Chapter 8

Day 7 Thursday 19 April 2007 Impact plus 3

I woke up at 2 pm and figured it was time to get up. I headed for the bathroom and did my business then went back to my room and saw a smiling Betsy looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing, I'm just watching you," she said.

"Not much to look at, in my opinion," I replied.

"I don't know, I am starting to get used to seeing you in the buff," Betsy said.

"Yeah right," I said.

"Really, it's not so bad," Betsy said.

"Sure, I believe you ... when pigs fly," I laughed.

I walked over, sat down on the bed and turned, and pulled her over to me.

"Now you, you have a lot of nice things to look at. I really like those big eraser nipples you have," I said as I played with one with my fingers.

She swatted my hand from her nipple, buried her head in my chest and gave me a hug.

"Stop doing that, you're going to make me horny," she said.

"Well maybe I want to make you horny," I said while hugging her to me. She giggled as I bent down and kissed and hugged her one more time, then started to get up.

"Come on, time to get something done today," I said.

"Do we have to?" Betsy asked.

"Well you can stay here if you want, but I have to go and get more stuff," I said.

"No, I'll come with you, someone has to make sure you don't get into trouble," Betsy said.

'That's right, and it is a full time job," I said.

"Don't I know it," Betsy said with a laugh.

I gave her a look and started laughing right along with her. When we got a hold of ourselves, we started to get dressed and ready for the day.

We made it upstairs and I prepared some lunch for us. I warmed up some soup out of the fridge and made a couple of sandwiches and sat down at the bar to eat.

While we were there, Dad and Tony showed up with Kristian and KC not far behind them.

"Good morning. How is everyone doing?" I asked.

I got what could only be called a growl from most of them; I just laughed and went on with my lunch.

Lisa came in about then and said, "Mike and his crew started on the pads for the metal buildings, they should be ready for pouring concrete by tomorrow."

"Great! Now all we have to do is come up with the concrete. Tony, do you think we could take a big generator and get one of those cement plants up and running?" I asked.

Tony thought for a moment then said. "Why don't we just bring a portable plant here, we could set it up and have all the concrete we need."

"There's one up in Harrisonburg that they were using it on a big job site. If we are lucky, it still might be there," Lisa said.

"If, and it's a big "if", our luck holds. Plus we need to bring at least one cement truck for mixing, then sand, gravel and the cement. Well, let's eat up and see what we can find," I said.

We finished lunch and headed out for another fun day of adventure.

"Man, the sky is a lot darker today; the dust from the impacts is spreading faster than I thought it would," I remarked.

"Well let's hope the rain holds off for a little while longer," Tony said.

"I don't know if that's going to happen or not, so we better get a move on," I said.

We stopped and talked to Mike and he told us where we should be able to find everything we needed, so we got geared up and headed for Harrisonburg.

We reached Monterey safely and didn't run into any problems going through town, though we did get a lot of looks again, but no one bothered us.

I decided to go through Franklin to get to Harrisonburg this time, and then through Bridgewater on the way back, so we would keep people guessing as to which route we would take. The only problem being that there were four ways into town, but only two that didn't take us miles out of our way. We would just have to be on our guard.

The drive to Franklin went off without a hitch and our luck held out. We only got looked at when we passed through town. We cruised over to Harrisonburg and started seeing more people, but for the most part they kept their distance and we didn't stop to answer any questions. We had better things to do.

Arriving at the job site that Mike and Lisa told us about and found what we were looking for. It looked like a mixer that you might have at home, only on steroids. It had a full metal cage around it and a conveyer belt that would load the dirt and sand into the machine, plus it would lift the bags of concrete and dump them into the mixer for you.

"The Cube. Well, it looks like it will do the job that we need done," I said.

"That it will," Tony said.

"Tony, you think you can get that front-end loader going so it will be easier to load this thing," I said.

"I don't know, but I'll give it a shot," Tony said.

"Well it doesn't look all that new so we might be in luck," I said.

I had Dad hook up to a lowboy trailer that was on the site so we could get The Cube loaded onto it. I figured if Tony could get the tractor running we would load it too. It would give us another backhoe at the house and would help in pouring the concrete.

Tony was able to get the tractor running and it didn't take much time at all to get the Cube loaded onto the lowboy. We pulled the tractor on behind it, along with an old crane they had on site.

What took the longest was getting everything chained down and ready to go. Finding the chains and getting them in place was only half of it. The real work was the chain binders, getting them hooked on and tightened down, that was the real problem.

We left the job site and headed off to the quarry that Mike told us about. We got there and it looked like they had everything we needed, we just had to get it all onto trucks.

It looked like they only had new equipment at the quarry, and I thought we were in trouble, when I spotted a large front end loader in the back that might just work for us. It was not in the best shape in the world, and we had to parallel a couple of batteries to get the thing to turn over, but it started and seemed to work alright.