Then it all went away and dried up. It was a crazy couple of days!!!! The kids and I had to retreat to the camper for hours at a time to escape the weather. We played countless rounds of Skip-Bo, Phase 10, or Nertz. They were great little troopers!!!! Zach finished widening the road, but it was too wet to do much scraping.
While I was across the country visiting my friend Ericka and then my Grandma Edie, Zach decided he would run up to HH to get the backhoe fixed. At the conclusion of our last work day, a hose on the backhoe started leaking pretty bad. So he figured he would take the time while I was gone to figure out what parts needed changing and get the backhoe back in order so that the next time we went up it would be fully operational for another work party!
Well, my Mom decided she wanted to go, and she invited a family friend Darrel to go as well. Zach ended up bringing our nephew Marshall too! So with lots of helping hands to watch kids and wanting to work... He filled up the backhoe with hydraulic fluid and decided to patch the problem instead of fix it. Other than slowly dripping hydraulic fluid everywhere and a front tire that was flat by nightfall... it worked great! When we had purchased the backhoe last year, the back two tires (the big ones) were totally sun rotted, so we had already replaced them. the two smaller front tires had held up okay, so we were waiting until it was necessary to replace them. When we have so many projects to do, it's hard prioritizing what we put money into first, second, etc.... But it worked out great that the tired lasted just long enough to get another workday in. It would have been a huge bummer had we planned on a 2-3 day work party and had the parts go all out then. Zach would have had to scramble back and forth to Cedar (over an hour each way) to try and get parts together instead of being able to just work, work, work! All in all... a blessing in disguise.
All day long, Darrell worked on the tractor pulling a box blade up and down the road smoothing out the parts where Zach had uprooted trees and dug out stumps with the backhoe. When he texted me pictures of the road at the end of the day, I could hardly believe it was the same strip of dirt!!!!!
Before he left, Zach noted the parts that needed to be fixed (hydraulic hose, 2 hydraulic seals, new front tire) and ordered them that night so that the next time we came up he could swap out the old parts with new parts.
Count your blessings! Name them one by one! God is good.
