Friday, May 22, 2009

A trip into Oz: LOST

When Cliff talked to the man in Kansas with several Oliver series 55 tractors, he asked him for his address. Thanks to 911, even very rural homes have genuine addresses that can be typed into a Garmin and found easily. This morning we entered it into the GPS and merrily headed out on what was supposed to be a seventy-six mile trip.

On the way, a motorcycle caught our attention. Something just looks wrong with the biker (or his bike, or the combination of the two) on the right. I wanted to take a picture from beside him, but the traffic was horrible and the speeds were such that we couldn't catch up with him.

At about the time we should have been reaching our destination in the extreme boonies of Kansas, something just didn't seem right; so when we saw a fellow painting some sort of wagon, we stopped and asked. He knew the guy we were looking for, and told us we were on the wrong road.

"You just go up here a piece and turn south..." etc. etc.

Yeah, right.

I made Cliff stop so I could take a picture of this mansion in the middle of nowhere.

Lord only knows where we'd have ended up, but Cliff got a call on his cell: Lee, the farmer we planned on meeting up with, said he had given us the wrong address.

"Oh," I said, "so that's why our GPS didn't recognize that other address."

We typed in the new address and confidently headed on our merry way, already a half-hour behind the originally scheduled arrival time.

That didn't work so well either. Cliff decided to call Lee back, but wouldn't you know, the cell phone had no signal where we were.

When we finally got a signal, Cliff called him and he said, "Let me check dad's address; maybe I got it wrong."

Hmmm, again?

It wasn't the fault of the GPS; this farmer just couldn't get his dad's address right, and hadn't bothered to check and make sure he had given us the right one.

"I never send Dad any mail," he said. "I don't know his address."

Armed with the proper address we drove straight to the eighty-year-old gentleman's door; he was sitting on the back porch waiting for us. We liked him immediately, and decided not to be angry with him for his son's incompetence.

I'll do an entry later telling about the tractors we saw there.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I love comments!