May 11, 2012

View of the day-The Freightliner backed down the hill to get hooked up to the cart trailer...first thing to get loaded to head south.


Well, it's official!  The go ahead paperwork was delivered to Marilyn at Staples on Wednesday...in one of the FedEx envelopes that we had sent with the application. Bonus! Now the scrambling starts.

We were up early on Thursday to get the tractor and cart loaded on the trailer and hooked up to the Freightliner.  First time loading of the season and we got it right the first time...even discovered that we needed one less set of ramps to get the tractor hitch to clear the trailer.  That will be great for Marilyn, because she has to do the heavy lifting, lining up the ramps so Al can drive the tractor and cart onto the trailer.

Once the tractor and cart were in place, we hooked the trailer up to the Freight and got everything chained down, windows washed and RainEx applied, then Al took off on his own.  He was hoping to beat the rain that had started to fall...so much for the weather reports that the rain was finished for the week.  He had originally wanted to be rolling out of town by 3pm, but was two hours ahead of schedule.  How many times will that happen this summer?

Back at the house, Marilyn was getting things put away and bags packed for the week long run to Oklahoma and back.  After stopping at Staples to pick up some supplies for her sister, Marg, she was on the way to meet Al at White's Ag Service at Whitewood.  We had to pick up the MacDon header, which had been set up and was on the trailer, ready to go.  We stopped to chat with Glen...and to pay for the header...then continued on to Carlyle.

It rained pretty much all the way and as we hit the hills north of Carlyle, in the Moose Mountain Park, it just dumped on us...there was no way we were going to try to get the equipment out to Kim and Marg's to park for the night.  We ended up pulling in to Precision Ag so we could plug the Freight in and stay off of the muddy roads.  Then we went out to the farm to spend the night.

AIS(a$$ in seat) was 8am and we were ahead of schedule again as we left the farm, got the Freight smoking, said our goodbyes and were on the road by 7:45am.  We got to the border and they were expecting us...Marilyn makes a point of faxing and calling ahead to let them know when we will be arriving.  We spent about an hour getting all the serial numbers checked and getting our H2A visas for the season.  for some reason, this year the California centre faxed our approvals to the Port of Fortuna, instead of the Port of Northgate, which has been the only port we have crossed through for the past 15 years...Fortuna is never even mentioned on any of our paperwork.  They did fax from Fortuna to Northgate and we did have the original notice from USCIS, so we weren't too worried.

We left the border at 10:30...we had a time change as we crossed the border...and made it to Kenmare to pick up some toys. There's a shocker.  After a quick snack and a fuel up for the pickup, we were heading south...on a beautiful, sunny but cool, driving day.  Excellent conditions...until we hit South Dakota...what's new?

They had done nothing with the road that we cursed when we came back from the US harvesters convention in March...still rough and no sign of any work getting done.  At one point south of Selby, Marilyn came over a hill and within about a half a mile, there were pylons channeling the traffic over to the right side of the highway...but the channel started on the left side...the most bizarre detour.  They had completely carved away half the highway (the oncoming lane) and had dug down about three feet, for whatever reason.  They had actually just redone this piece of highway a couple years earlier and it was one of the better stretches through the state.

So with half the highway gone, they put the double yellow line on the right side of the normal lane of traffic, making it the oncoming lane and made the shoulder our lane...not so bad for Marilyn's load.  Al's load, on the other hand would have slid down the sharp drop off on the soft shoulder if he ventured too close to the edge...which nearly happen when he met a couple of oncoming semis.

We got through that mess and finally made it to Gettysburg, where we parked at the Gettysburg Inn and called it a day for driving.  We were across the street from the Medicine Rock restaurant and we were lucky enough to get in on the buffet on the only night of the week that they are open.  Of course, they all know us here...it has been over 20 years that we have been eating at the Rock, so the waitress got us caught up on some of the doings around town before we ate and went back to the motel.

We rearranged some of the boxes of toys we had picked up, so there would be room in the back seat.  Al got rid of the bigger boxes that had those Styrofoam 'peanuts' for packing, into the dumpster, but not before the wind got hold of a bunch of the peanuts and spread them on the ground.  He then took the pickup to get fuel in the slip tank for the Freight...that way he wouldn't have to maneuver around the pumps with it.  When he got back and started fueling the Freight, he saw two little girls about 8 or 9 years old, playing with the 'peanuts' that had fallen on the ground.  They were pretending they were marshmallows and they were roasting them over a campfire.


Ah...young imaginations...