… this tractor pull has been.
The morning started fine enough, a beautiful bright blue sky and nice hot weather. And I had a most enjoyable breakfast too.
After that I went for a walk and it wasn’t difficult to find Rachel, Darren and Amber. They were parked up by the fence of the pits.
The security staff wanted to charge me $10:00 for an entry into the pits but enough was enough. It appears that, for the Dodge, I’m paying the same price to stay overnight as one of these monster caravans pulled by one of these monster trucks. A family of 6, occupying six times the footprint that my Dodge is occupying, is paying the same price that I’m paying.
Not only that, the “bigger” pitches have water and electricity too – I don’t have anything like that and so you can see that I’m being ripped off even more by the Clinton Lions Club and I am extremely unhappy (to say the least) about all of this. So there was no way that I was paying an extra $10:00 on top of all of this to visit the others. I made “other arrangements”.
Darren needed some help to fetch “Perdy in the Pink” out of the trailer but before I could volunteer, I was overwhelmed by Amber who rushed to his assistance.
With Hannah now having started University Darren finds himself a pair of hands short, so I can well imagine Amber stepping into the breach in a couple of years time. Nothing like starting early.
So having done that, we all relaxed and chilled in the sunshine while we waited for the competition to start.
There are various classes of pulling vehicles. This is one of the competitors in the diesel 2.6 – 3-litre class and it looks like an old-time steam train roaring across the prairie or up into the Rockies or something. I’m glad that there were only a couple of competitors in this class, and so is the planet.
So Darren went to pull but found to his surprise that his tractor was overweight. With Hannah having driven it until recently it was set up for her. Some of the weight balances had to be taken off the tractor and as it was easier to do it from the back, this was from where the weights came out.
This also meant that the tow hitch was too high and this needed to be wound down a couple of inches.
As a result, the machine was totally out of balance and so the first run wasn’t particularly impressive.
We spent the next couple of hours readjusting the weights and rebalancing the tractor so that the weight was correct and all in the right place, but as Darren was about to start his second run, this was when the heavens opened and we were all drenched in a torrential downpour, the like of which I had rarely seen. There was no grip on the track for Darren so the tractor simply slid across the track when it set out with the load.
The competition was immediately cancelled and that was that. We were there in the pouring rain cleaning off the tractor before we put it back in the trailer and that was that. We went off to the fairground where I had chips and onion rings for tea. And after that, an early night, in soaking wet clothes.
And who in his right mind builds mudguards with pointy aluminium front ends? Cleaning off the front tyre, I’ve ripped open the side of my thumb. That isn’t half painful, I can tell you.
