We started out early from Great Bend after having a quick breakfast and fueling up the trucks. The forecast was for strong storms in the afternoon, but we thought we would beat them, or miss them altogether.
There were still harvesters moving south along the highway, but there wasn't anything cut at all and only one field we saw had been sampled, which seemed strange for this time of year. We made Cherokee just at noon and after having lunch with our farmer, we headed back to Timken, KS to get the Freight/Tractor/Cart and header that we had left there a week before...exactly a week. It seems strange that we have driven down twice, back once, and spent two days packing all in just over a week...6000km.
After getting the cart trailer hooked back up to the truck and hooking the header to the pickup, we started back to Cherokee. It was getting dark in the SW and the weather forecast was getting worse...tornado warnings, high winds, heavy rain and hail. We just hoped we could miss it...and it was looking pretty good until we got a good dumping of rain 40 miles south of Great Bend. We couldn't see the clouds behind us, but judging from the vehicles that were parked on the side of the road watching and taking pictures, we knew it had to be bad. There were reports on the radio of tornados that had touched down in a few places...all behind us by this time...and the strong winds that were blowing, there was even a report that a storm spotter had his windshield shattered because of the hail.
We entertained thoughts of stopping somewhere until the storm had lessened, but opted to keep going. As we got closer to Cherokee, we could see a few fields that had been tested since we last were by them and there were even a couple of combines making dust. By the time we got parked in Cherokee and made our way bakc to the camper, we had to weave in and out of the lineups of trucks at the elevator. Al claims the reason for the lineup is because they are only dumping in one place...the amazing thing is that they have put in a second scale so they can weigh the empty trucks separately to speed things up...and they are still lined up.
It feels good to finally be here and hopefully we will get to do some cutting tomorrow. No dish, no internet, no Blogger...
How are we to know what is going on in the outside world,,,
No comments:
Post a Comment