Owning a ranch is a blessing. And a curse.

Mostly, though, it’s a blessing. Tonight marks the last day of our week-long vacation, which we have truly enjoyed. The first two nights we spent on the coast, unplugging and decompressing. The “big water” is so soothing to us both; The Tinker grew up on the coast, and I loved the ocean and its soothing rhythms and sounds from the first moment I saw it. Mostly we sat on our balcony, talked, watched the water and the shrimping boats going in and out of the port. We ate wonderful seafood Cajun-style with our hands. We laughed and napped. It was great.

But the ranch demanded its share of our vacation as well. When you have a small ranch and you aren’t independently wealthy or a lottery winner, you end up with a full time job in town and you work the ranch in the evenings and weekends. And vacations.

A ranch is only as good as its fences.

So for three days, we tore down 300′ of fence, and put in new. This was the oldest stretch of fence line that we have on the property that we bought out of an estate almost 6 years ago. We’re pretty sure it’s original to the property, so that makes it at least 25 years old. Seven-strand rusty barbed wire on rusty T-posts with rotting wooden posts at the ends, crushed by limbs and bandaged back together over the years.

So we drilled post holes, mixed concrete, hauled generators and mixers and water tanks to the work site. We took turns hammering in 8′ T-posts with a driver – for every 20-30 strokes The Tinker could drive, I would spell him for my measly 10 or 12. I like to think it helped.

Then we ran the 300′ of field fence, tugged it taught, tied it off, stapled it to posts. We built something sturdy, functional, long-lasting. If that can define beautiful, then we built a beautiful fence line that will keep our cows inside where they belong, and the stray/wild dogs, wild hogs and coyotes at bay.

We work hard for this view, and love it.

Today on our last vacation day we did some work, The Tinker sold and loaded some hay, but mostly we relaxed, regrouped for a return to our respective jobs. Tonight we went up and looked at our fence, our work. We parked our UTV at the top of hill and looked at the pretty vista and talked about the next goals, the next projects, the next expenses we need to figure out a way to carve out of our paychecks. And decided that we couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Vacations have a different meaning when you have a ranch; at least they do for us. It’s an opportunity to take a bite out of the work we try to do part-time. If you wonder if we wished we could stay all week on the coast, if we were sad to leave, I can assure you we were not. The break was needed, necessary. If we had stayed here the whole time we would have ranched the whole time, and never had that blessed dunk in the icy water of idleness. But we were also ready to come home to continue building this dream we have for our ranch. And trust me, building a dream is like a vacation.

Only a lot more work.