Always fun to check and see 'who' has been taking a look at my ramblings. Of course the only thing I see is what country a person is from when they check out a page or two. Today someone from China checked in, the first time since the first week I went on line with this blog. So far I think I'm up to 14 different countries besides the ones from here in the U.S. This country still surpasses all the others combined, but I am often amazed at how many 'views' I get from Russia and other European countries. Welcome to you all.

    I was up and about way to early this morning. My nephew, Brian, promised to take me fishing if I'd get up before it got to hot outside. So with only 4 hours of sleep I was up and going at 5:00 a.m.  this morning. We headed over to 'Soldier Creek' north of Fort Robinson. The creek is only about 3'-4' wide at the widest points, but it holds an amazing number of really nice fish in the 8"-24" range. I know.... seems hard to believe, but I've seen pictures of fish Brian has caught out of here before. The largest one we caught today was a 15" brookie that I pulled out. Not a huge fish, but heavy and very nice for a Brook Trout. All in all I think I caught about 20 fish total, and Brian maybe 25-30. We didn't keep anything today, way to hot to keep anything in the heat, plus I really didn't want to bother cooking anything tonight in the heat. We had a really fun time though, even if Brian did find a couple of ticks crawling on him. Nothing on me that I could find, but will check again one more time tonight before hitting the rack. I hate ticks, they're creepy!

    We were done fishing by 11:00 as the temperature was nearly 100 degrees again, and we didn't pack in nearly enough water to stay out much longer. A nice walk out of there of about a mile, so we didn't fish very far today. We came on into Chadron then and had lunch at a local cafe here. I ordered what I thought would be a pretty standard hamburger, but turned out to be about a half of a cow. It was no wonder that I needed to head back to the trailer after that and take a nap, even if it was to hot to really sleep well.

    Up again around 4:30 and took a nice cool shower before heading back into town for one last visit with the kids. Going to miss hanging out with Aubree and Rykin, they are certainly cute kids.

   Will be heading back to my sisters place tomorrow night to pick up a few things they didn't get to bring up to me this week, since the kids won't be moving into their new home for at least a couple more weeks. It'll be good to see them again one last time this trip also. From there it will be on back to Longmont, Colorado to tuck Esmerelda back into her storage spot until I get back from my river trip in Montana. It has been a wonderful couple of weeks up here visiting with my family and friends. As always the plays were wonderful and it is always fun to hang out with my nephews. They keep me kind of young with some of their antics.

Here are a couple pictures from the drive around the Nebraska Forest the other day with Brian.

A fine group of mule deer bucks. There are actually 9 in this group, but the others were outside this view.

As you can see there are some rather nice racks in this bunch. Especially when you consider that they still have nearly another two months to grow before the velvet dries up and they start rubbing it off. I think they need to learn how to 'run' a little better by then also. Mule deer aren't the 'smartest bulbs in the pack', which may be why the white tale deer are starting to take over most of their territory. They sure are pretty though.