Life: Idiotropic

I was folding laundry and I could hear it coming a kilometer away... there's a steady roar... and then it flies by. When we first moved here Kirk heard that sound one morning and said, "there goes a C-140." It wasn't an airplane. It was a big tractor. On Saturday morning I saw about 10 of these trucks go by in an hour. Most of them are even bigger and all are heaped with sugar beets. They use both beet and grape sugars here instead of cane sugar and they have a slightly different taste. Tante Tinny tells me to eat grape sugar every time I'm not feeling well. Supposedly it is very healthy, but I haven't tried it yet.

The sugar beets are huge and roll off the trucks as they go by. We know not to drive too closely behind them because those beets could do some damage to a car. Even running into them on the road gives you a bit of a jolt.

In most of the fields now the piles of beets are getting bigger. I saw a harvester yesterday plowing down the green leafy plants and throwing up large brown tubers into the bin in back. The weather isn't cold yet, but it's cooled down enough where these beet piles will last a good month or longer just sitting out there in the field before they haul them away.

Just before you get to the base in Schinnen, there's a big factory on the right that makes apple juice, yogurts, and other things. This is their big production season with so many apples and sugar beets harvested. When I drove by last week I took these pictures. Their back lot was piled high with several varieties of apples and two big piles of brown beets. A few days ago I drove by there again and the piles were even bigger. When I rolled down my window the sweet smell of apples blew into the van. The factory has tours... that might be a fun activity for the kids one of these days.

A side note: We're used to big tractors and trucks here. After all, we do live in farm country. I like it and find it interesting most of the time. Other than large uddered cows for cheese, all the obvious crops are of the produce variety and make the scenery quite pretty with the various shades of green. But... Monday when Tiara and I were driving back from ballet, she and I both caught sight of a large truck coming into the roundabout ahead of us. It was heaped full, but not with sugar beets. We looked, and looked, making sure we both saw what we thought we saw. Then Tiara broke the silence and asked, "what's in that truck." My reluctant response was: "bones." White and red. Gross.