After years of listening to Al "suggest" it was time to retire from...as he likes to call it..."this lucrative business", we finally came to an agreement that Harvest 2013 would be our last run in the USA.
While we had officially made the decision, we decided not to tell anyone, "just in case", we changed our minds...this had happened before. There had been a couple of pre-harvest agreements, that there would be only five or three or two more years, then we would quit, but all those deadlines came and went. And we did the same...came to the US and went harvesting.
Knowing that we were firm in our choice, made the summer a lot more relaxed...sort of. We had some of our customers retire, pass on, or rent out their land, so we lost work during the year which meant future work. We still managed to get our usual acres from other sources, and even with the 52 straight days that we didn't combine, still came out okay.
The hardest part was having to let our remaining customers know that we wouldn't be returning this season. These were folks that we have known since before we had even gone harvesting out on our own. These were friends.
When we made the trek to Wichita for the US Custom Harvester's convention, we made a point of swinging down through Cherokee, OK and Great Bend, KS to visit one more time and officially say good bye. Although we hope to visit again at some time in the future. We have seen other crews retire and wonder how they could handle the transition in the spring, but life is a vacuum...when one thing goes, another takes its place.
We certainly didn't miss all the paperwork headaches that come with getting prepared for the run...and the cost involved. The mad panic to get everything in order and loaded to make two 1200 mile trips...without incident. If we were lucky. With everything we had going on at home, we would have been ready for the straight jackets, of course, we might not have taken on so much if we knew we would be leaving. There's that vacuum.
We will not be getting out of the harvesting business. We have always had lots of work to do here in Canada and actually found some winter wheat to do in the southern part of the province, near Carlyle, which means our season will just start a couple months later than usual.
Anyone who is familiar with our outfit, knows I never wanted to quit the southern run...it has been so much a part of what we have always done in the summer. I will miss those fields that we have combined year after year. Miss those towns we have lived in for months at a time...one day we will go through Al's journals to see exactly how many days we have spent in each place. On the other hand, we will forge new territory here at home.
Part of the deal to retire the southern run was that we would be able to do something we had always wanted to do, and that was take the camper and tour Newfoundland and the maritimes. We had planned to leave the last week of May and spend the month of June touring around...we were looking forward to it, although, Al would not drive unless we had each day's destination confirmed...he didn't want to drive too far and end up looking for a campground. There had to be a plan.
No problem with the planning until I discovered our date to leave was coming up in just over a week...where did the time go?!
Now, Al had been talking about the Lamoure, ND toy show in the middle of June, which would have thrown a wrench into the maritime tour..that's a long loop around. Then Al got a call from the CaseIH dealer in Chamberlain, SD, where we had purchased farm toys over the past several years. He had wanted to purchase a particular piece of advertising memorabilia and they would never part with it, but now they were planning an dispersal and were offering it to him before the auction...which was in June a few days before the Lamoure show. How convenient.
So we had decided to save the maritime trip for next year and do the ND toy show loop. Then we noticed that the weekend before the auction and toy show was...the Summer Farm Toy Show...in Dyersville, IA. Road Trip! This time we might get our Mississippi riverboat cruise. So now we will be taking three weeks to go to Dyersville, Chamberlain and Lamoure.
What is tough now, is following Facebook and Twitter, seeing all the rigs that are heading south and starting the harvest. The bad part for them is the disastrous crop conditions that they are heading into. Another plus for us not going on the run...but not enough of a plus that it takes away the feeling that I want to be on the move, too.
For the past 10 years, I have hauled all our harvesting photo albums along, going all the way back to 1991. My intention was to scan them all and put them into our digital photo frame so we could "trip down memory lane" as the pictures scrolled through. Even though Al has the rule, "if it doesn't get used, it doesn't come back in the camper next year", they always made the run, tucked away in a place Al never looked. Now with all the time I have on my hands, I want to get the job done and post some of the past years on the blog, there are some classic harvest pictures that need to be shared.
So, just because we aren't harvesting in the US, doesn't mean the blog will stop. It might not always be about harvesting...at least until August and the Canadian harvest starts.
Countdown to June 1 and our "Farm Toy Tour"...
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