It Pays to have Friends with Bigger Toys

Its always good to have a friend with a bigger toy

So what the heck is that supposed to mean??  Well …..

ooops

Road maintenance is a fact of life here at the cottage.  The road to our place is long, windy, hilly and gravel.  When we first bought here it was virtually unusable and had earned the dubious distinction of being the worst road in the county (true!).  

Mostly it was considered an ATV track.

Checking things out in an ever so fashionable bug suit

That said, we have put a huge effort (and cash) into getting it fixed up and functional.  It quite good I think, though no amount of gravel and RAP (Recycled Asphalt Product) can change the fact that it is long, windy and hilly.  Now though it is exceedingly driveable.

So now what?

In any case, this beast does requires regular use of our orange friend (Kubota backhoe) with the various attachments to redistribute the gravel, smooth and crown the road, etc.  In the spring here we are also dealing with the remainders of fallen leaves from the autumn which can obscure the edges of the road.  In some areas this makes the road appear much narrower than it normally is.  In other areas it can hide issues that we are better off seeing.  Like the edge!

 

This series of photos shows what happens when one is running the blade close to the edge (for all the right reasons)  and the edge just magically seems to be somewhere other than exactly where we thought it was.  Big, big oops.

Thank goodness for the trees.  Without the trees I fear the backhoe (and driver) would have rolled completely, and the steepness of that particular hill is quite scary when you think of that as a potential outcome. 

Luckily injuries were very minor (scratches mostly, and wounded pride which took a bit longer to heal).  However - we were left with the dilemma of “what now?”.  Luckily we have made friends with the local sand and gravel guys.  We do business with them, and also a bit of socializing.  So a call for help resulted them bringing in a much larger unit which managed to pull our orange friend out of its perch on the hillside and set it right.  

So – it pays to have friends with bigger toys than yours.