The salt of the earth

Clicking the pics will show you more about an asphalt machine than you ever wanted to know.

Contractors are doing some road work right next to my daughter's house and they've park their asphalt machine next to the yard for the last three days. You can see the  bronco, and the Arctic Fox in the background.

I'm finishing up a few last-minute projects, so I can hopefully get packed up and take a mini-vacation starting the 30th or October 1 depending on what I want to do as I head down south to the San Luis Valley area.

The big town in the area is Alamosa, Colorado, which isn't very big but it's got about everything you need. Of course, the Sand Dunes National Park is the big draw to that area, and other than that, it's mostly farming and ranching country, with six or eight tiny towns that no one even knows where they are except the farmers and ranchers that live and make a living in the area.

There's a lot of Hispanics living in the area and always has been. The Mexicans have been farming and ranching in the San Luis Valley since the days when Mexico owned most of the West. And when this part of the country became a territory of the United States, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the Mexican farmers and ranchers just kept doing what they've done for hundreds of years, and the fact that the name of the government had changed meant little to these people of the land, they just kept tilling the soil and raising sheep and cattle as generations that came before them.

I've never planted a crop nor raised a cow in my entire life, but I can relate to people like that; I don't know why, but people who live on the land and make a living from that land seem like "salt of the earth" people to me. They seem more in touch with reality than a lot of supposedly smart people are today.

My grandfather was a farmer, a sharecropper to be exact, and as poor as a church mouse. But, as a kid, I watched him plow that red Georgia clay behind his mule. The very same red Georgia clay in which he's buried. He was "salt of the earth, " and maybe that's why I relate to the people of the San Luis Valley.

                                                                    Theboondork

If I had tracks like this on my truck instead of tires I could do some serious boondocking.

When the road workers weren't using the asphalt machine the grandkids took it for a spin. I was amazed how much asphalt the kids could rip up with that machine.