Travel Blog

So not much has been going on since we've been home. We're eating, playing cards and spending money. We went to Altoona the other day to get our driver side truck door fixed. It's nice to not have to open it from the passenger side anymore. Then I got my Sheetz MTO sub. Yum, yum, yum! Just as good as I remembered. And we're going to a Halloween party Friday night, so we had to get our getups. So everything was going well, until.....last night......when it did this:


And it hasn't stopped yet. We're up to about two inches by now. It's supposed to stop, but....


Our Snowy Home:


But at least the dogs like it.


Willough in the Snow:

We made it safe and sound to Pennsylvania with only two minor casualties due to this state's infamously curvy back roads. We lost a bottle of vodka and our kitchen sink faucet. We understand how the first one happened, but we're not sure about the poor faucet. Who knows. I hate that sink anyway. I'm taking it as a good thing.

We're enjoying our stay at the Baker Hill RV park. We fit in real nice:


Plenty of Space:


We're wedged in the middle between my mom's house (on the left) and my sister's house (on the right).

Being home is great, but we are being way over-fed. I mean, way. I've already gained ten pounds, and I've only been here a night. It's great to be home.

We're staying with my sister who has a Catahoula named Tohbi. I was worried that the three dogs wouldn't get along, but as soon as the initial Xander smackdown by Tohbi occurred, they've been fine. Sort of. Xander isn't fond of big dogs. And he's not fond of other dogs getting near Willoughby, and he's not fond of other dogs getting attention.
Tohbi:


Tohbi and Willoughby:


Xander all by himself:

We're in Avery, Ohio. If we wouldn't have been boneheads and forgot that the time zone changed in Michigan, we'd be at Cedar Point right now. As it is, we're just cooling our heels at the RV park. It's too cold for roller coasters tonight anyway. My mom says it's about 15 degrees colder than usual in PA. I'm probably somehow to blame.

So we're on schedule, and should hit PA by tomorrow afternoon. How exciting is that?

I got to drive most of the way through Michigan yesterday. Except for a minor bout of road rage (that Phil’s dad got
to experience since he was on the phone with Phil at the time) over a driver who pulled out in front of me and
proceeded to drive under the speed limit, it was a nice, easy drive. The fall colors are beautiful, and the lakes are
gorgeous.
Rest stop at Deer Lake, MI:


Deer Lake, I presume:


To get to where we are now, we had to drive over a 6-mile long bridge. Actually, I could be wrong about the 6-mile
part. It didn’t seem that long. Now, I’m not fond of driving over bridges, but as far as bridges go, it wasn’t too scary.

Except when I went to pass a big rig that had to go 20 mph (I wasn’t mad at him; he really did have to go 20 mph)
and the left lane was that stupid grate stuff. That stuff gives me the willies.
Mackinaw bridge:


Mackinaw bridge and Lake Huron:

We’re in Mackinaw City now, getting ready to hit the road soon. We’re at the Tee Pee RV Park. We first went Mill
Creek Campground because they advertise in Workampernews for jobs, and we were thinking this would be a nice
place to work some year. I’m glad we stopped. Neither Phil nor I were impressed with the place. We were so
under-impressed, in fact, that we left there and came to where we are now.

We’re shooting for somewhere near Finley, Ohio, tonight. We’ll see what happens. We’ve had no luck finding an
RV park that’s still open anywhere where we want to be in Ohio. But that’s part of the adventure.

Now, about my title. What comes to mind when you see “pasties.” Yeah, me too (folks from Michigan, you don’t
count). So we were seeing signs for pasties all through Michigan. And we giggled every time. I mean, I knew they
weren’t what I think of. I knew they were some kind of baked good, but it’s just so funny to see all these signs for
pasties, especially when they’re combined with other goods, like “live bait and pasties” or “ammo, beer and
pasties.” And then we saw a sign for “Grandma’s Pasties” and we just lost it. And whereas we didn’t get a picture
of Grandma’s pasties, I’ll leave you with an equally disturbing pasties imagery-evoking sign:


And for the record, we were told they are pronounced PASS-TEES, not PASTE-EES like Phil and I were calling
them. But that’s just not as funny.

