This Wednesday Sarah and I took the outreach rig out for the last program of the year. We went to River Grove, Illinois which is one of the western suburbs of Chicago. My morning started out kind of interestingly by being woken up by heavy rain and my thoughts of "how's this going to work?". So after laying in bed for an hour worrying about it just got up and headed for the farm. That was a little before 5 so I had plenty of time to think about what we were going to do. For the spring outreach programs we have been using the smaller of our two trailers since we are only taking a couple animals out with us. The fall program has the tractor and wagon so that means that we have to run with the 30' gooseneck trailer. When I'm driving it I really feel akin to the truckers. Besides the gooseneck trailer being larger it also has a couple of neat features such as a retractable awning. With the rain coming down I thought this would be just what I needed to get us through a day of 2nd graders and the rain. Once I got the trailer hooked up I had to fight the mud to pull it out to the road and that of course meant I peeled out and sent mud all over the truck and trailer. While it looked cool it left me with a heck of a mess that had to be washed before leaving the farm. Once loaded we headed out on I-294 towards the school. With bad weather traffic was not easy and when you are piloting a nearly 50' truck and trailer you can't make quick lane changes. I was to find this out the hard way as I passed the Irving Park exit while in the far left lane. The thought did cross my mind to make a hard veer but when your truck and trailer both have WAGNER FARM plastered all over it you loose that anonymity that gives a certain boldness in situations like this. We proceeded on to the next exit which was 7 miles down the road. The obvious move from this point would be to make a U turn get on the ramp going back the other way. Well this exit was missing that very basic ingredient. From this point our Lewis and Clark instincts kicked in and we just started navigating north and east. For the record, I am not one of those guys who is afraid to stop and ask for directions but when you are driving a rig that doesn't fit in a gas station you really have to be careful where you commit to stopping. After about 15 minutes Sacajawea (Sarah) next to me gives up and we call her boyfriend Dan who lives in Indiana to mapquest us help. Good news, we were only about 10 minutes away and we were still on time to the school. On top of that, it was a perfectly sunny day so we really hadn't needed the XL trailer with the retractable awning. At least the program went really well and we are done for the season.
