Don’t get a crease in your butt

Hilary called last night and said she was waiting on the edge of her seat for my next blog which would be about our new barns. I told her to not do that or she’d get a crease in her butt. In the above photo, ranch friend Loren guides the driver through one of the tight spaces where we widened the road because we couldn’t cut down a tree.

This day was a gut-wrencher. We had spent a couple of days preparing our primitive road for the delivery of a couple of big containers we would be using as barns to store hay and other stuff. We had traveled along our roughly three-mile drive with a pole saw that could reach up about 16 or more feet, trimming trees so a couple of trucks with modified former highway-mobile 28-foot-long trailers with their wheels and other stuff removed could be hauled in. There were a couple of places where the trees leaned in toward the center of the road, trees we couldn’t remove because they were on neighbors’ land. So we took our road grader down and widened the road by several feet (the neighbors don’t mind us working on their parts of the road). We tilted the road away from trees on some places. We thought we had it all in great shape.

Then the trucks came with their loads. It was like the trailers were forty feet high! What we thought was a fine place to drive through still had branches the diameter of a weight-lifter’s forearm leaning across the road. The branches were torn out by the first truck, leaving a couple of deep dents in the container he was hauling. He made it in with few problems. The second driver had some problems with the fact that his load had a more rounded bottom and kept tipping from side to side. He had already broken one of the wide tie-down straps holding the load. He rigged a chain to keep the container tied down to the truck, which then came loose soon after. He re-rigged the chain and kept going. The containers hung out behind their trucks so far they “fish-tailed” around the corners, making maneuvering between trees even more difficult. Despite all that, they considered our road only slightly problematic, and described some of the places they’d previously gone where the roads got so narrow their trucks tipped into ditches along the sides.

When the trucks finally arrived, everything went smoother and we ended up with the two containers exactly where we wanted them, with a wide space between them where we can park a boat.

Next, a roof to cover them both and provide a space for another boat. Stay tuned.

Finally having arrived, now we had to back the container into place on our carefully positioned railroad ties.

The driver was an expert, having done this stuff hundreds of times.

Drop it into place, then pull forward. Done!

Shifting it from side to side got it in place exactly where we wanted it.

The second container arrived in a cloud of dust kicked up by the truck’s cooling fan. The fans cooled the road more than the engines!

Karla and the famous Blind Dog Coffee mascot, Sioux, took in the festivities in the cool shade.

My sentiments exactly! After being the pilot, leading in two of those things tipping and rocking along the road, almost smashing into our trees, I was nearly exhausted. But very happy with the results.