Quinn’s Extraordinary Travel Ramblings:

The Hunt’s house:

On Tuesday we arose early enough and after cleaning up the bus and doing our school we started driving to the Hunt’s house. It was later in the afternoon by that time. When we turned on to the final road which would lead us to the Hunt’s (it was way out in the boonies) someone who was driving along it stopped and asked us if we knew where we were. We told him that we thought that we did. We then asked him where we could find the Hunt’s house. He told us to continue on where we were headed. When we arrived at their driveway we saw Andrew and Mr. Hunt standing there. Later they told us that they had watched us approach from their house. They helped us get parked and level our bus. Jonathan came out then and we all visited for a while. Mrs. Hunt was teaching a piano lesson at the time so she didn’t come out till later. When she was done with her piano lesson she came out and we all stood outside visiting for a while.
The Hunt’s house is situated out in the country alongside a dirt road. They are surrounded by fields and they have a small pond nearby. When we were headed inside we noticed a big blackish burntish crater in their parking lot. Mr. Hunt then related this story……. It seemed that Mr. Hunt was coming home from work one day. He parked his truck next to his house and got out. He had been inside for about twenty minutes when he went back outside. When he looked over to his truck he saw that the whole thing was enveloped in flames. All of the family rushed outside and watched it burn. The fire was so hot that it melted the siding on their house. That day there were strong gusts of wind, but thankfully they did not blow the flames towards the house and the house did not burn up. So the Hunt family ended up having to get a new vehicle.
That night Mrs. Hunt had prepared an amazing home cooked meal consisting of chicken and dumplings, garden fresh green beans, dinner rolls, homemade jams and jellies, salad and lots of other delicious stuff. She is a most excellent cook and hostess! After dinner was over that evening Laura, Andrew, Jonathan and I went into the living room and did some pickin and grinin for a while.
Later Jonathan and Andrew took us out to their barn to look around. It was rather exciting. Inside were a trampoline, a tractor and several model airplanes that Andrew and Jonathan had made from scratch. The planes were constructed with all sorts of supplies such as wood, Styrofoam, paper, wire and paint, etc. While out in the barn we found a small brown scorpion. Andrew, not fond of scorpions, stomped on it. Abby found three farm cats. One had black fur with white paws. The other two were also black. Abby spent about twenty minutes trying to catch a cat which she finally succeeded at. After we were done exploring in the barn we went back into the house for a while.
Once we were done terrorizing the house we took Jonathan and Andrew out to our bus. We showed them around, which took all but two seconds. And then Andrew saw my hat box. Of course he had to try them all on. He went through everything and then he found my red wig. He tried that on and we all just about died; he was very dashing in it. But then again by dashing he might have been dashing out away from us. After much insistent persuasion Andrew also tried on Laura’s big pink feather boa. Sadly, he absolutely refused to allow us to take his photograph for Quinn’s Extraordinary Travel Ramblings blog. Just an interesting side note….on my fancy dancy computer I just typed in the word blog and the spell check doesn’t recognize the word. Kind of funny seeing as a blog was invented for the computer!

Jonathan or Andrew, I am not really sure which, said that they had an Armadillo that lived under their front porch so we went and looked at that… We found the Armadillo’s hole but we couldn’t see the Armadillo. The hole was very exciting, we found a role of duct tape inside the entrance. Maybe the Armadillo was planning to make an elephant. Once we had determined that there was nothing other than a role of duct tape in the hole Jonathan took us in to see their recording studio. It was in Jonathan’s room. Jonathan and Andrew explained how they did all of their recording and such. Jonathan is in charge of doing all of the mixing for their CD’s. They did all of their recording in their bathroom due to the fact that the acoustics were so good. We understood that due to the other fact that we often practiced in our downstairs bathroom in our home in Juneau for the superior acoustics as well.
The Hunt Family as you might have guessed is comprised of Mr. Terry Hunt (the dad); Mrs. Leanne Hunt (the mom); Andrew (17 years) and Jonathan (14 years). They like us, or us like them, travel around playing music at festivals, churches and whatnot. In fact we met them at the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival when we were there and that is how we ended up at their house. The Hunt Family Bluegrass Band is a top notch, hard driving bluegrass machine. They won the KSMU Youth in Bluegrass Competition held each year at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. Mr. Hunt plays banjo and guitar, Mrs. Hunt plays the upright bass. Andrew plays the mandolin, fiddle and guitar. Jonathan plays the banjo, guitar and bass. They all are terrific singers. Andrew and Jonathan taught Laura and I a great tune called Daybreak in Dixie. My mom loved their rendition of Rawhide. On the side it was impressive to us to note that Mr. Hunt was the manager of the flight program for the Oklahoma State University.
The rest of the evening was spent visiting with them and jamming and such. When we did go to bed we slept in the bus for the night.
On Wednesday we arose at around 6:00 a.m. so as we might make it inside in time for breakfast. We did clean up the bus before we went in so we might maximize our visiting time. When we did get in they were all awake already and breakfast was almost done. We spent the next hour or so visiting and eating breakfast. After breakfast was over we jammed again for a bit. But after a while we had to say our goodbyes. We packed up our instruments, checking and rechecking to make sure we hadn’t forgotten any of them. If we had it would have been a problem and a good thing at the same time. The good thing would be that the Hunt’s would have some more instruments and another good thing would be that we could get new instruments. But luckily for us we didn’t leave anything behind.
We are very grateful for their hospitality and we hope to see them again someday soon, either in Alaska or back in Oklahoma or elsewhere.

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