Tennessee Rain Keeps Comin' Down....

Our "Spring Cleaning" trip to the property in Tennessee was good, but we got hit with three days of straight rain, which made it hard to accomplish  some of the things we wanted to get done.

We left early - 4:00AM early - on Thursday for the drive up.  I wanted to get there at a reasonable time since I was expecting to meet Kevin Snyder on the property. Kevin has a John Deer tractor with a Bush Hog and Loader, and was going to do some work for us.

We made a short stop in Macon on the way up to walk around the BassPro/Outdoor World store, and by the time we got to Dunlap Kevin had already bush-hogged the entire driveway!

Next, we wanted to put in some drain pipe (culverts) at the front of the drive, and about 200 ft in, where we were running into some erosion issues.  Kevin started digging the trenches for the culvert while I started working on the big Red Oak tree that was uprooted.

On Friday Morning we ran over to Daub's plumbing supply and picked up two 18" diam, 20' pipes and strapped them on to Kevin's trailer.  Wasn't long before he got them in place, and spent the rest of the day filling in the trenches and packing in the dirt.

We ran over to the quarry - which happens to be less than 2 miles from the property - and inquired about getting some 6"-8" Surge Rock for the culverts.  They calculated that we needed about 7 Tons of rock, and gave me the name of a local hauler who would pick up the rock and bring it to the property.

Unfortunately, It started raining late Friday night and didn't let up until Monday.  The ground was too soft for the rock truck to come on the drive, so nothing got done.

Monday, same thing, so we walked around and picked up a bunch more trash.  Some time during that process we ran into a little friend.

He was as cute as could be.  Looked like a cross between a labrador retriever and a Dachshund.  he had great big paws and tiny little legs.  He followed us around for several hours while we worked picking up trash in the woods.

Brenda managed to pick up about 20 huge trash bags worth of rubbish off the land, and we took a full truck-bed to the recycling center on Monday.

We decided that it would be nearly impossible to keep the place picked up, and to schlep trash, logs, or anything else up and down the slopes, so we took a ride on Friday night to Tractor Supply to look at a UTV. We found one that we liked - and was withing our budget, but they don't deliver, so we'll have to arrange to pick it up.  Probably have to borrow Kevin Wohl's trailer.
But first a place to keep it:
We bantered back and forth between renting a nearby storage unit and putting in a small shed.  Storage unit made sense from some standpoints, but it felt like we were just spending money that we would have nothing to show for when all was said and done.
There was a local store that had sheds - delivered for free - but we needed level ground.  That meant equipment that we could not get on the drive because of the rain.

So, no UTV, No Shed, and No rock in the culverts.

But. I did manage to get the red oak all cut up - went through two chainsaw chains in the process - and we did get a lot of trash off the property.
We also go the drain lines in, which is a big plus.

So, overall, we got some stuff accomplished.  But we could have done more.

I have to learn to take the "farmer's and rancher's" approach to this stuff:  I can't expect to get everything done at once.  I have to do and accept a little at a time, and work on more the next time.

It's a good life-lesson, just hard for me to accept.