Great Road Trip of 2017.....Part Fifteen/Day Twelve

Part One of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Two of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Three of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Four of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Five of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Six of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Seven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Eight of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Nine of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Ten of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Eleven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Twelve of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Thirteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE  

Part Fourteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE

So we got back to the ranch in the afternoon.

Hubs sat on the porch and had some grapes(and Benjamin Button the dog sat and waited for him to drop some, but he didn't-dogs can't eat grapes).  I wandered around the land surrounding the house instead.

I saw this calf out in the pasture so I called to her.

And she came right over to the fence..........

Benny Button sunning himself on the sidewalk...

Some old wheels leaning on the side of an outbuilding.......

I wandered into the greenhouse but didn't stay long as it was hot as blazes in there.  Tomato plants as far as the eye could see.

Then out into the garden area outside of the greenhouse.........

Squash for days!

Here comes Benny checking me out again.....

And here is Cindy's landscaped flower garden.  There was a creek and a decorative bridge over the water feature too.  So pretty.

And here are the horses.......

Ty and Cindy's son came up pulling a horse trailer, unloaded this fella and put him in the paddock.

And this horse too......

Across the road from the house was a pasture with a bull in it.

At this point Ty came out of the house and said he wanted to show us other parts of the ranch.  Kim and Joel came on the tour, as well as Cindy.  

Ty gave each couple a vehicle to use for this trip deep into the ranch lands.

Here is Ty showing Hubs how this thing works.

Take note of the windshield, or lack thereof in the photo.  The windshield barely came halfway up.  This will be important later on in this story.

The other two couples got off-roading vehicles with full windshields.....hmmm.

Hubs strapping himself into our "death machine".  Notice also that there are no doors on this thing.  It had what appeared to be a cargo net for doors.

And then we were off!  But first, the horse started neighing.  I think he knew what was going to happen and was warning me.  Plus Benjamin Button sat right in our path so we couldn't drive anywhere.  The dog knew what was going to happen I bet.  Animals know these things while us humans are dumb as rocks. lol

Here we all are lined up, engines on and ready to take off.  Side note-Hubs has NEVER driven a 4 wheeler while this was old hat for Ty and Joel........

And here's a shot once we got off the blacktopped road onto the ranch further down the road.

We were last in the line and Hubs was trying to catch up with the other two machines as we bumped along on a dirt path.  Oh goody!  More hitting my head on the roof time, as well as brush wacking my right side along the way.....

Some video I took while 4 wheeling on the ranch.....

Hubs caught on fairly quickly to driving this thing.  Some of the paths had very deep sand covering them too but he just handled the sand like we did snow out East in PA during the Winter.

After awhile flying down the path and trying to keep up, we came to a gated area.  Ty opened the gate and we ventured in to where a water source(a pond)was.  There was some kind of small dead critter(things we call "Squeazeel" after an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show "A Cook's Tour" where he was in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Asia and was served a meat and the translator called it "Squeazeel", which was later discovered to be raccoon)laying by the gate that we had to drive over. 8-/

The pond was lovely.  Ty said his grandfather(or maybe his great grandfather)had created this pond as a water source for the ranch back when it was created.  Land is pretty worthless if you don't have access to water out West.  Water for the humans, the animals and the crops.

We went back out the gated area.  After Ty checked in on us and Kim & Joel in the other 4 Wheeler, we headed onward.  We were now in the middle of the pack with Kim & Joel at the end.  Ty gave us the double thumbs up sign and then we were off again. Notice the sky behind him, all those dark clouds rolling in.......

More dark skies ahead.......

                                       

Then I noticed the sky got even angrier and the clouds began to dip toward the land.  I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw the sky in the shot below.

My last bit of video on this ride to what almost was to my death.....

Soon after I shot that bit of video, we all took off again(we were heading back to the house/driveway but continuing on in a loop to our starting place).  We still have a fair piece to cover before getting back to the path that would take us back to the blacktopped road.

And not a minute later the skies overhead opened up with a tremendous hailstorm.  The hail was about dime sized and fierce.  It felt like being pelted with rocks!

Ty took off and left us four on the other two four wheelers in the dust(well, mud at that point). 

