Relative Something

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Guess where we are now. Here’s a hint:

There is no lake in that photo but the lake place is where we are.

Yesterday morning, while the excavators were picking up where they left off the day before on ripping up the old driveway asphalt, I was rigging up the bike carrier on the back of Cyndie’s car. We drove over the freshly dumped gravel until we reached the backhoe at work and then took to the grass to get around it.

Two and a half hours later, we were up in the north woods.

Wasting no time, we walked our mini labyrinth in the woods, had lunch, went to the beach, swam in the lake, I took a cursory spin on a standup paddleboard, played a card game on the deck (CrossCrib!), and binge-watched the end of season 1 of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime while eating dinner and later, ice cream for dessert.

We are definitely up at the lake.

I gotta say, Clarkson’s Farm has totally swallowed my brain. I think it was really well produced. I only knew Jeremy Clarkson in passing, by way of having spotted him when channel surfing past episodes of the Top Gear or Grand Tour programs he co-hosted. After getting to know him as a bumbling novice farmer with money to burn, I can say my impression is very mixed. Part of me definitely likes him. All of me doesn’t like parts of him that come across in this humorous documentary series.

However, the supporting characters in the adventure are wonderful and the challenges represented are completely relatable. It definitely throws me back to all the firsts we’ve encountered when taking on the care of animals and management of rural property. Our situations are muted in comparison to his dealing with 1000 acres and growing crops using all manner of agricultural machinery, but plenty of the sentiments are familiar.

I think back to my not understanding the terminology of components of a trailer hitch, trying to figure out how to rake hay into windrows using my diesel tractor, or raising chickens with zero previous experience and I feel like Clarkson’s Farm could just have easily been Cyndie and John’s Big Wintervale Adventure.

All we needed was a top-notch camera and sound crew on hand 24/7 to record it all.

Actually, I’m really glad that never happened.

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