Grandpa's Trailer

Yesterday was the day that we headed to Missouri to pick up our two new cows, one new heifer, and one new bull calf. We left Knoxville around 8:30 am with our family to pick up the trailer and get on the way. It was going to be a nice drive on a nice day with a stop at a picnic spot for some food and fun and then off to loading up the new additions to our herd. As we were pulling out of the farm, I mentioned to my dad that this was kind of cool, because I was the third generation of Books to use this trailer to pick up livestock. My Grandpa had the trailer made by a technical school in the late 60's and he, along with my uncles and my dad, had used it ever since. It was great ... it was nostalgic ... it was BROKEN!!!

When we stopped for lunch I noticed one tire on the left side was a little crooked ... not a good thing! Well the short of it is that we threw a bearing on that side, we had massacred the hub, and it was Saturday afternoon in sleepy Bethany, MO. Every shop we stopped at said that we weren't going to find any help on a Saturday, until I went back to O'Reilys the second time. That time a clerk was up front that new of a trailer dealer about 10 miles away that might be able to help. He had the pieces, my dad have driven over with tools, and at about 5:30 pm we left the side of the road and finally headed down to the Anderson's Farm to pick up our Dexters. You can see from the picture that it takes a lot of thinking to replace a bearing ... especially when you don't do it very often!

But, that is enough of that. You can check out my WIFE'S BLOG for more details. I don't really want to think about it any more!
I was really excited to pick up these Dexters because it would grow our herd by four, it would add some color to our herd, and the ten year old is bred to calve this coming year (which means we will have two calves in the new year). Since we didn't get them to their new home until around 10:30 pm, I wasn't able to get any pictures of them in the new pasture, but you can check them out in these two pictures that were taken while we stopped to check the hubs (not a perfect fix, but it was a fix).

In the first picture you see (going from top to bottom we have Ginger and her calf, then Billie the heifer, and finally Mandy the ten-year-old cow. In the second picture you can get a nice close up of Ginger. She may be a little more short-legged than Mandy or our other two heifers. Some Dexter breeders really like the short ones. I think they all look pretty good right now, and I'm looking forward to seeing them in the daylight on their new pasture! My dad tells me that they blended in with the two that we already had, and they are all hanging out in the pasture together. Hopefully we can drive down this week and check on them. There is always work to be done on the farm so we would have a good reason for going!