Ha! You thought I was done with the beet titles. I still had one in me. And a friend from AccuWeather emailed me
and called me at Beetnik, which I thought was very clever. Thanks, Michelle!

The last night of the beet harvest was very uneventful. We felt guilty taking the 20 bucks an hour (ok, no we didn’t)
because a rundown of the night is as follows:

8:00 p.m. - show up for work
9:00 p.m. - first truck comes to our piler
9:30 p.m. - second truck
10:00 p.m. - pizza break
10:30 p.m. - normal break for me and Phil
11:00 p.m. - were told to take 2-hour break because no trucks were coming
1:00 a.m. - third and fourth truck
2:00 a.m. - were told last truck of the night just left
3:00 a.m. - cleaned piler
3:30 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. - talked to our coworkers in the heated scale house until we were sent home

And I complained about this job? What’s my problem?

We’re in Wisconsin now. I like what I’ve seen of this state so far. Very pretty. I think it was my first Great Lake
experience as well. This is as good a shot as I could get of Lake Superior from the truck:

We’ll be motoring through Michigan, staying the night in Mackinaw City, then it’s somewhere in Ohio for the next
night, and then it’s Carrolltown, PA. We could drive longer days, but in order for us to put our state stickers on our
RV map, we have to stay a night in our RV in that state, so we’re picking up all those states on the way.

I like the park we’re in now except that they already have the water at the sites turned off for the winter so we had
to pay to shower. There’s just something wrong with coin-operated showers. That’s just my opinion. And it was
nice to shuffle through leaves for the first time in three years.

There’s not much else to report for now. I’ll leave you with a picture of a cocky Xander and the evil cats.

We’re still alive. And so are our co-workers. I haven’t maimed anyone. It stopped raining, finally, after six nights off.

We started back to work Thursday night and we’re going strong. I was told that we’d be done Sunday night, so
that’s what I’m holding them to. Meaning, even if we’re not done Sunday night, Phil and I are done Sunday night.
We’re going to make sure our foreman understands that this afternoon. Our co-workers already know we’re leaving
Monday afternoon. So we’re set! We should be in PA by Friday night.

Looking back on this experience, I have to say I blame a man named Bob. We met Bob in Skagway. His wife
worked for the Corringtons, and he was actually our neighbor in the RV park. Nice old guy who would do anything
for you. Well, he worked the sugar beet harvest last year, and we met up with him at Christmas tree school last
year and asked him about it. He said, “Don’t do it.” But that’s all he said. He wouldn’t elaborate. So all that did, of
course, was intrigue us. Oh, Bob. If ever our paths meet again…

You know how you get to a certain point of a project where you just don’t want to be working on it anymore? Like if
you have to be working on it for one more minute, you’re going to rip all your hair out or maim a co-worker or
something? Well, Phil and I are at that point with these stupid beets right now. We’re just about at the point of
pulling out in the middle of the night with nary a word. But, unfortunately for us, both of us were raised right and we
can’t just run out on a job. Even if that job is lasting forever. And driving us insane. And making us eat cake every
night to dull the pain.

They told us this gig would last about ten days. No sweat, right? Well, thanks to the godawful, stupid rain here, we
have about seven of those days done, and now we’re in another holding pattern because the fields are bogs that
the trucks can’t slog through. It started to rain last night, so we worked only three hours before we were told to go
home. They say we’ll be back to work on Monday night (this rain is conspiring with the sugar company from
keeping us from ever getting time-and-a-half and double-time for the weekends), but it’s raining while I type this, so
we just don’t know. And to make things worse, our sleep patterns are getting off kilter again, so when we actually
get back to work, we’ll be zombies. Not that we can’t function at this job like that. You don’t need many firing
synapses to do this. Do I sound bitter? Don’t get me started. I want my mommy.