Being in the vehicle with half a windshield was a bad thing....as we tried to drive, the hail pelted our faces over the top of the windshield making it so we could barely see where we were going and we didn't know where we were going since we had no one to follow now out of here!  At least Hubs had glasses on which protected his eyes and let him kind of see where he was heading.  Unfortunately Hubs has a very bad sense of direction so I shouted to him as it was quite loud between the hailstorm and the thunder, "keep following the dirt trail and as quick as possible so we don't die out here on the prairie!".

So Hubs floored it as I curled up into a ball as much as possible to protect myself from the barrage of ice coming over the windshield, while shading my eyes by cupping my hands around them and praying to God to get us back in one piece!

After awhile(what seemed like hours)we hit the blacktopped road and Hubs could go faster.  We had left Kim & Joel in the dust somewhere as they were nowhere in sight.

Since Hubs is directionally challenged I had to watch for the driveway to the ranch so we didn't overshoot it and end up 3 miles past the turn.  Kind of hard to see with all that hail pelting us.

I screamed at him to "turn in here" and we were back at the ranch in the yard.  I undid the seat belt but then in a panic, I couldn't figure out how to undo the cargo net door.  I was about to freak out and dive out the front, over the half-windshield, when Hubs came around and found the latch on the net and let me out.

I stumbled up to the house and Cindy was there with a blanket to drape over me and she pulled me under the porch awning.  I guess they got back to the house quite quickly as she didn't look like a drowned rat like I did.

My teeth were chattering at this point, I was shivering with cold and my dress was drenched.  She led me into the shower room by the backdoor and threw me into a hot shower to warm up.

After warming up I tired to take off my dress.  Cotton knit clothing like I had on was not very happy to be removed at this point.  My dress weighed a TON as it had about 30 pounds of water in it. lol  I couldn't get it over my head to remove it.  It was like Sisyphus rolling that boulder uphill, almost an impossible task.

I called out to Hubs to come into the bathroom to help me get out of that dress.  He ran upstairs and got me warm clothes to change into after that.  I sure could have used a stiff drink at this point, and I'm not talking iced tea!

Meanwhile, as I was taking a hot shower and wrestling with my dress, Kim & Joel still hadn't showed up in the driveway.  So Ty took his pickup truck out there to go find them.  He located them still back on the dirt trail somewhere, jumped out of the truck and took Kim's hand and led her to the pickup.  But when they got to the truck Kim resisted getting in and pulling away from Ty's grasp.  She told Ty she couldn't get in the truck because she had gotten so scared that she had peed her pants and she didn't want to get his truck dirty. lolz

I don't know what Joel was doing while this was going on but somehow Ty got them both back to the house.

Kim got taken upstairs to the bathroom up there for a hot shower and to change her clothes while I was still downstairs and trying to accomplish the same.

Kim described trying to take her shirt off over her head later and she couldn't remove it.  Kim has RA and her arms/shoulders seized up on her.  She demonstrated what she looked like trying to get the shirt off later, and she looked like a chicken with her arms pinned to her sides, flapping and clucking. 8-))  I think Cindy came to her rescue to help with that shirt.  We were all in hysterics later laughing at "Chicken Kim".

After I recovered from this "adventure", and the storm had stopped raining down ice, I had the presence of mind to look around the yard and take these pictures..........

The hailstorm and the driving rain that followed decimated Cindy's garden and sheets of water were flooding the yard,

This is a photo from the porch of the flooding of the front of the yard, the road and the driveway.  What a mess!  At least Ty was able to recover some of his feed crops and they weren't a total loss.

The ever wise Benjamin Button, their Corgi, seemed to stare into my soul at this point.

In my head I heard him saying(if he could talk), "What the heck were you thinking going out four wheeling with Ty?  Don't you know he's a madman daredevil!?  And I tried to warn you not to go by laying in the way, but Nooooo, you didn't listen!" 8-)

Come to find out later that Ty is known for his daring do.  One story goes he was out on the ranch with a horse when a lightning storm rolled in.  Next thing he knew, he was waking up, laying flat on his back on the ground and the horse was dead.  A lightning strike took out the horse and almost took out Ty!  He crawled home on his knees as he couldn't stand up.

Cindy apologized for what had happened(not that anything was her fault!)and then said, "You know Ty use to be worse....he's much better now."  Lord, I would hate to see Ty acting more reckless. lolz

As the sun set Ty made us all a steak dinner.  I should have photographed those steaks....they were HUGE!  The cow those came off of must have been a behemoth!

After talking a bit we all went to bed.  We were all warn out because this day(and Ty) tried to kill us all!

Sluggy