August 22, 2018

View of the day-The best of both worlds...Marilyn's sewing machine and Al's farm toy.

A road trip to Windthorst to finally settle up the damages for the pickup head repair. Marilyn almost got a picture of Al choking as he was handed the five digit invoice...and that was without the decimal point! What are you going to do...

We put a new backup alarm on the combine to replace the silent one and that was the extent of the harvest related work today. Al did go out to give the farmer a ride back to the yard after running a test on the straight cut oats we will be doing tomorrow. Plenty dry, just have to get the bin space organized.

The next toy show we attended July 26 - 29 was in Austin, Manitoba. We got there a day early, since we had never been to that show before and had no idea about the camping...which we had booked back in April...or how the setup was going to be in the hall. Or anything really.

We got our camper parked, which was relatively easy since it was well before the festivities were to start. A perfect spot, as well, only 20 steps from the display hall across the road. We only had power and water at this spot, but for some reason they had decided this year...and didn't tell the volunteers or campers... to shut the water off from 8am-9pm! We could have had our tank filled had we known they were going to do that. There were not a lot of happy campers in the park for the weekend.

We got into the building early the next day and ended up getting a sweet spot at the end of the hall, nestled in between two steam engines.

One of them was the exact one that the 175th Anniversary model represented.

This was a killer show, lots of people attended and 85% had to pass through our building to get tickets to enter and Saturday they were lined up and down the inside of the building and out the door. The hours were killer too...10am to 7pm!!

We each got a little time to go check out some of the sites. Wow, there was so much to see and it was kept up quite nice. There were a lot of "Pete's Passes" through the trees that were full of campers parked willy-nilly and most of the passes led to another old tymie display.

It was also the IHC Chapter 38 Roundup...a LOT of red tractors in pristine shape. We are members of the group, which was the reason we set up shop at this show. We didn't have a lot of time to check them out because the main outing was to see Big Roy.

This tractor was the only one of its kind built by Versatile. It was redone a few years back for an anniversary and was out for all to see.

It wasn't as big as we had imagined it to be, but it was still amazing to look at. 

We also wanted to see the Versatile pull type combine that had been painted New Holland yellow.

We had seen video of this one on Facebook and though it was fake, but here it was in all its glory.

There were only a couple of these painted yellow.

In the "mini" area, there was a Big Roy working replica that was really cool, too.

Al did get to see the owner crawl in through the cab top and take it for a spin.

Just a lot of neat stuff to see and it would have been nice to have a day to explore it all.

Still one more toy show coming...