It was about time to head out to the farm again. We had a truckload of goodies to bring out, a new generator to test, and I knew the grass there was growing. Mason and I got up early Saturday and headed out to find knee high grass covering everything, including most of the driveway. I got out the power mower, but after the first lap of the driveway, it wasn’t doing good under load. After fresh fuel, and a carb cleaning, it wasn’t doing much better. I realized the only thing I didn’t try was a fresh spark plug. I got out the weed eater instead. That took care of the grass no problem. However, in just a minute, it was out of string and I didn’t have any more on hand.
Just then, I noticed a pack of cyclists at the trailhead. “Wow” I thought, ” Nice to see so many people out riding. They must be regrouping.” That’s when they started riding down our road, and I wondered where they were off to. Then I could tell they were turning into my driveway. Chuck or Carla must be behind this.
Chuck was guiding a college class, “Bike Writing”, where they roam Iowa by bike and write about it. I’m two classes from being done school myself, but I want to take this class now. Chuck and I gave a quick overview of how we found the farm, and what some of our plans were. It really was fun to share our experience, especially as a live tour of the farm. After they left, we headed into town to get a new spark plug and some trimmer line from the Ace hardware in Jefferson. For fast food, the only things around are a Dairy Queen, and a Subway on the north edge of Jefferson. We also got some cheap subs for a snack.

Finally, I got the driveway cleared out, and I trimmed a perimeter around each of the buidlings. Wow, they look good when cleaned up. Then I tried to get Mason to fly a kite to keep him busy for a while. We had about as much luck as Charlie Brown. We just could not keep the cheap little kite we had stable. Next we tried the metal detector. There is a patch, where we thought the original house used to stand, that is a perfect square of darker grass. We could hardly swing the metal detector around. Somehow I got to do all the digging, and quickly produced a handfull of nails and junk.
We finished out the day picking up as many branches as we could and making a single pile. Checking out the well seemed to be to daunting of a task, I’ll call someone else instead. And I never even got the generator out. Mainly due to the fact I didn’t have the allen wrench to change blades on a sawzall. Luckily, I had an amazing handsaw that I used to break up a few of the larger branches with.
Oh, we saw the rat that was making a home in the machine shed. Mason also said he saw a mouse with babies clinging to it, running around in the barn. Mason began a rat hunt, using a makeshift spear and a small hoe, to kill any rats in the machine shed. He says he threw his spear really close to the tail of a rat once, but I didn’t see it happen.

We both took quite a few pictures, and I posted them into a new album on the gallery page.