June 15, 2011

View of the day-The first load at 6:30am. Al is checking it out while he waits for the truck to air up.

Marilyn decided to pass on the eggs for breakfast, so we were able to get an early start for Timken. We saw a LOT of combines sitting in the towns along the way…most of them still loaded on the trailers. There were some in the fields as well, but none making dust at that time of the morning.

We stopped to check the load once, then continued on without a pit stop…it was only 160 miles, after all. Once we had gotten through Great Bend, Marilyn went on ahead to unhook the header at the bin site so she could get the header trailer that Al had hooked on behind the cart trailer. He had a narrow corner to make and didn’t need the extra stress of the pickup head trailing behind, so he unhooked it just before the corner and Marilyn watched to make sure the trailer tires didn’t drop into the culvert at the corner.

With that experience over with, we drove a couple miles up to the bin site and backed the trailer in so we could unload everything before we headed back to Cherokee. When we unload the tractor and cart, Al goes into the tractor and uses the hydraulics from it to lift the trailer out of the hitch, Marilyn then gets into the Freightliner and drives it out of the way, then Al sets the trailer down and Marilyn unhooks the hoses and places the three sets of ramps strategically in place so Al can back the rig off the trailer without hooking the hitch on anything.

Marilyn has been known to be a bit of a snake wrangler…garter snakes, at least…and does not fear those ones and will catch them, if she is fast enough. But today when she was getting ready to move the Freight, something…about 3ft long, and fat…slithered past her and went under the truck. Now this had no rattle and it wasn’t the friendly garter snake, she took a guess at a bull snake and wasn’t about to mess with it…but it was hanging around the door that she had to go in. By the time she made a pile of noise going around the truck, she couldn’t see it anymore, so she made the move and got the Freight parked.

Back in the tractor, Al was waiting for the ramps to get set, which meant Marilyn had to do the rearranging mere feet from where old slippery had just gone. She was just setting the last ramp in place when the grass rustled by her hand!! No biggie…just a fat grasshopper.

So we got the tractor unloaded and parked, then went down to the farmyard to visit with Ken before heading into Great Bend. We stopped for lunch, then had to make a detour to the RV place to see about getting some warranty work done…yes, the new has worn off. The water pump had given up the ghost, but since we use the city hookup, we were blissfully unaware until we spied a puddle forming in the basement. After checking things out on the internet, Marilyn discovered that this was somewhat of a common occurrence with these higher output pumps. We have a 1pm appointment for Friday to get the new one put in.

On the way back to Cherokee, there was a lot more action in the fields where the combines had been sitting earlier in the day…and the ones on the trailers were still there, as well. We got back to Cherokee and went back to get the shop trailer hooked up behind the combine trailer, and…more brake light issues. This time we got it right and once everything was flanged in, Al drove it out to the street for our early morning escape tomorrow.

We went for supper to Miss Dotties and paid up the rest of our bills around town. When we stopped at the elevator to pay our fuel bill, they told us they had filled all their bins up with this harvest…almost one million bushels! Harvest in this area turned out better than predicted…although far from the average of past years.

Tomorrow we leave Oklahoma, we won’t miss the heat and the wind, but somehow we are pretty sure it will follow us into Kansas…