The last couple weekends I've gotten in on outings with Ryan Walker, a baler engineer named James, and their buddy Steve from Centerville. James' dad is the dealer in North Carolina whom I mentioned in the previous post. Last weekend, we hunted morel mushrooms in ditches in the Centerville area, which is where Ryan is from. There's a certain skill to spotting the little fungi, which upon spotting seem very spotable, yet are still oddly camouflaged. They're either yellowish or gray, and look like brains. There is neither rhyme nor reason to where they decide to pop up. According to Walker, they had picked morels out of the ditches we looked through that day by the bagful, but those may have been fish stories. After several hours looking in two different places and walking many miles, we had found about half a plastic bagful. It was great day to be out in the woods though, not sitting at a desk or driving for countless miles, and I didn't have to even look at a mower.
This weekend the four of us made a mini road trip to Rutledge, Missouri to see the massive flea market they have there. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was quite a redneck affair. It was pretty rainy so both the crowds and vendors were sparse, but there were still enough of both to make the day. Imagine the most interesting junk and the most worthless junk you've ever seen at yard sales, gather enough of that to fill a 25-acre field, add some guns, and you've got the Rutledge Flea Market. Until you visit Rutledge, you simply wouldn't believe that someone not only has an old old old clothes washer, complete with wringer rollers for drying, but that they are trying to SELL it. And they have three of them, right next to a stack of recorded VHS videos, next to a Milwaukee Ice pool table light, next to a case full of knives, next to...you get the idea. Classy stuff here.
The only thing I found that I couldn't live without was a ridiculously tiny cast iron pan, in which I planned to cook an egg at a time in for sandwiches. It didn't work that well though, because even with lots of oil, the egg didn't dislodge from the pan easily enough. It's a little too ungainly to be a keychain bobble, but it was only a dollar. I almost bought a plastic child's accordion to mail to my niece unexpectedly, but walked away and it got rained on. Your home will remain accordion-free, Court and Aaron...for now.
We scared up another batch of mushrooms on the way back to fill out the day. Morels are prepared by deep fat frying, and are quite delicious.
To top off the weekend, I swapped a couple tunes with Deanna Smith, who met Riley's sessioneers Will Harmon and Dawn Buckley at an Irish music camp in Portal, Arizona last year. Deanna lives south of Des Moines, and was my connection into the session scene in Des Moines.
4/15/12
4/5/12
Southeastern Mower Campaign
I've been out on a mower cutterbar part recall trip the last ten days. The circumstances and details of the recall would bore just about all of my readers except my dad, but the important thing is that Vermeer is willing to go to the expense of sending out crews to replace critical parts on machines known to be defective instead of waiting until they all blew up during haying season. This hugely impressed dealers and customers alike, some of whom didn't even know we were coming because they hadn't been told about the problem.
I traveled and worked with Ryan Walker, a baler tech. This might seem an odd match, but there are so many of these trips that all the engineering techs, not just the mower tech, were out on at least one mower campaign. We had twenty-one mowers to work on on this trip, in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Ohio. We also passed through Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. Except for two mowers at a dealer in London, Kentucky, all of them were in separate towns, usually at least an hour apart. We were out for ten days, and covered 3630 miles. Ryan asked me if I kept track of such details for posterity, which I do, and I'm curious to see what my yearly totals will be. After nine weeks, I've already driven 6400 miles for work. We worked about 120 hours this trip. Our longest day was 16.5 hours, and on a 14.5 hour day we finished five of the mowers.
There are some odd things to be seen in that end of the world. I've concluded Kentucky is the patron state of horses, tobacca, and looking the other way. At least once every two hours on the road there, we would see something that definitely looked odd, such as a truck meant to haul a car hauling a bulldozer, or an ancient half-ton with three horses loaded into the box in a stock rack, or a skid steer at a dealership being stored six feet in the air on a forklift. After the first few of these occurrences, we'd just look at each other, shake our heads and laugh, and say "oh Kentucky".
Walker pointed out a few barns painted black to me. These were tobacco curing sheds, and the black absorbed light and made them hot inside. They looked shoddily built, but were made with gaps between the slats in the walls to allow air to pass through. I suspect it was to keep with a certain decorative scheme, but many horse barns and outbuildings were also painted black, which to me does not seem terribly wise.
Tennessee also had a rather, ah, backwoodsy feel to it. This feeling was enhanced by the fact our GPS tended to direct us to our destinations via sometimes quite rugged routes. This began to anger us when we found out from the farmers or from our own cruising around that it had been neither the most direct nor the fastest route. The most vivid example of this happened near Newport, when the GPS insisted we take a long, windy, out of the way, one-lane gravel road to a customer's place, even though a decent paved two-lane led almost right up to it. We could just about "hear the banjo". I almost hit a peacock gamboling about, and Ryan mistook an actual turkey gobbling for his turkey ringtone. On the way out of Newport, we were startled by a busload of kids driving out from under a bridge at 5:30pm. What sort of field trip were they out on? We gathered that even in the best of times, the area wasn't very prosperous, and spent no extra time getting out of there.
Tennessee was pretty though, gotta give it that. I hadn't ever been in the Appalachians before, and though they're cute compared to the Rockies, they're worth seeing. On the way out of them, we were about an hour behind a two-semi, one-car accident. There were no fatalities or injuries as far as we could tell, but one of the semis had lost its trailer and dumped a couple hundred bushels of corn on the highway, which looked like a LOT of corn. It only occurred to me later, but I'm sure scores of deer were hit around there for days afterward.
North Carolina was next, and we practically raced through those three mowers spread across the whole state. The last one was in the northeast corner, at a dealer whose son is a baler engineer (oddly familiar). We went for a quick drive to see a customer's place, which was an experience in itself. I've seen some junk piles, but this was orders of magnitude bigger than anything I'd seen, and I mean junk. I spotted some odd gray lumps hanging in a tobacco shed close to their baler. They had attempted to cure a few hams, but just left them when they didn't cure right. Walker wasn't sure how long they'd been hanging, but had seen them at least a year before.
We passed a sign for a place that read "Jim's Cricket Ranch" in this area. The first things that came to mind...in our best Sam Elliot/Virgil Earp voices:
Walker: "Yup, I'm the biggest cricket rancher in the county."
Me: "I'm up to about a quarter billion head of cricket."
Though we were there on a Friday and it was only an hour away, we didn't get to go to the coast. Most dealers close at noon on Saturday and our nearest ones were 500 miles away in Kentucky, so we raced back that way. This was our 16.5 hour day, and I wasn't thrilled about this rather extreme schedule, but we needed to keep knocking out mowers to finish in time to get back for Easter weekend. We got there in time to work on it, but had a panicky moment when we realized we might get set back by having to order parts on Monday. Our schedule luckily worked out anyway though, with the two mowers in Ohio being at customers' places who didn't mind us working on Sunday. The rest were in Kentucky and everything finished fine once our parts came in. Back to Iowa we went after that, and here I am, yet another round of stories collected.
I had schemed about coming home for Easter, but couldn't quite make it work. Hopefully I'll make it back sometime in May.
I traveled and worked with Ryan Walker, a baler tech. This might seem an odd match, but there are so many of these trips that all the engineering techs, not just the mower tech, were out on at least one mower campaign. We had twenty-one mowers to work on on this trip, in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Ohio. We also passed through Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. Except for two mowers at a dealer in London, Kentucky, all of them were in separate towns, usually at least an hour apart. We were out for ten days, and covered 3630 miles. Ryan asked me if I kept track of such details for posterity, which I do, and I'm curious to see what my yearly totals will be. After nine weeks, I've already driven 6400 miles for work. We worked about 120 hours this trip. Our longest day was 16.5 hours, and on a 14.5 hour day we finished five of the mowers.
There are some odd things to be seen in that end of the world. I've concluded Kentucky is the patron state of horses, tobacca, and looking the other way. At least once every two hours on the road there, we would see something that definitely looked odd, such as a truck meant to haul a car hauling a bulldozer, or an ancient half-ton with three horses loaded into the box in a stock rack, or a skid steer at a dealership being stored six feet in the air on a forklift. After the first few of these occurrences, we'd just look at each other, shake our heads and laugh, and say "oh Kentucky".
Walker pointed out a few barns painted black to me. These were tobacco curing sheds, and the black absorbed light and made them hot inside. They looked shoddily built, but were made with gaps between the slats in the walls to allow air to pass through. I suspect it was to keep with a certain decorative scheme, but many horse barns and outbuildings were also painted black, which to me does not seem terribly wise.
Tennessee also had a rather, ah, backwoodsy feel to it. This feeling was enhanced by the fact our GPS tended to direct us to our destinations via sometimes quite rugged routes. This began to anger us when we found out from the farmers or from our own cruising around that it had been neither the most direct nor the fastest route. The most vivid example of this happened near Newport, when the GPS insisted we take a long, windy, out of the way, one-lane gravel road to a customer's place, even though a decent paved two-lane led almost right up to it. We could just about "hear the banjo". I almost hit a peacock gamboling about, and Ryan mistook an actual turkey gobbling for his turkey ringtone. On the way out of Newport, we were startled by a busload of kids driving out from under a bridge at 5:30pm. What sort of field trip were they out on? We gathered that even in the best of times, the area wasn't very prosperous, and spent no extra time getting out of there.
Tennessee was pretty though, gotta give it that. I hadn't ever been in the Appalachians before, and though they're cute compared to the Rockies, they're worth seeing. On the way out of them, we were about an hour behind a two-semi, one-car accident. There were no fatalities or injuries as far as we could tell, but one of the semis had lost its trailer and dumped a couple hundred bushels of corn on the highway, which looked like a LOT of corn. It only occurred to me later, but I'm sure scores of deer were hit around there for days afterward.
North Carolina was next, and we practically raced through those three mowers spread across the whole state. The last one was in the northeast corner, at a dealer whose son is a baler engineer (oddly familiar). We went for a quick drive to see a customer's place, which was an experience in itself. I've seen some junk piles, but this was orders of magnitude bigger than anything I'd seen, and I mean junk. I spotted some odd gray lumps hanging in a tobacco shed close to their baler. They had attempted to cure a few hams, but just left them when they didn't cure right. Walker wasn't sure how long they'd been hanging, but had seen them at least a year before.
We passed a sign for a place that read "Jim's Cricket Ranch" in this area. The first things that came to mind...in our best Sam Elliot/Virgil Earp voices:
Walker: "Yup, I'm the biggest cricket rancher in the county."
Me: "I'm up to about a quarter billion head of cricket."
Though we were there on a Friday and it was only an hour away, we didn't get to go to the coast. Most dealers close at noon on Saturday and our nearest ones were 500 miles away in Kentucky, so we raced back that way. This was our 16.5 hour day, and I wasn't thrilled about this rather extreme schedule, but we needed to keep knocking out mowers to finish in time to get back for Easter weekend. We got there in time to work on it, but had a panicky moment when we realized we might get set back by having to order parts on Monday. Our schedule luckily worked out anyway though, with the two mowers in Ohio being at customers' places who didn't mind us working on Sunday. The rest were in Kentucky and everything finished fine once our parts came in. Back to Iowa we went after that, and here I am, yet another round of stories collected.
I had schemed about coming home for Easter, but couldn't quite make it work. Hopefully I'll make it back sometime in May.
3/10/12
First testing trip, northwestern Florida
I got out of an entire week in the office for a testing trip this last week. I had better err on the side of caution when it comes to discussing project details, so forgive me for being a little vague about some things. The 1100 mile drive down south went smoothly; I'm just glad I don't have to foot the bill to drive a loaded one-ton V-10 on regular 1000+ mile trips. Ouch.
The main forage crops in that part of the world are rye grass and corn, and this is the time of year for rye. It's all chopped and bagged for silage, because there's no hope of ever drying it down enough for hay. Right after it's cut, the grass is tedded, or fluffed with a tedder rake. This beats up the stems and helps it dry more evenly. Rotary rakes put it into windrows when it's ready. The fields are worked in straight lines despite the pivots; they just bounce over the tracks every single pass. Forage choppers process the windrows into fine feed which is loaded into trucks. The trucks unload into stuffers, which put the chopped rye into tube bags.
I got to ride in a forage chopper for about an hour while it was running, and it was one of the most impressive pieces of machinery I had ever been around. This particular dairy ran two, a Claas 970 and a Claas 980. They chop both rye and corn, so they are running most of the year. They're powered by two Mercedes inline-6 diesels which supply 860 horsepower. The operator monitors the machine with one screen; he can detect foreign material in the pickup and chopper, check the engines, and resharpen the blades among other things. I was very impressed.
That dairy cuts and silages about 3000 acres twice a year, and milks just under 5000 cows. They had many five- and six-span pivots, all high-pressure with half-inch nozzle sprinkler heads on top instead of the drop-type seen in Montana. I pointed out to Eric, the other mower man, that the water coming out looked really rank. He laughed and told me that it's because they pump manure through the pivots before they farm the ground again. Your only hope is to stay upwind.
We wouldn't have been able to get anything done at the dairy Friday before having to leave for the airport, so we headed for Sanford Thursday night, which is where we flew out of. We had a few spare hours Friday morning, so we saw the beach. This also meant I'd driven from the northwest corner of the country to the southeast corner of the country, coast to coast, in the last eight months, most of it in the last six weeks.
Luckily, we got to fly back to Iowa. Pella's spring-like 50s and 60s were sadly a bit of a letdown after Florida's tropical 80s. I'm proud to say my farmer's tan is well underway already.
The main forage crops in that part of the world are rye grass and corn, and this is the time of year for rye. It's all chopped and bagged for silage, because there's no hope of ever drying it down enough for hay. Right after it's cut, the grass is tedded, or fluffed with a tedder rake. This beats up the stems and helps it dry more evenly. Rotary rakes put it into windrows when it's ready. The fields are worked in straight lines despite the pivots; they just bounce over the tracks every single pass. Forage choppers process the windrows into fine feed which is loaded into trucks. The trucks unload into stuffers, which put the chopped rye into tube bags.
I got to ride in a forage chopper for about an hour while it was running, and it was one of the most impressive pieces of machinery I had ever been around. This particular dairy ran two, a Claas 970 and a Claas 980. They chop both rye and corn, so they are running most of the year. They're powered by two Mercedes inline-6 diesels which supply 860 horsepower. The operator monitors the machine with one screen; he can detect foreign material in the pickup and chopper, check the engines, and resharpen the blades among other things. I was very impressed.
That dairy cuts and silages about 3000 acres twice a year, and milks just under 5000 cows. They had many five- and six-span pivots, all high-pressure with half-inch nozzle sprinkler heads on top instead of the drop-type seen in Montana. I pointed out to Eric, the other mower man, that the water coming out looked really rank. He laughed and told me that it's because they pump manure through the pivots before they farm the ground again. Your only hope is to stay upwind.
We wouldn't have been able to get anything done at the dairy Friday before having to leave for the airport, so we headed for Sanford Thursday night, which is where we flew out of. We had a few spare hours Friday morning, so we saw the beach. This also meant I'd driven from the northwest corner of the country to the southeast corner of the country, coast to coast, in the last eight months, most of it in the last six weeks.
Luckily, we got to fly back to Iowa. Pella's spring-like 50s and 60s were sadly a bit of a letdown after Florida's tropical 80s. I'm proud to say my farmer's tan is well underway already.
3/3/12
Settling in
The last couple weeks I've been at the office in Pella, so I haven't really had any adventures. I've done little things here and there for the current mower project, but I'm still largely in the dark about it. Perhaps my favorite part of this job is the fact that Vermeer's engineers, especially the ag engineers, spend so much time in and around the equipment, not just in front of a computer. I haven't had much to do up front in the office, so I've been back in the shop, puttering, visiting with techs and other engineers, learning where things are, working on equipment, and generally keeping my hands dirty, which is how I prefer them.
It looks like tornado season has started in the midwest, after Kansas and Indiana got nailed this week. Nothing has happened in Iowa yet (knock on wood).
The other mower engineer and I are leaving for a testing trip in northwestern Florida tomorrow and we'll split the driving over two days. We'll be down there until the end of the week, then fly back. Hopefully it's nice and warm, and dry enough to cut. Stories forthcoming.
It looks like tornado season has started in the midwest, after Kansas and Indiana got nailed this week. Nothing has happened in Iowa yet (knock on wood).
The other mower engineer and I are leaving for a testing trip in northwestern Florida tomorrow and we'll split the driving over two days. We'll be down there until the end of the week, then fly back. Hopefully it's nice and warm, and dry enough to cut. Stories forthcoming.
2/18/12
National Farm Machinery Show - Louisville, Kentucky
My first outing as a part of Vermeer was a trip to Louisville last week, to take in the National Farm Machinery Show. I rode with five other engineers for the nine hour drive. We stopped in Indianapolis to tour Rexnord, a primary bearing supplier to Vermeer. Louisville has the largest UPS sorting facility in the world, so we toured that as well. The action starts there at about 11pm, so that's when the tours are. We were lucky enough to also get to try out their flight simulators. To give you an idea of how realistic they are, UPS pilots never touch a real plane during their training, and are completely ready for action when they are done with the several-month training. Granted, UPS only hires veteran pilots, but these trainers are exactly like the real thing. This tour took us around the 5.2 million square foot (120 acres under one roof!) facility. All sorting is automated, and most packages go from plane to plane in less than twenty minutes. Very impressive. This was very late on Valentines day, and someone noticed that there were many upset wives and girlfriends out there: about every tenth package was from Pro Flowers.
Sales and marketing people manned Vermeer's booth at the show, and the engineers were there to walk the show and look at the competition's technology up close. The NFMS is the biggest of its kind in the country. It's possible to see everything in one day, but I was a little stunned by everything and really just glazed over everything the first day. I dug deeper into the forage equipment the next day with a product guy and an enhancement engineer, who together gave me deep insight into details about Vermeer and the competition that I wouldn't have gotten by myself or from just looking at the equipment.
Aside from all I learned about equipment, this was a very good chance to get to know some of my coworkers. I'm looking forward to more travel.
Sales and marketing people manned Vermeer's booth at the show, and the engineers were there to walk the show and look at the competition's technology up close. The NFMS is the biggest of its kind in the country. It's possible to see everything in one day, but I was a little stunned by everything and really just glazed over everything the first day. I dug deeper into the forage equipment the next day with a product guy and an enhancement engineer, who together gave me deep insight into details about Vermeer and the competition that I wouldn't have gotten by myself or from just looking at the equipment.
Aside from all I learned about equipment, this was a very good chance to get to know some of my coworkers. I'm looking forward to more travel.
2/11/12
Moving to Iowa
I mentioned to a few people that I may put a blog post or two up about my relocation to Pella, Iowa after being taken on by Vermeer. It's a little overdue as I've been out of Montana for almost two weeks, but here it is, and after the first week of work, it's looking like I may have plenty to write about soon.
My final week in Montana was a great one, and I'd like to thank everyone who was part of it, including my last Riley's session, birthday festivities, and the awesome get-together we had at my parents' house. It's tough to leave such fun and supportive friends and family! I'd love to stay in touch with any and all, so if you don't have my email or phone number, get in touch through my parents.
I'd like to note that I'm writing this on the anniversary of the day that didn't exist for Larry Lee and I last year; we left for Australia on February 10 and didn't get there until the 12th due to crossing the international date line. An awful lot can develop in a year huh?
The drive out to Pella took me a couple days. I went the long way, through North Dakota to Minneapolis, instead of through South Dakota. I did this so I could visit with high school friend Rachelle Rauser in Bismarck. Somehow it was only a 1390 mile drive, not many more than the other route. The weather and roads were fine the entire way, except for some fog in North Dakota and Minnesota, and the only real complaint was the traffic in Minneapolis.
It was a huge relief to have a place to live sorted before I left. I was lined up with another Vermeer engineer who needed a roommate through the manager of the apartment complex when I was looking around for places in January. It's a perfect setup because I don't have much furniture and he's already got the place furnished. It'd have been hard to live by myself in a new town anyway. Tyler's from west of Des Moines and has worked for Vermeer on directional drills since August, so he's pretty new to Pella also.
Officially, I am a design engineer in the forage equipment department at Vermeer Corporation. I'm in the mower "group", which is a group of two engineers for now. My first week at work was pretty gentle. Typical, expected orientation activities occurred on Monday. The only surprise that day was when my manager offered me a trip to Louisville, Kentucky this coming week to attend the National Farm Machinery Show with several other Vermeer ag engineers. We're driving there, and will stop in Indianapolis at Linkbelt, one of Vermeer's vendors, and at the UPS Worldport sorting facility, the biggest in the US. After getting situated into a cubicle of my very own, I designed my first couple mower parts. I was also offered two other opportunities to travel, the first being a two-week mower service trip through Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina at the end of March, the second being a mower test trip to Florida in early March. I'll be as far from Pella as Helena on that trip, but in the opposite direction. It'll also mean I've driven from the Pacific to the Atlantic in the last nine months. I don't have much keeping me in Pella, so I snapped up the offers. I'll be out of the office four of my first nine weeks at Vermeer. Extensive travel will be likely, especially during the summer, and Vermeer uses a Dutch-made cutterbar in all their mowers, so regular trips to the Netherlands are necessary.
