Load of Straw

With the dry summer hay and straw is scarce in these parts. Danielle has been calling around without much luck trying to find some straw for bedding once we move the animals back to the barn. Thursday she calls me at work to tell me that I am picking up 30 bales after work. She had talked to the farmer on the phone and got directions to his place. Therein lies the first problem. If you have ever received directions from someone who has lived their entire life in the same town you know that they do not necessarily give the best directions. I guess that is not completely fair. They do not give directions that an outsider can follow, since they tend to use landmarks and names for places and roads that are not the norm (i.e. not on Google Maps).

I am supposed to meet the farmer between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, which means in pitch black, due to the season and the fact that it is a new moon. I drive around for a half hour trying to find his place, turn out he does not actually live on the street he told my wife, and am unable to get him on the phone since it is busy. After going up and down a bunch of country roads I finally find his drive and pull into his place which has no outside lights on. The nice guy comes out and states matter-of-factly, "must of been hard finding this place in the dark".

He directs me to pull around to the back of his barn and we begin to load up the truck. I have a tough time keeping up stacking the bales as he tosses them in the back of my truck. He has no lights on the outside of his barn so I do my best to strap it all down in the little bit of light that is coming from inside the barn. Not happy with the security of my load, I drive a mile or so and pull into a McDonalds, park under a light pole in their parking lot and rearrange the load. Then it is a slow drive with blinkers on back to my place.

The kids ckome out of the house and are all excited to see the truck all loaded up and want to be on top of the straw mountain.





Then Danielle and the kids help me unload it all into our loft.



All and all it worked out fine, we now have straw for the winter, and I learned not to pickup straw from an unknown farm at night.