Wobbly wagon...

A guy buys a loader for his tractor at a farm sale. It has to be hauled home.

The loader was going to be hauled home on another guy's sale purchase, a $150 trailer with removable sideboards. The plan is to put the loader in the trailer and haul it home about 30 miles. When making such plans one important question was asked. Will the loader fit into the trailer?

“Yep, it should,” I was told.

Should. When the answer to a question is ‘should’, this means the help (that’s me) needs to come up with a plan B. I should know. I've been hatching up plan B's for about fifteen years. The measuring tape came out, and then out came plan B.

Let me back track for just a moment. The night before when discussing the plan for the retrieval of the trailer and loader I asked about plan A, which was to just put the loader in the trailer and take it home.

"Are you sure that the panels come off?" I asked.

"Yep, they slide right off," he says.

Right. Nothing 'slides right off'. This is when I started to think about a plan B. I try to stay on top of things because I think back to past experiences I've had. I look across the table and shake my head. "You'll say, 'slides right out' as you're leaning on a crowbar cussing the sideboards," I said.

“They’ll come out, the guy said they just popped right out,” I was told.

I'm glad the guy facilitating the sale item removal at the sale site had a crow bar. We'd still be outside Nelson, Nebraska trying to poke a square peg into a round hole. The sideboards did come off, but they didn’t just slide right off.

We did get the loader on the now flat bed trailer with two log chains and another tractor and loader acting as a crane. It wasn't easy, but it got done. We were ready to head out – almost.

One of the tires was low, really low. I thought it looked like something that needed more attention than just air, but what do I know. We spotted some spare tires lying in a pile so we went over and stole one. We figured it couldn’t hurt, seeing as the tire on the trailer was about as solid as Jell-O, but the spare had a broken valve stem.

“It’ll work,” the guy says.

Yeah, if we need the spare it will get us directly to the next ditch.

I got to see a lot of Nebraska countryside because we could only drive 15 mph. Fred Flintstone could drive faster. I realized why pretty quickly, we had a snaking trailer. For those of you not familiar with a snaking trailer, that's farmer speak for damn near impossible to pull. At least not safely. (You’ll find it in the same section as ‘should’ in the farmer dictionary).

We pulled it anyways, for about four miles.

The thought was the hitch was loose and hopefully tightening it up would help. I wondered if it really would help, at least I asked if it would.

“It can’t get worse,” I was told. Actually it could, but I didn’t want to go into all the things that could possibly go wrong. Why we didn't check that before our departure still is unknown. Farmers don't ever perform a road worthy check before pulling out of the yard because that would take about thirty more seconds and daylight is burning.

As we took off again I realized I'd made a huge mistake. I had forgotten my horse sized dose of Dramamine. If I had to ride the entire way back like this, I was going to need it - or a barf bag. It was rough. The trailer didn’t snake so much anymore, it just jerked.

As I willed myself not to hurl I did notice we had reached speeds nearly 35 mph. A vast improvement. It shaved about 45 seconds off our return trip.

We did make it home and it only took us shy of two hours. We made fun of ourselves the entire way home. We might as well have, because I’m sure everyone else on the road was making fun of us.

Like I always say, laugh at yourself – if you don’t someone else will.