One Cow, Two Women, Three States and Twenty Hours

In May I always get a little stir crazy to mark the end of an academic year with a little celebration. This year was no different. The problem is that John is about as busy as he ever gets that time of year with calving and fencing and moving cattle etc. The days are long and the list of things to get accomplished is even longer. So he is not available for a road trip or anything else that I might dream up. Even though I know he is unavailable I usually ask him anyway.

About mid-May I said "I just am itching for a little road trip to mark the beginning of the summer." He surprised me by saying "Why don't you take 6157 to Iowa for me...."

At first glance that offer might not look all that attractive...but I accepted. I called my galpal Julie and the trip was planned. A little teeny weeny detour would take us to Sioux Falls for some shopping. All we had to do was deliver one grandma cow to Sioux Center Iowa. No problem.

The day before my departure John took the pickup to the Ford dealer to get it serviced and to see if they could fix the AC for us girls. When they were unable to fix the AC and the forecast showed an early heat wave for us he offered a rescheduled date. But I told him that we would just travel in the cool of the morning and evening and we would just have to suffer the heat of the day in the Sioux Falls Mall. He groaned and made some snide remark about it being cheaper for him to fix the AC. :)

We loaded 6157 that evening and John fretted about her being comfortable. He had weaned her heifer the day before.

6157 had raised her last calf at 19 and it was sad to see her get loaded for the last time. I know it was a sad thing for John to see her leave the place. She had been his favorite for a long time. He gave me lots of instructions....open up the center gate tonight and put hay and water in the trailer for her unless I could easily unload her in a corral at Palmers....but to easily unload her I would have to back up to ditch or a high spot so she wouldn't have to jump down very far since she had gotten a little sore in her left hip. So along with other last minute tips and tricks I was off on my grand adventure.

The trip to Julie's was fairly uneventful. I arrived after dark and just after she and boys had gotten home. The boys bedded grandma 6157 down in the trailer for me and we didn't even bother thinking about trying to get her unloaded and loaded. She was going to be very comfortable in the trailer.

We visited around the kitchen until Bruce got home from a meeting then visited around the table until one by one the Palmer fellas disappeared for bed. Julie and I decided about midnight that we would get on the road at daylight...which was going to come way too soon.

The next morning we left the yard about 6 and headed east and north on a trail scouted on the map by Bruce before we left. We visited right along for about 30 miles until an intermittent screeching sound would interrupt us. If I had been alone I would have just turned up the radio....but the screech was rudely interfering in our conversation. I thought it sounded like we were dragging something. Julie thought it might be in the engine. So I pulled over and we popped the hood and looked things over. I don't really know what we were looking for but we didn't find it so we looked under the pickup....didn't find anything there either. When we started back on our way the sound was gone and would just screech every now and then. We stopped at least once more to look for something again but still didn't find it. When we were just a few miles from Wagner, SD we had a right curve and the screech returned with a vengeance and stayed with us most of the rest of the way to town. We pulled into the Gus (not a typo) Stop just before 8 am and filled up with gas (not gus) and went inside to grab some grub and pay. I asked the lady at the counter if they had a good garage in town...Wagner is a few thousand short of metropolis status so I wasn't sure what they would have available. She right way said I needed to see Doug at Rog's Repair just two blocks down the highway....the lady in line behind me said "Doug will treat you right - he is a real good mechanic". So we screeched down to the garage and got there just ahead of the shop opening for the day. As soon as the guys started to arrive I asked for Doug and the guy I asked told me Doug would be there soon and asked what I needed. I said "My pickup has a bad noise." He smirked a little and said "a bad noise eh?" He hollered out into the shop to one of the mechanics to check out the pickup. The mechanic asked if he could take it for a drive and I consented. He got in, put it in reverse, screeched back about a foot then put it in park and shut it off. About then Doug arrived and had witnessed the noise....he walked up to the pickup and said "It sounds like you have a bearing problem....put his hand on the right front hub and quickly removed his hand. Yep...we had a bearing problem alright. It had ruined the hub too.

So....the guys there were great. They unhooked the trailer with Grandma 6157 inside and pulled the pickup right in and got to work. They had to send one of the gals in the office to another non-metropolis town to get a replacement hub so that took a little time.

Julie and I explored Wagner. There was an Alco just down the street and a Dollar General just across the road. Not exactly the shopping we had been dreaming of but in a pinch...shopping is shopping.

It took a couple of hours to get the pickup back road worthy and it was starting to warm up so we checked on Grandma 6157 to make sure she wasn't getting too hot and see if she needed water. She was fine and dandy. The mechanic even hooked the trailer back up for me without even being asked which I appreciated greatly. I wrote the garage a check and thanked them for taking good care of us. (The next week I sent them a box full of cookies too - I am telling you this - if you are anywhere near Wagner, SD and have car trouble you just need to see Doug at Rog's Repair two blocks west of the Gus Stop).

