What is a tractor cruise?

That's the question my longtime Internet friend Lori asked this morning, so I am doing this entry especially for her.
We belong to the Mid-Mo Tractor Club.  The purpose of this club seems to be to find people who will actually appreciate your old tractors, and all the work you've put in on them.  Everybody in the club loves everybody else's tractors.  Because, you know, tractors are the best invention mankind ever thought of.
Most of the club members are "mature".  Like me and Cliff.  As people age, they seem to need bathroom facilities more often.  That's why, when we go on a tractor cruise, one of the tractors pulls a couple of porta-potties.

So, here's what happened:  People who enjoy parading their tractors around and tying up the roadways met at Beckner's Orchard.

A wife can ride with her husband if the tractor is equipped with a seat for her.  It is considered unsafe to just hang on, sit on a fender, and ride along (like I do on the way to our meeting-place).  So those poor ladies whose husbands don't want to make an effort to fix some legal way to transport their wives get to ride in the trolley, which you see pictured above.  You'd never know it, but the trolley used to be a livestock trailer.

Here's how it looked from my point of view inside the trolley.  Yep.  I get to ride on the trolley.

We were to depart at 12:30 on the nose.  Twenty tractors had shown up by time to leave, and we paraded around the orchard while we were waiting on our police escorts to arrive.  Yes, we are that important.  We get a police escort.

The guy behind the trolley.

We made a stop at St. Paul's in Napoleon.  

I have lived in this area since 1975, but I did not know about the overlook where you can look down on the Missouri River and points beyond.  If you drive out this way, you should make a stop there.  

This is the home of a Facebook friend, a retired teacher who taught in our local school.  I took this picture so I could let him know we cruised by his house.  The joke is on me.  If I had been poised and ready, once we got up to his front yard I could have gotten a picture of him and a grandson sitting in the front yard waving at us.  Story of my life.  I always miss the best shots.  

Back at Beckner's, we picnicked... and had a weinie roast until we ran out of weinies.  Beckners only have peaches now, but I used to work for them when they had lots of apple trees.  Alas, the apple trees are all gone, even the ones I helped them plant.  

The cruse, round trip, was about twenty-five miles.  Tractors don't go very fast, so the whole thing took about four hours.  I took my Ipad so I would have something to read, but I happened to be sitting near a lady who knew a lot of people that I know, even one I haven't seen since the year 2000 (whose husband was one of the first Kansas City Chiefs).  She also knows a lot of my neighbors.  So we chatted on and off through most of the cruise.  

It was a good day.  Oh yes....

  We came home to this.  Babe finally had her calf, a lovely heifer.  Pay no attention to Bonnie.  She is SUCH a mother hen, she thinks she has to help out with every baby she sees.  We brought her up to the lot for the night, just so nobody gets confused about whose baby it is.  If everything goes well, this calf won't be any extra work for us.  Beef cows raise their calves with no help from humans, so there is no need for us to intervene.  
Babe's original name was Annie, so we are naming the baby Annie.