Road Trip, Part XIII

Thursday, June 2: Again true to my past visits, I was not left to my own devices the next morning. After a late breakfast I rode a truck with CR, a close friend of the S’, delivering her morning’s harvest of fresh asparagus to a nearby packing plant in Granger. After unloading the truck, CR took me on a quick tour of the plant, which had two manual lines and two automated lines with optical recognition techniques that took me back to a most enjoyable course I had taken and then TA-ed twice at Northwestern.

Sent home with a packet of fresh asparagus, I used the rest of the morning to do two weeks worth of laundry and air out my damp tent and groundsheet before I packed them away.

In the afternoon I helped H and K top off and hose down the wine barrels and clean and test all their bottling equipment. Later, H took me out to the vineyards to show off a pond they had dug – a new addition that served as a water reservoir but was also home to some of the largest frogs I have ever seen. I also met a lady supervising a crew of workers whose ex-husband’s father was – small world – a Bengali from Calcutta!