So the Camry passed inspection yesterday and Aimee has a new car to drive. Not a brand new car, obviously, but the newest car we've had since we were married. Aimee's truck, now retired to be a farm truck, was bought new but that was in 1999.
Time for a road trip. Aimee is due to give a field class soon at the Humboldt Field Research Institute, down the coast in Washington County, and needed a recce. So off we went for a day's tourist-ing in our new Camry. Here's couple pictures of Aimee on the hike we had, and the view across from Schoodic to Mount Desert Island.
The car drove well and we had a nice hike and a pizza dinner. Haggis got to play in the ocean, which he likes. The only bad part was the old cigarette smell in the Camry, which Aimee is now trying to exorcise with some old folk remedy -- placing a bowl of vinegar in the car overnight. If that doesn't work she has two others to try.
You'd think that now the Camry was on the road that would be the end of my vehicular labors for the year, but both the other vehicles are rusty and I need to inhibit the dreaded oxidization progress somehow or we'll be shopping for another car long before we want to.
The salt that we use on the roads around here in winter makes for very bad rust problems on cars. It's a heartbreaking business, because it means the car bodies and frames fall apart long before the engines die. I hate rust.
In a few days I will get busy with the angle grinder and the tractor's loader and lift that old rusted-out bed off the truck, preparatory to fitting a wooden flatbed with angle-iron sides. I'll take the opportunity to blast, grind, or scrape off all of the rust I can see and spray the entire underside with red oxide paint. The result should be a truck that can take fifty or more bales of hay instead of the current thirty, and that can accept an entire sheet of plywood laid flat.
Why anyone would design a pick-em-up truck bed that wouldn't accept a four-by-eight of plywood is beyond me. Something to do with the increasing urbanization of global society and the alienation of folk from practical life.
The Ford wagon will get similar treatment with red oxide paint. I'm hoping not to have to buy a car for at least four years.
Except perhaps a Land Rover.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
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