Speaking of which, my family wants to know when I’m going to be home.

Wahhhhhhhhhh! I just don’t know. I think I told everyone we’d be in PA at the end of October, and that’s what I’m
still hoping for. We hope, if this rain will end, we have only about three more nights of work and we can hit the
road. And we don’t think it will take more than three days to get from here to PA, so we’re hoping the week of the
25th we’ll be there. Mom, I’ll call ya when we leave Minnesota. Everyone, do us a favor and do some anti-rain
dances and send that energy to Minnesota so we can get the hell outta here. For all those who may be reading
this blog in hopes of getting the real poop on the sugar beet harvest, we’ll be writing a review at the end with all the
pros and cons. Don’t let my rant here make is seem like there’s nothing good about it…it’s just that I am so ready
to head for home that I’m unable to see the good right now. I’ll be more objective later. When I don’t have the smell
of beets in my truck or in my clothes anymore.

Stupid beets.

Four nights down, and we were getting into the vampire groove of sleeping days and being up nights. But on

Sunday, it started to rain. We still went in at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, and there were still big old trucks coming in,
but not that many. One piler could handle it (we have two pilers on our site), which was good because our piler
was experiencing difficulties. So Phil and I, and the other couple we work with, sat in our respective trucks for
awhile, watching the rain fall more heavily and the trucks come less frequently. While we were waiting, the other
couple, Berta and Martin, gave us some Mexican candy. One was called Vero Mango, described on the package
as “mango flavored hard candy lollipop coated with chilli. Then there was the Bomba Chile, a chilli strawberry
flavored lollipop (Berta told me to watch for the powdered center). And then there was the one I ate that night that
was described as caramel and tamarind, but all I could taste was the chilli. Very interesting.


Then our foreman said it was time to get some work done. Huh? What? No trucks were coming, and we were told
the problem with the piler was electrical. What could we do? Turns out the piler problem was not electrical. The
problem was that there was too much dirt underneath the tracks of the thing, which is ok when the dirt is dry
because the piler can just push it all out of the way. However, when the dirt gets wet and turns to mud, ah, not so
much. So we spent a couple of hours, in the pouring rain mind you, digging out mud and beets so the piler could
move again. This was good and bad. See, Sunday we get paid double time, so we actually wanted to work. But
after about four hours, when the rain was starting to pour into the TOPS of my boots, I wasn’t caring so much
about the money. I just wanted to go home and de-prune. And we’ve been home ever since due to rain because
the farms can’t harvest when it’s raining too hard. The fields become too much of a mud pit and the trucks get
stuck. Supposedly we go back to work Wednesday night, and it will be like starting all over again since we’ve been
off our schedule. We tried to stick with it, but we just couldn’t do it.

And for the record, the AccuWeather forecast was right on for all this rain we’ve been having here. Phil’s been
impressed.
Mudpit by our RV:


Mudpit in our truck:


Dave Novak (who works at AccuWeather, for those of you who don’t know) left a comment last post asking what
we do with the beets now that they’re out of the ground. Good question. They’re going to sit in those big piles and
freeze. That’s the goal. They’ll stay there frozen until next year sometime when they’re ready to be taken to the
American Crystal Sugar Company and processed into sugar. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen bags of it in the
East, but I was at the grocery store here last night and saw them (and kicked a couple and burst into tears, if you
must know…nah, just kidding). It sounds like a lot of this sugar is also used by big companies like Hershey’s and
Coca-Cola for their products. That’s what we’ve been told anyway.

And Jerry Harlin, my good friend and coworker from Corrington’s, you’ll never guess what I’ve been told twice now
by my foreman. I’ve been told that I “work too hard.” I know you can’t believe it, but it’s true. Ha ha. But I really
don’t, which Jerry can attest to. It’s just like with the Christmas trees when the guys there couldn’t believe I could
toss and tote the trees around. The guys here can’t believe I can toss bags of beets around without hurting myself.
One look of my linebacker shoulders should clue them in, but what can I say. I can play the delicate flower card as
good as anybody. And Phil can do all the work.

