Actually he was airing up one of the tires that looked a little low. This was the second load to leave town in the 108º heat of the afternoon...at least we had a south wind.Better be sitting down...Al was up before the crack of dawn and Marilyn wasn't too far behind as we scrambled to get the plans for the day underway. Marilyn gave Al a ride to the Freight and after it aired up and he picked up his morning V-8 he left for Great Bend. Marilyn had to pay a couple of bills and got the camper all ready to go so we wouldn't be draining tanks and hoses in the heat of the day...although it was already 80º at 7am.
Once the slides were all in on the camper, she hooked up the header to the pickup and headed for Great Bend, Kansas. About three miles north of Cherokee, there were flashing lights and pylons set up for a detour...it seems somebody didn't see the pilot car with a stop sign up ahead of the truck hauling a huge turbine section and drove under the trailer trying to pass him on a one lane bridge. No one was hurt, thank goodness, but it meant a back roads detour...a very rough detour.
We had gone through some road construction just outside Medicine Lodge on the way down and as Marilyn reached the town she ended up behind a big crew of harvesters that had to wait for the pilot car to come through. This construction set her back 45 minutes behind the already hour and a half that Al had on her.
After taking a pit stop after the road got better, she gave the other crew a chance to get a head and thin the herd out a little.Back at the bins at Timken, Al had the chance to grab a short nap in the grass after unloading what he could by himself. Marilyn finally showed up and after a quick lunch in Great Bend, we made our way back to Cherokee for the other load. We paid up the last of the bills, got the camper hooked up and Al noticed one of the tires was low on the General so Marilyn pulled up the shop trailer so he could use the compressor to air it up. He got about two pounds out when the compressor ran out of gas. Fortunately we were half a block from the gas station and Marilyn was already walking over with the gerry can to get some.
After filling the can, she left it by the pumps and went in to get an iced tea and "powder her nose" and as she was at the counter, the clerk was looking out the window as a car was driving away, trying to see the license number of the car that had just driven off without paying...or so she thought. There were no other vehicles at the pump and then she asked Marilyn if she had bought fuel...to which she got the confirmation "yep, that's my five bucks worth in the red gerry can". The poor girl was so embarrassed...the other guy in there had a good chuckle over it, and she will probably tell the story over and over again.
We finally left Cherokee for the last time...everyone continuing on with their lives like we had never been there...kind of sad, but you just know there are new adventures up the road at the next stop. We got to Great Bend around 8pm, parked the General and unhooked the shop trailer from behind the camper and went to the campground to get set up for the next week or so. The new pickup pulled the camper/shop trailer load like there was nothing behind it...no overheating, even with the air-conditioning and plenty of pedal left for passing...although Marilyn doesn't like to get too far ahead of Al when they move between stops in case we meet some wide loads or narrow bridges. There sure were a ton of crews moving north today...on our trip back to get the second load we must have met at least 10 or 12 crews and there were a lot in the fields making plenty of dust.
Back at the camper, we have no internet again, so it is off to the Nextech building to upload the blog and get caught up with the email.
And it is in the same parking lot as the 24hr Walmart...
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