We were off again....a little later than we anticipated but without that annoying screech. However it was warm out for May and we had to have the windows cracked so we didn't overheat....so now wind noise was making our visiting a little less enjoyable but we powered through.

We drove through country that had been flooded earlier in the spring and over a big dam and saw hayfields already cut and baled and finally crossed into Iowa a little before noon. Our destination was Transova. It is a facility that does a lot of embryo transfers, artificial breeding and all sort of other high tech cattle reproductive things. Grandma 6157 was going there to be "flushed". She would be given drugs to make her hyperovulate, inseminated and then have the embryos taken out and put into recipient cows. She had done this twice before but not at Transova. So it was new to all of us and a pretty impressive place.

I pulled into the loading/unloading area right behind a nice 4 door pickup pulling a newish aluminum trailer which sported a Peidmontese Ranch name on it. The two fellas driving it got out and came back and offered to move if they were in our way. They were Hiturite men and very nice. I bet they had AC in their pickup. I mentioned that to John later and also told him we may be in the wrong breed....or maybe the wrong religion but I was sure we were doing something wrong.

I went into the office....it had a security system so I had to be buzzed in. The young lady behind the counter asked for my paperwork and I handed her the fat envelope of papers that John had sent with me. She looked it over and asked a question I didn't know how to answer.....were they going to do a traditional flush or something else. Ummmm. I said maybe they could just call John to see what he said.

John had told me to make sure Grandma 6157 had geriatric care and was in a pen by herself so I relayed that message to the young lady and she said "Oh I remember this case." :) John had talked to them at length about what kind of care Grandma 6157 would get there and made it clear that he did not want her to be in a common pen with a bunch of hyper sexed cows jumping on each other....he was worried that she just wouldn't be able to withstand a lot of that and did not want her to suffer or lose weight or be unhappy. Editorial Comment: I love how my man loves his cows.

She got the pen assignment out and assured me it was a private suite in the geriatric wing. She then said the very thing that had made me start sweating since we pulled in...."You can just back up to one (yes, one....there were four chutes all together) of the chutes and someone would come to take her to her pen." I just immediately swallowed my pride and a little too desperately said "Would you have anyone that would maybe be better at backing a trailer than me?" She didn't even ask how bad at trailer backing I was....I think it must have been evident. She just made a call to one of the many barns and said someone would be right out to get her unloaded.

While Julie and I waited we watched some scientistlike people bring out a cooler and load up in a van that's license plate said OVA5. Julie said a pickup had driven through while I was in the office with OVA14 on the plate. I am telling you it is a big and impressive place.

Pretty soon our driver arrived and deftly got the trailer backed up to an unloading chute sandwiched between a metal barn and another rig. Impressive. He did it on one try. I was a little concerned about the height of the drop from the trailer to the ground but Grandma 6157 just jumped right out of the trailer. They walked her down a lane and I lost sight of her from there. Julie and I were now free to pursue other interests. In order to do that we needed to get back to the interstate and head to Sioux Falls. Julie had knowledge of a nice shopping mall there.

It was a little sad to leave Grandma 6157. In some ways we would have liked to have kept her here and let her graze sweet grass until she died of old age. But she was getting stoved up. John had already had her in a little electric fenced pasture by herself so she wouldn't have far to walk to water and she wouldn't get bumped and jostled by younger more spry cows. We just aren't real equipped for bovine end-of-life-care.

Back to the trip.....

We weren't all that far from Sioux Falls which is good cuz it was really getting hot and we were hungry. We pulled into Sioux Falls about 1 or so and the traffic was surprisingly heavy. We soon realized that our trip was the same weekend as the South Dakota State Trackmeet. Maneuvering a pickup and trailer through lanes of traffic and into Mall parking is not my favorite memory of the trip but we only ran over a couple of curbs so I feel pretty good about that. We parked the trailer in the far parking lot with a lot of High school buses and headed to the Food Court. The fun had begun. We had several hours to kill before we could head back to Nebraska....we needed to wait for the sun to go down and cooler driving conditions. We had what nearly every woman rarely has....justified Mall time. I actually felt giddy....and I am not necessarily a die hard shopper. But to have several hours to kill, stores aplenty to shop in and a friend to hang with is a rare and beautiful thing. It was exactly what I wanted when I initially told John that I was "itching for a road trip".

We shopped til dark then went to Kohl's and closed it down and decided that we needed some supper before hitting the road. It was one of those balmy summer nights that just has a festive youthful feel to it. I bounced over another curb turning into a Mexican restaurant and we had a nice meal. It was almost 10pm when we finished up and headed back to Palmers. It was a long trip home. Wagner, SD was asleep when we drove through. We got to Julie's in the wee hours and hit the sack. We hadn't even been gone 24 hours. Crazy. In a good way.

That is pretty much the end of that saga. The flush with Grandma 6157 didn't work. She produced some embryos but they were poor quality. She only had one that was high enough quality to try to put into a recip cow and it did not implant so the whole deal ended up being a bust....other than the fun had by the two women in those three states in that 20 hours. :0)