Two down. Hopefully only eight to go!

So this is the post for all the folks interested in what working the sugar beet harvest entails.
Let’s start off with a picture of a sugar beet. You can see that they are a decent size. I picked a pretty big one for
example purposes, but I’ve seen (and shoveled) bigger ones.


I’m what they call a “sample taker.” Phil is a “helper.” The difference in our job descriptions is that Phil can run the
piler when our piler operator needs a break, and I can’t. But let me start at the beginning.
The beets come from the field to us in big trucks. The trucks bring them to a piler, which basically does what it
says. They dump the beets from their truck beds into a contraption (we’ll call it the hopper) that funnels the beets
onto a conveyer belt and up a big crane-thing (we’ll call it the boom) and shoots them out the top onto big beet
piles. The boom is moved from side to side to fill in the beets and keep the pile nice and even. When a pile gets
high enough, the pile operator moves the whole contraption back a foot or so and keeps shooting.

This is a piler. This image was borrowed from Google images since we’re not supposed to take pictures at the
site.


We stand at the bottom near where the beets go up the big arm thing and direct trucks through to where they need
to dump their beets. (They really don’t need much direction; many of them have been doing this forever.) Two
trucks can come at the same time, one of either side of the machine. Phil and I are on one side and a nice couple,
Bertha and Martin, are on the other side. When the trucks are in place, the drivers hand us a slip of paper on
which we write the piler number. This slip will also tell us if we’re supposed to take a sample or not. If so, they give
me a little bar code dealie, and I take that over to the sample taker spout. We have canvass bags to catch the
sample of beets that come flying down a chute when we push a button. If we don’t have to take a sample, we busy
ourselves by keeping the work area clean of debris (dirt and beets). And sometimes the trucks get too excited and
dump beets all over the place (this happens if they drop their load too quickly and the beets spill out of the
dumper), so when this happens, it’s our job to go shovel all those beets back into the hopper. We have to do this
quickly so the next truck can come through in a timely manner. That can be a bear of a job because you’ve seen
the size of these things. (So Jerry, if you’re reading this, we are indeed shoveling beets!) When the truck is down
dumping the beets, we direct them forward a bit to receive their dirt. As the machine conveys their beets up the
belt, the dirt and crap get agitated off and the trucks have to take that dirt back to the farm with them. If they’re
small trucks, they back up to get their dirt. If they’re big trucks, they just pull forward, get their dirt, then back up
and turn around. We have to watch that they don’t hit any machinery (or us) and that they are in the right position
to get their dirt. If we misjudge that, the dirt falls on the ground and we have to clean that up too. Even if we don’t
misjudge, dirt still falls on the ground, and we still have to clean it up. We also have to clean out the hopper every
now and again because mud accumulates on the walls and that has to be scraped off.

Like I said before, when our piler operator, Jorge, goes on a break or needs to do something on the ground, Phil
will go up into the controller booth and run the show. It’s a pretty intense responsibility. You have to direct two
trucks at once and make sure their loads are getting dumped at the right pace, and at the same time you have to
watch where the boom is because if you leave it in one place too long and it gets covered in beets, the whole arm
can fall down and a million-dollar machine is broken. So you have to juggle a lot of things.

And that process goes twenty-four hours a day. I’ll leave the critique until we’re done, but there are pros and cons
to this job. I don’t know yet if I’d do it again, but it doesn’t suck as much as it sounds on paper. It is a physical
job, and you’re standing for twelve hours. And if you’re working overnights, it gets mighty cold around four in the
morning (it was freezing last night - literally). But it’s not brain surgery and you get a rhythm. And Phil and I are
together, except for when he’s working the machine. So far, so good. More to come later, but before I sign off,
check out the farmer: