Farmily Reunion!
A day on the farm... and a long overdue reunion!
So, my Aunt Jill called me sometime back in the summer, and I told her that we had been fully intending for the better part of the last four months to make a trip out to Gettysburg the Gettysburg area to see her and Uncle Terry.
But Kitten had to go and have her suicide bomber of a gallbladder defused instead, and we limped through June and July without a single Gettysburg in sight.
So I promised to do my best to make that happen!
And wouldn't you know that the universe tried to torpedo that plan as well... because of course it did.
But it failed.
Midway through September I coordinated with Jill and my cousin Becky to see if there was a Friday or a Saturday in October that everyone would be around.
We came up with the 11th of October.
We'd have to miss my cousin Pete's chili-fest—which would be a shame, 'cause he said there'd be a trophy this year, and I think we probably would've had a pretty decent shot at winning it.
Also, the 11th would be Taylor's 21st birthday—though I had no particular reason to think she'd have any desire to come down from Connecticut and spend such a milestone birthday with her parents and her little sister. <shrug>
So, yeah; it seemed to me that the 11th was absolutely doable.
Buuuut of course within a week of making those plans, the transmission in Kitten's Focus took a dump and we had to scramble to procure ourselves a new ride—complete with a car loan that's going to be stretching our finances excruciatingly thin for the next nine months or so.
Aaaand then Taylor reached out with the surprise news that she and Ahlina in fact would be driving down to PA for her birthday weekend... and they absolutely couldn't wait to see us!
If you tried to put this kind of stuff in the plot of a novel, your editor would make you nix it because it sounds so damn far-fetched.
Anyway...
We hadn't seen Becky and company since we all met for dinner back in February (which, because of other people's bullshit, was the first time I had seen her and Ryan since ~2009-2010 or so—and I had never even met Xander and Brantley, nor had Becky's family ever met Athennia or Riley).
And it had also been almost a year since we last saw Aunt Jill and Uncle Terry.
So I was rather looking forward to the trip... and I was fortunate that I'd made all the plans and finalized the details under the wire before the universe managed to derail everything once again.
Thus, the rest of September came and went—as did the first week and a half of October—and we soon found ourselves at the morning of the 11th.
Translation: It was finally go time!
The Drive Out
Assuming that you've had the "pleasure" of enjoying the "privilege" of "driving" on the Pennsylvania turnpike, then our trip out started off pretty much exactly as you would probably expect.
Stratospheric turnpike tolls in 2025 would suggest that you're about to spontaneously teleport directly to your destination through some quantum wormhole in the space-time continuum... or at least approach the speed of sound on a splendiferous autobahn paved with solid gold and maybe some rough diamonds thrown into the mix for traction purposes.
But then you actually get on the turnpike, and it's... well, something more like this instead...
Three miles per hour was our top speed for the first 15 minutes of the journey. I could've taken the cannon from that totally real text thread and wheeled it down the shoulder faster than our car was moving.
Luckily, the nice thing about traveling west is that you eventually break free of the tri-state area's shithole cities' combined gravitational field.
The New York traffic @#$%S off.
The Trenton traffic @#$%S off.
The Philthadelphia traffic @#$%S off.
The sky gets blue.
And the fast lane just miraculously opens up, as though some bucolic deity suddenly Moses'ed all the horses' asses who were in front of you right out of the way.
And then? Look!
Seriously, does anyone else know about this?! That cars seem to move more efficiently in drive than they do in park?
...And, if you drive faster, you'll also get where you're going faster too—as if there's some sort of relationship at play between distance, velocity, and time?
Oh, right. Thanks, Glenn.
I think we can all say that the poopnado hit us full force, for sure.
But there had been rumors of a Nor'easter in our midst—though we had seen no evidence of that as of yet.
It was a bit overcast, looking out to the nor'east above Overthereistan; but, in the direction we were going, it was blue skies ahead...
Get used to staring at that black Chevy's ass though, because he plagued us for a good portion of the trip. And, for having a gold plus emblazoned on his rear end, this guy sure was one hell of a minus.
Every time there was a truck (which is about every 15 feet on the turnpike), this guy had to come hang out in the left lane to pass it.
Not with any urgency, mind you! No, it was more like...
I was really hoping to cruise it at exactly 71.23 miles per hour.
Oh, bother. It looks like... maybe... I think... mmmyeah, I'm gonna need to pass this slowpoke.
Hmm, but he's SO big and scary though! How'm I gonna do it?! Better take it slow!
As long as I'm going even just marginally faster than he is, I'll be around him before we hit the Great Salt Lake.
Whoo-whoo! Fast lane, here I come!
And so, there he was.
Again... and again... and again...
We just couldn't get by him.
...Until about six time-zones later, when we finally got our chance...
...Only to immediately be thwarted by Stickers McDuff...
And, yes, even this far west, what was ol' Stix here rockin'? A urine-colored New Jersey license plate.
We eventually managed to ditch him as well—and we even regained our lost ground against the Nor'easter that was trying to blow in behind us...
Just as we were about to cross the Susquehanna River, we saw this low-flying airplane go blazing by overhead...
And then there was the river. It's still there, in case anyone was wondering whether or not the Susquehanna was still flowing...
Up next was an obligatory lunch break at Baker's Diner in Dillsburg.
By my count, we'd been in "Dillsburg" since the moment we got on the turnpike.
Welcome to Baker's. To them, I'm one of the family!
That's pretty much the only reason we come here.
But lunch was tasty enough—overpriced but hardly more expensive than anything we would have ordered back home—and soon we were back on the road for the final leg of our commute.
As we drove into Biglerville, we got stuck behind yet another Poke-ahontas.
This one was so bad that a road crew even came out and painted the word SLOW on the road behind him.
Then they tried to paint a + in front of him to try to convey that he should increase his speed, but that didn't work either...
Finally the universe presented him with the ultimate idiot-proof let's speed it up technology: A downhill straightaway.
Like, you don't even have to try to find your gas pedal anymore: You can just white-knuckle the wheel at 10:00 and 2:00 and enjoy the ride while gravity hits the gas for you!
But, nope: the thought of surpassing 11 miles per hour was just too scary for him.
So he @#$%'ed off entirely. And we were A-okay with that!
Suddenly everything was perfect again—at least until we came to these narcissists, who seem to be under the impression that every single person just trying to drive down Carlisle Road was only there to visit the Hollabaugh Family Farm.
Well...
Astro Boy and Gwen Stefani have something to say about that!
At last we got to the cemetery in Bendersville and stopped to visit my dad for a few minutes.
Two guys from the landscaping crew were at the end of their lunch break and tailgating on the back of their truck, and they graciously waited for us to conclude our visit before they fired up their weed-whackers again.
Then it was just a couple more miles up the road to Jill and Terry's farm.
We're FINALLY Here!
Are you excited? Moose sure was!
Can we, can we, can we, can we, can we?!
We sat down and caught up for a bit.
Then Aunt Jill reminded us that Becky and the boys wouldn't be around until 5:00 because they were at a band meet of Xander's.
So...
Swords to Ploughshares
Terry took us out to pick some produce; and, now that we were off the highway and out in the countryside, my mind immediately transitioned from Battle Mode to Serenity Mode :)
Tomatoes, peppers...
Zucchini—on which Kitten insisted we needed a size comparison...
Squash and broccoli...
Then onward to corn...
Terry explained that this was their "personal" corn, where they didn't spray any pesticides all season. So, when we husked it, there would probably be a caterpillar at the tip of each one; but then the entire rest of the ear would be good.
After the corn, it was onward to apples...
Apples were mostly done, but Aint Jill had picked us some earlier and there were still a few secret spots here and there where we could pick our own :)
But first we got the grand tour, which will never EVER get old!
God, what a view!
Okay, then we picked some apples.
And, contrary to what the kids' books would lead you to believe that apple trees look like—with five or six apples per tree—real-life apple trees look like this...
Make sure you send in someone tall to reach them all!
Luckily Kitten is about three-foot-six and grabbed every single one...
We might have to leave Riley behind.
Then a couple of the farmhands showed up and needed Terry's expertise on something; so he insisted that we drive the Kubota around while he was busy with them!
We pretty much just gave ourselves The TourTM again, because it's that awesome...
The Latecomers
And then it was time for dinner.
A few days prior, Jill had asked if it was okay to invite my Aunt Joan (Jill's and my dad's younger sister, and my cousin Becky's mom)—whom I had not seen since ~2009-2010 just like I hadn't seen Becky.
Naturally, I said "Of course!"
And luckily, Aunt Joan accepted :)
She arrived maybe 10 minutes before Becky and the boys did, and we got to catch up; and she got to meet Athennia and Riley.
And soon, Aunt Jill had dinner ready—roast beef from one of their cows, with too many sides to even count. Corn, stuffing, potatoes, applesauce, and on and on!
Everything was phenomenal :)
More importantly, this was the closest we've come to having my dad's family together in literal decades.
We still would have needed Kelly and her family.
And Taylor.
And my cousin Jenna (Jill and Terry's daughter) and her husband Wes.
And Becky's husband Ryan.
And Joan's husband John.
But...
This was a damn good start!
As it started to get dark later, we found out that Jill and Terry aren't as privileged as we are to have a dead-end street and a thug-magnet guard rail right outside their windows.
So, they have to look at this every night instead...
And then it was time to get on the road again since we were staring down the barrel of another 2+ hour trek on the turnpike.
The visit was too short, as always.
Homeward Bound
First of all, we needed gas: With all that apple weight in the trunk, we'd probably even have to use caution crossing the bridge back over the Susquehanna! And we sure weren't gonna make it all the way home on just half a tank.
So, we popped into Rutter's for the first time—which sounds like it would be the name of a raunchy strip club; but it was basically a space-age gas station on the outside and a Wawa competitor on the inside...
And then we backtracked through Dillsburg and hoped that the Dillsburg portion of the drive would end once we got on the turnpike.
It did, at least in the sense that it wasn't wall-to-wall imbeciles this time like it was on the way out.
But now there was a nor'easter happening...
Looks like we won't be hitting 100mph this time, boys.
Meh. Close enough.
— probably someone
We got home just before midnight and lugged all our farm-fresh produce up a flight of stairs...
Then I sat down at my computer to see what I had missed after being away all day long, and that's when Kitten came bursting through the doorway to tell me that Odin was chasing a caterpillar on the living-room floor.
We would've thought we could have waited one night and got a well-deserved rest after being on the road and working on the farm all day.
But? No one wants an apartment full of caterpillars!
So, we were up for another hour and a half shucking three dozen ears of corn, plucking caterpillars out left and right, and carrying all the trash out to the dumpsters.
And even though we ended up not getting to see her on her actual birthday...
Now, please excuse us while we go take a coma.