Our good friends invited us to go up to Monte Cristo for a couple of days of relaxing. They have the setup that I would love to have. Actually they have much more than I would ever dream of having. They have an amazing cabin on 40 acres of land. The cabin is much nicer than our house, and bigger too. It was perfectly comfortable and had gran views of the valley. Their land sits almost completely isolated from other homes, and nestled in the trees so it is very secluded.
He has a tractor on the property along with motorcycles, 4 wheelers and a side by side. While we were there we had to pull out a couple of his chainsaws to cut up trees that had fallen across the road. I could live out there full time, and think it was a great blessing.
The pictures in the post are from a tree that stood a hundred yards or more away from the tree line. It was a lone monster of a tree welcoming them every time they drove out to their cabin. That tree must have been standing there majestically for decades.
On Saturday morning I got up and took the tractor out to work on evening out the road. It is a dirt road and there were some fairly deep ruts from driving over the road after rain or snow. I had driven the tractor about 3/4’s of a mile from the cabin into the middle of a wide open field. Just after I started working a storm came up quickly. This of course was a hail storm. The hail was pelting me on the head hard enough that it started to hurt quite a bit.
I considered turning around and making a run for the cabin. Quickly I decided it was too far away to make that on a slow tractor. At first I tried to keep working, but then I wimped out and took cover next to the tractor. The wind was blowing from my left side at first. So I ducked down on the right as far under as I felt like I could safely go. Then the wind shifted, and the tractor wasn’t providing me any protection. I had to run around and switch side.
Lucky for me the storm left almost as quickly as it had come, and the hail stopped. By now I was wet and messy, so I got back on the tractor and tried to go back to work. Unfortunately there had been enough rain to make the roads very slick. I didn’t have enough traction to move much dirt at that point. I tried to work the road for a few minutes, and then my friend came walking down the road. He had jumped in his truck to come and rescue me when the storm came in. I came to find out that he had to walk most of the way because a tree had fallen over the road. We cleared the tree after breakfast along with a couple of others.
