RV Adventures

How do you know when it’s time to leave the Red River Valley? 

This is how you know it’s time to leave. The Christmas decorations are going up in town!!!

Today we have finally left the Red River Valley and the sugar beet harvest.  No, the harvest overall is NOT done yet.  The weather is working against the farmers. But Jim’s farmer saw a good weather window open up yesterday.  Jim went in at 10:30 a.m. and the crew pushed it hard.  Rain was coming in and they knew it would shut them down again.  I didn’t hear from him again until 11:00 p.m. to come pick him up.  Yes!  They got the last field done!!!!

Borrowed from the farm’s Facebook page.  Racing to finish up as it gets dark!

A few days ago when Jim was supposed to haul sugar beets off the field, the cops shut the guys down.  The trucks were tracking so much mud onto the road (which is a main route), that things were getting too slick.  The cops had to sit there for 1 1/2 hours forcing vehicles to slow down. Something had to give…that something was the harvest.  We drove out to the field later to check the muddy mess out.  NO…we did NOT drive on the field this time.

They had to bring out a scraper to get the mud off the road. All the equipment was sitting idle in the field on the left.  Look at the shoulder on the right.  We are used to seeing piles of snow on the side of the road. But mud?!?

This is what EVERY vehicle in the area looks like, even though we were all driving on pavement. Mud falls off the trucks. Add in a little rain and it’s a muddy mess out there!

A few harvest “statistics”.  The farm Jim worked at usually does the harvest in 10 to 12 days.  This year it took 29.  Average beet yield is between 25 and 35 tons per acre, he doesn’t have exact data but they seemed to be running just over 30 tons per acre.  Times almost a thousand acres means around 30 thousand tons of beets.  Hauled by six trucks means that Jim personally hauled about 5 thousand tons of beets, or about 180 trips between the various fields and the piling locations.  Between beets, soybeans, and corn Jim drove about 10 different semis.  The grain loads they kept close to the legal weight, the beets not so much.  The trucks are registered at 80,000 lbs max gross weight.  His lightest load was just under 82,000 lbs, his heaviest, 93,760 lbs.  Just a little over weight!  He would haul in 25 to 30 tons of beets per load.  Other than the mud things went pretty well until the last day.  They only had a few flat tires, a few broken welds, no accidents and no injuries, even with all the hassle in the mud.  Then the last day about six hours before they would finish the beet defoliator had a major breakdown.  Time to repair the defoliator?  Days.  They raced to the shed, got out the old retired defoliator, brought it to the field, did some emergency repairs, and were back to work racing the rain.  It was a close race, it started raining as the last truck pulled off the field and before they got the trucks to the shop it was pouring.

Before we left “The Forks” this morning, the farmer did us a HUGE favor.  The motor for the window in the driver’s side door of the Blue Flame was getting flaky.  The window would go down, but not go back up without assistance.  Since the farmer has almost exclusively Freightliner trucks (which is what we have), their shop mechanic knew exactly what it would take to fix it.  And he had the parts on hand.  So they had us in this morning at 8:00 to give us a new motor.

The Blue Flame in the farm shop, with the door panel removed…not an easy thing to get off!

What would have cost us $500 or more and/or oodles of time took them about an hour to fix.  And we weren’t charged for the parts.  Thanks Mike, Tim and Chris!  I also got to meet all the guys Jim has been working with.

So that’s it.  We spent one day short of five weeks in East Grand Forks.  That is two to three weeks longer than what we anticipated.  Jim really enjoyed working the harvest and being part of a team.  But we never thought there would be so many down days.  You just never know.

We are now headed towards Minneapolis.  Jim’s nephew Andy is there on business, so we have a dinner date with him tonight.  We have a reservation at another campground that has shut off their water for the winter already.  Yes, it’s definitely time to head southward.

As for all that quilting I was doing, especially the past five weeks, this is as good a time as any to show you what I accomplished this trip since we left on August 1.  If you aren’t into quilts, feel free to leave the room now. 

This is a mystery quilt I started while still at home. Once a month I would get a new set of instructions. I had no idea how it would turn out till the final set of instructions arrived, which happened on this trip.

I saw a picture of this on Facebook. Before we left home, I got out my scraps, cut them up, and this is the result.

I picked up this quilt kit in Cortez, Colorado last Fall. It got stitched together a year later..in East Grand Forks!

Janelle is president of the Texas A&M Galveston Graduate Student Association. Every Spring they do a silent auction to raise funds. I found some beach themed fabric in Grand Forks and stitched up this Stack and Whack quilt to donate.

Having still more time on my hands in Grand Forks, I found this flannel fabric with campers on it. I also spotted a picture of this simple quilt. Bam, another quilt done. This one I am going to donate to an auction in January at Quartzsite to raise funds for a care facility for full-time RVers who are unwell.

Janelle gave me a book with patterns for 12″ square blocks, one for each month of the year. She and I started this one last Christmas. I finished it up (again in East Grand Forks) so she and I can start on another one next time she is home.

Finally, the last sugar beet harvest quilt. I had cut up some 2 1/2″ strips of fabric. A stack of strips rolled up is called a jelly roll. If you sew all the strips end to end and then sew edge to edge, you make a Jelly Roll Race quilt. This goes together really, really fast. Sewing guilds have been known to have actual races to see who can finish their quilt first. I did this one in one day.  Again, I was using up my scraps.  It may not be pretty, but it will be functional!

That’s it.  One trip, seven quilt tops/blocks finished.  Mind you, these are just the tops.  I still need to sandwich them with batting and a backing and finish them up.  Guess what I’ll be doing in November and December?