A Day at the Auction

Saturday I went to a farm local auction. My dad has been wanting his own hay wagon for quite a while now, and this auction had two of them, so he asked me to go for him (since he had to work) and gave me $300 as his spending limit.

In case some of you are city-folk and aren't sure what a hay wagon (also known as a hay rack) is, its a large 4-wheeled trailer with a flat bed (usually made of wood) that really isn't street-legal but awfully handy to have around the farm. While we don't use ours (or the one we've been borrowing) for hay anymore, they are awfully derned handy when it comes to picking up branches or moving construction scraps to the silo.


I had seen several nice hay wagons for sale but usually all at least $500, so I didn't expect to get a winning bid on anything, but thought it was a good day to go since it was raining at home anyway.

The night before I had also seen this trailer at the sale preview and Dad expressed interest in it. It is a street-legal trailer and we could put a metal bed on it and use it for the lawnmowers and I could use it for small square bales, too. So, he let me know I could bid on this one instead of the hay wagon if it came up first. Okey dokey.

Well, the bidding got underway and I actually ended up with the hay wagon first. It didn't go for much at all, fortunately. I lucked out in that they held two auctions at the same time and the other area had a lot more interest, so I didn't have many people to compete with on it.

However, a little later, I was watching the bidding and waiting for Dad to arrive to see his new hay wagon and the other trailer came up for bid and no one hardly bid on it, either! I couldn't resist, so I went ahead and bought that too.

I thought heck, it was worth it to me to get if Dad didn't want it, and we had two trucks so we could haul two trailers home, right? At least they weren't horses (since I used to have a bad habit of leaving to pick up one horse and coming home with at least two)!

Thankfully Dad was VERY pleased with my purchases. He commented that he expected for me to go over the $300, since I'm a woman afterall. Gee, thanks Dad....

We paid for the items and went into town for lunch (stopped by to see my new lean-to, of course). When we were in town in started POURING rain, and then even hailed some! We lucked out, though--we were able to get out to the auction site where it was still sunny and get hooked up and on our way before the weather hit there.

Yes, you read that right. Between the town and the auction site, about 5 miles apart, it was hailing in one part and sunny and clear at the other. This is Kansas afterall.

So, we went on our way, Dad pulling the hay wagon and me behind him, taking back roads since the hay wagon can't go that fast and it's not street legal.

All the way home, though, we managed to just barely miss all the storms around us.

It would start looking ominous,

and then clear right up!

Overall it was a pretty darned good day--so much better than last weekend. We got a couple of nice trailers to use around the farm, I got a sneak-peak at my new horse building and I got a ton of stuff done on Sunday as well (to be detailed on an upcoming post). Hope you had a good one, too!

Over and out.

~J