Headed South

On Tuesday Robert and I headed south for a long drive in the country. We were heading for Organic Pastures Diary Company who market raw milk to their local grocery stores. It's a totally awesome concept for us to ponder people selling raw milk to their grocery stores but it was wonderful to think that SOME people have this freedom. Who knows, maybe thousands of North Dakotans will some day demand their right to drink the kind of milk that they want and insist that our legislators give it to us too!



I took a couple of pictures of the highway system on our way out of town. It absolutely amazes us how much traffic moves around out here and how quickly. :) Like Robert says, "It's built to handle lots of traffic," but sometimes it's piled up 3 layers deep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An overhead layer.

Finally, after about an hour, traffic thinned down to this. We started driving through foothills which Cora had labeled on our map, "Beautiful country." It was beautiful but it was very sad to see how dry everything was.

Eventually we entered the rich, fertile farm ground of the San Juaquin Valley. It was a different kind of agriculture than we have ever seen as everything is flood irrigated. If they didn't irrigate, the crops would look like the foothills did and everything would shrivel up.

I had never seen cotton growing before so I asked Robert if we could stop and I could get a closer look. I was amazed at how much cotton one plant could produce. There was one bowl that filled my hand and each plant had up to 50 of them of various stages of development. That's a whole lot of cotton from one little seed. Praise the Lord for His magnificent ways of caring for the needs of people.

We were amazed to see almond farms and miles upon miles of grape vines. These are things that we had only read about in books, but now here they were--totally awesome.

We were puzzled as there were many of these trucks with pups moving all over the countryside. At first we thought that they were full of red potatoes but, on closer inspection, we were sure that the produce was too red for potatoes. Then we thought that they were apples but, finally we got close enough to see that the trucks were bringing in the abundant harvest of TOMATOES. Further along we saw the massive plant were they were taken to and I said to Robert, "It's the Enderlin of tomatoes."

Finally after 3 and half hours, we made it to the dairy. We got a tour of their processing plant which is made out 2 old reefers. We actually burst out laughing when we saw their huge separator disks so I had to get a picture of them for you children.

Here is our tour guide, Callie. She's the daughter of the owner and this is their portable milking system. As you can see, the great outdoors is just outside of these walls. They milk 20 cows, out of their 400, at a time and have portable milk tanks to haul the milk back to the farm.

After drinking some of their fine milk, and buying some colostrum, we started the long journey back to the city. I took this picture of Robert, as I had taken one of him 30 years ago on our honeymoon, and I wanted a repeat. I don't think he's changed a bit.

We stopped at a farmer's market out in the country. He bought grapes and I bought almonds. We couldn't resist taking a picture of this sign but we COULD resist buying some.

We stopped at a Wall Mart before we came home. We needed some warm jackets for when we go whaling and also picked up another piece of luggage for our trip home. We're picking up some things out here, to remember this wonderful time with for years to come, and it's clear to see that we won't get everything back in the same bags that we came out here with.

It was the first time that we drove in the dark out here so we were pretty pleased with ourselves when we arrived back home safely. We've been telling ourselves that we'll have to do it sometime as on Saturday night we're attending the OPERA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Being Robert's tooth had started hurting during the day, and he was pretty wiped out from driving 7 hours, I gave him a BodyTalk session. Yesterday he was up and ready to go again, and I'm gaining on this cold with the help of the colostrum we bought at the dairy, so I'm very happy that we took this loooooooooooooooooooooooong journey out to see some cows. :)

Best take my shower as today will be another day filled with fun and adventure in this gloriously, beautiful place called California. THANKS A MILLION TO CORA, ANDREW, AND JACOB FOR GIVING US THIS TIME TO FOCUS ON US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!