I've gotten out a little bit in Pella, but don't know the town much yet, nor do I know many people yet. Most of my coworkers are farmers and all of them are from the Midwest, and consider Montana to be the extreme Northwest. Two are Nebraska cowboys, and they've promised to get me on some broncs. The ag engineering department is a young group, with all the engineers being under 40. I find it very interesting that the other mower guy and myself are the only bachelors in the whole lot of close to twenty engineers. I've experienced a very respectful and friendly work environment thus far in the office, in the shop, and on the production floor. I've probably met more than forty people in the last week, and almost every single person already knew who I was, where I was from, and that my dad is a dealer. This last detail has gotten me some high regard. It's been fun to run into and re-meet people who had been out to Montana and met my dad at service and sales schools or who had even been out to the ranch.
Check back to read up on my forthcoming adventures and on how I'm getting along in Pella when I haven't been shipped elsewhere. This gig could get interesting.
6/11/11
Home Again, Home Again
I had a great week in Phoenix, despite the heart-breaking departure of Court and Aaron's beloved lab, Clancy. I more or less set myself back to the right time and date, and spent lots of time with my sisters, brother-in-law, and silly little niece. Court even tracked down a session for me on Sunday night, which was good fun.
I got back to Montana on the afternoon of the 9th. Never have I been more glad to see Helena and to see and smell Montana springtime. And here I am again, back where I started, just four months later.
Mostly out of habit from writing so many lab reports, I can't let this go without some sort of conclusion. So what have I gotten out of this little adventure, other than fierce and justified hatreds for carnies and snow peas?
A summary:
- Australia is hot, can be both very dry and very wet, and is massive
- Australian ranches are unfathomably large, Brahman cattle are ornery, and cheap wire stretchers aren't to be trusted or used hastily
- Australia has lots and lots of dangerous critters
- The reputation carnies have is completely true and deserved
- Oz really does have nice beaches
- There's got to be a better way to plant strawberries
- Melbourne is one of my favorite cities anywhere
- Aussies use terrible grammar
- The English are excellent fun
In all seriousness, I'm not yet certain just what I've learned from this trip. It wasn't the easiest four months of my life, and was honestly quite stressful. My impression of the place is a bit mixed: it is unbelievably expensive, yet it is possible to make money there, with the right frame of mind and enough time. There's lots to see there, lots. Too much maybe. And there's a lot of country to see it in. I certainly felt overwhelmed by it.
Perhaps the most intriguing theory I developed about the place is that it may be what America once was to the rest of the world. Many of the travelers I met there, whether they were Asian or European, were there because Australia offered them a better chance than their home countries did, even if it wasn't a permanent move. When asked about America, they often said they wanted to go or had tried, but couldn't get visas. To some, Oz was indeed the Land of Opportunity. To me, it wasn't. I am happy to return to America, God bless it.
I might go back, and I stress the 'might'. There's a lot there I didn't see, but there always is; you can't ever see it all. I know I won't go on another trip like this one. Seeing new places is fun and all, but this wide-open, ridiculous four months of homelessness and dodgy employment was enough. I've no idea where I'll go next, but I most likely won't be traveling much for awhile.
I may have griped a lot about the scoundrels Larry and I tangled with in Australia, but I never could have given enough thanks to the truly great people we had the luck of meeting and getting to know. These included, and hopefully I don't forget any, Jeff and Leanne Ihle and their kids Ryan, Austin, and Morgan; Sue Muir, her kids, and her brother Bob; Elise Pike (our landlord in Wamuran) and her neighborly parents Greg and Cathy; Rosie Timmins, her parents Michael and Heather, and her brothers Sam and Josh; and Phil McCarroll, Sheridan Overton, and her daughter Matilda. This trip was made easier in untold amounts by their generosity and friendship. Hopefully, someday, I will be able to return their kindnesses.
It also meant a great deal to me to have so many people back home that supported me, offered advice, or just wondered where the hell I was. You all meant more to me, especially in the tough moments, than I can put into writing, and I sincerely thank you.
Lastly, but probably most important, I need to thank Mr Larry Lee, my open-minded and ever-optimistic comrade through the last four months. They say you only get to know somebody after you've lived with them, but backpacking with someone goes to a whole new level. I met Larry about ten years ago, and we lived together in two houses over three stretches of time, adding up to two-and-a-half years, so we knew each other quite well before we left. You certainly learn new things about people when traveling together, no matter how well you know them. Nonetheless, considering everything Larry put up with on this trip, from me and from the scoundrels, I can't think of a better person with which to go to the far end of the world. Thanks for everything buddy.
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