. I also
wanted to get a chance to try self-reliant, off the grid technology for a day
or two. Coyote Moon has no hookup to the
commercial grid system. It is powered by
a combination of wind and solar. Cooking
and hot water are propane. Heating is a
combination of wood and propane.
Despite a pretty well state of the art solar/wind system and a very
small, inherently cool and energy efficient by design space, electricity is a
problem.
The owner warned us that even
with a full charge there was only enough power for about three hours of air
conditioning per day.
In southwest
Oklahoma that is a problem.
He solves
that problem by shutting the cabin down in the summer months.
But, that would obviously be a problem for an
owner of such a unit who intended to use it most frequently in the summer.
Using only the fridge, one light fixture, a ceiling fan
and a pedestal fan overnight, we depleted the battery supply by fifteen percent
with the wind generator running all night.
You can tell the wind generator ran all night by the lawn sprinkler
sound it makes when the wind reaches sufficient velocity to engage it. It is not annoying at all, just an audible reminder that you are dealing with different technology.
All of the plumbing fixtures were the tiny new, high tech,
low water use units.
Big people don't get along with them well and neither do people with bad knees. I will let that stream of conversation end there. Bottom line, if Sheila and I
build such a vacation home for ourselves, it will have full size fixtures.
The natural stone pavers of the
rear courtyard present a quite attractive appearance.
But, they were so uneven that it was nearly
impossible to level the the table or the chairs enough to type, paint or even eat from.
I eventually found a combination of placement
that included the use of the thick plastic lid of an orange juice bottle for a
shim that made the table fairly level.
Saturday morning, Sheila slept in for a while and then made us
a nice little bacon and egg breakfast including canned cinnamon rolls. After breakfast, she opened her birthday
present from me, a boxed set of artist supplies in a wooden carry case and some
sketch paper, etc. By mid-morning, she
was in the front yard doing a sketch of the front of the adobe.
Around 3:00, Sheila told me that she was out of allergy
meds. It was 26 miles to the nearest
pharmacy, which thanks to meth cookers and the Oklahoma legislature is the only
place you can now purchase formerly over the counter antihistamines. So we got ready and drove the 26 miles to
Paul's Valley. In the meanwhile, Sheila
had blown out a brand new fancy flip flop on the way so I also had to buy her a new pair in Walmart if we wanted to eat dinner in a restaurant. This is definitely no shoes no service country. When the shopping was finished, we ate at a place called
Punkin's that all of the locals rave about. If you ask any Okie they will immediately tell you that their local
place has the best barbecue and catfish in the world. The meal was OK. I have had better and had worse.
After dinner, we drove back and packed up for
our departure tomorrow morning.
When
that was finished, we went back out on the rear courtyard and played a game of
dominoes.
I hadn't played in years but
that was what Sheila wanted to do.
She
loves games and she is good at them.
As
usual, she kicked my tail. As we were
playing dominoes, we could hear heavy thunder off to the northwest.
By dark there was almost constant lightning on the horizon to the south and west. I tried every way I could but simply could
not find a a local radio station that gave anything like a weather
forecast.
It was nearly 10:00 PM before I succeeded and by that time the weather was dying down.
When the storms passed the wind shifted to the south. I was immediately stricken with the mother of all allergy attacks and since I cannot take antihistamines, an allergy attack just means I feel miserable until conditions change. Period. So we were up early, packed and gone by 7:00 AM, headed back home where I could get inside, breathe filtered air and stop the nose running, eyes burning, hacking cough, etc. I would have liked to have spent another quiet morning there but it wasn't to be. We pulled into our driveway just about noon. In hindsight, our early departure was highly fortunate given the fact that by mid afternoon, tornadic supercell thunderstorms were lined up I-44 between OKC and Tulsa like semis in traffic. If we had waited until noon or so to leave as I intended, we would have been in the middle of it.
Like many our cabin "adventures" this one had its high and low points but all things considered ---- a good time was had by all.
This adventure on YouTube
I always have the Bun Ga Nuong. It is a bowl filled with salad, cold rice noodles and grilled chicken. It is served with warm spring rolls on the top. Nuoc Cham, a clear sauce made by pressing fish between plates of steel in the sun and collecting the liquid that drips out is served on the side. As disgusting as that sounds to a westerner, the flavor is mild and not unlike a very high quality light soy sauce of the type that we never see in the U.S. You mix that sauce with ground chilis to taste and use it as a salad dressing over everything. It is a fabulous light summer meal and no one does it better than the folks at Viet Huong.
When we arrived at our daughter's house, we found Little Ben Bob in a great mood. He was all smiles and giggles all evening. My son in law is an engineer who enjoys his technology. Their television system is fed by a state of the art media server with a larger hard drive than I used to sell to run national companies. I don't even try to to figure it out. It's not worth the learning curve. But, I did manage to find his stash of recorded movies on the server hard drive. Sheila literally danced much of the evening away with Little Ben Bob in her arms was we watched an uncut
Sunday evening, The Rat Pack met at the Queen's for dinner. Roger Harmon smoked chicken, ribs, bologna and hot links. He also brought home brewed beer. Maddy Harmon brought fresh strawberries from their garden and homemade shortcake. The Salas brought potato salad and an oriental ramen noodle salad. We brought the beans and cornbread. Roger's beer was unbelievable. I broke my usual rule and had a bottle. It was pleasantly fruity with a nice hops aftertaste. And as usual, the alcohol content was a little higher than I am accustomed to. Roger's meats were superb. He gave himself an expensive Hasty Bake grill for a retirement present and has devoted much of his retirement time to learning how to brew gourmet beer and barbecue like a pro. Roger was always well liked but now he is now a very popular man indeed with the Pack.
The Queens have a beautiful home set in a park like atmosphere. As a matter of fact, the grounds at the rear of the house look a lot like Swan Lake. Their place was made for evenings like this. After dinner, Dennis's youngest son, his lovely wife and their rambunctious grandchild came by. Their touch of youth was just the right thing to liven up a bunch of near senior citizens sitting around the deck. After dinner the men went for a walk around the lake. They somehow wound up on the golf course that abuts the rear of their property. After scouting the rough for a few minutes, Dennis came back with twenty bucks or more worth of high dollar golf balls filling both of his hands.
