A Day in the Country

It was Santi and Peter's turn to play tour guild for me and we were going to take a trip into the country, our destination, an area called Tonteldoos. It didn't take long to get out of Middleburg and you could see the gradual shift from urban to rural as we drove along. Coming down the mountain out of Middleburg we stopped to enjoy a view of the valley we were heading for. The brush had grown very high and there wasn't far before you could have easily fallen over the edge of the mountain. This was not a gentle bank of the mountain and I'm not sure I would have tried climbing down that side of the mountains in my younger years, so we decided that falling would probably be a very bad idea. While walking from the car to the edge, there were stacks of the tall grass that had been cut with a sickly and strapped together with more of the tall grass, that would be used in the thatched hut roofs that you still see here. The roofs are layered on top of the houses and help to keep the house cooler in the winter.

As we meandered down the road farther, the fields were planted with corn. As I've mentioned, the rainfall this summer has been well above normal and it is affecting the crops. They don't irrigate much so they depend on the rainfall to water the crops. There are miles and miles of corn planted, but Santi said it was nothing like the plains in the states! What I found very interesting was that out of nowhere came a coal mine! Even on a Sunday there were trucks waiting to be filled and there was a lot of activity around the area that I think was being used to load the coal into trucks. Peter said that if they found coal on the land, they would mine it. The companies are required to reclaim the land when they are finished, but it still takes several years to be able to plant again.

Once we turned off of the main road the roads were not as well maintained. There are signs indicating potholes ahead and there were! There had been places in the road where they had started repairs and ran out of money, so these large chunks of asphalt are still missing. These are 2 lane roads and each driver is careful to watch for on coming traffic. At one point over 3/4 of the road had been torn up for replacement. As we went farther on the road the paving have ended an we were driving on dirt. With the rain you can image the condition of the road at this point! Time and distance are used to relay information about one area to another. It's the same as we do, if someone asks me how far it is from Bakerfield to Sacramento, I tell them "about 300 miles". When someone asks me how far it is to downtown Sacramento from where I'm at my answer is "about 25 minutes". So, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

While traveling on the road to "The Barn", in Tonteldooes, (translation "flint box, used to light fires, much like matches) our destination for the day, there were small groups of homes, I would be hard pressed to call them towns. Most of these people live near the farm where they work. There was one house where the husband and wife (?) were tending to their property, he was mowing the lawn while she was cleaning up the yard. There was a small vegetable garden where they would grow their own fresh vegetables. Other houses were not that well tended. We came across a very, very old, dilapidated brick home that had not been cared for over the years, the brush was over grown and the yard within the fencing hadn't been cut in a very long time. My first thought was that the house had been abandoned for several years. Peter said that someone, in fact, lived there. We spotted 3 young children (under the age of 10 I would estimate) playing out in the brush in front of the house, they were almost so hidden by the tall, overgrown brush that we didn't see them immediately. The house was in such disrepair that you wondered if the family was that poor and then Peter saw a satellite dish in the yard! They had strung a line from the nearby electric poll, Peter said they were "stealing" electricity because the electric company would never do it the way it was done... and then the satellite dish...? It made no sense to me but Peter said that was how it was out in the "country". I have seen similar conditions out in the country in Bakersfield but in those cases there was no satellite dish!

On these roads, where we would see nothing for quite a ways, there were people walking along the road. I asked Peter where they were going because I could see no destination in site and he answered that back off of the road there were farm houses where the workers lived. Again, being a city girl, I couldn't imagine the walk they had from point A to point B.

One thing I will interject at this point would be the "bus" service in and out of Middleburg. There really isn't a bus system, they use vans as taxi cabs. The roads in Middleburg aren't really wide enough to accommodate buses. For those who don't own cars and live a ways out, they use these taxis to get around town. The taxis even travel out to the rural areas. There are many who live in town through the week and travel home for the weekend. Their only way to get there if you don't have a car. Many of the farmers in the area will load up their workers who live in and around the farm and take them into town to pick up what they need.

That reminded me of my Grandmother, who lived in a "mill village" in South Carolina and her stories of "going to town" when she was a child. They lived on a small piece of land when she was growing up. The family lived in a very small 1 room house that her father had built. I think there were 9 or so kids in family in such a small house. I remember her stories of her father hitching up the wagon and "going to town". They would get up at the crack of dawn (as always) and get ready. They would wear what my grandmother called their "Sunday go to meeting clothes (church attire). The trip to town took all day long! I don't think we can appreciate living that far out into the country! Even when she lived in town in Greenville later in life, her reward for a hard week at work was to go "to town". She would wear her hat and white gloves and wait on the bus to fetch her.

After a long ride (long because of the condition of the roads, not in miles) we arrived at "The Barn". It is a quaint little restaurant, out in what I would consider nowhere, owned by a very lovely 80 year old woman. The barn was built about 1878 and has been kept as original as possible even though some modern conveniences and newer portions of the original building have been added. If you look at the album, "A Day in the Country", you can see the building has been mostly built of rock and mortar. The rocks used are naturally somewhat flat and of irregular shapes. You can clearly see in the photos that where the stones didn't fit tightly, smaller stones were jammed into the holes. The original fireplace was also built out of rock and it was blended into the back wall. There are few tables inside, but they have long picnic benches to sit outside on the porch on nice days.

They had taken old, colorful medicine bottles and had strung them from an old tree branch outside and had a wind chime made by hand, using the bottles as well. Across the front of the building there were old farm implements hanging. At one point when we were looking at the antiques on the porch and Peter pointed out an old sewing machine that he called a Pfaff it was really a very old Bernina. I couldn't find a model number on this machine, but it was a light green with knobs and gears on front and on top. I think the oldest Bernina I've seen is the old 500 series. If someone has an idea as to what model number, I would love to know what it is. There was even an old Singer treadle machine as well, it took the old bullet style bobbin case. The poor thing was rusted solid and you could not even tell the machine should have been black. One thing I did find quite amusing is that a very old pair of leather work shoes had been used to plant succulents in! The shoes were well worn and I would have to guesstimate they were made in 1930's or before.

The house that the owner lives is in a house in the back that was built in about the 1930's. The woman said that it was so old that some of the vine type foliage was creeping to the inside of the house! She said she used to fight with it, but at 80, life was too short so she is leaving those problems to the one who comes after her. There is a walnut grove to the side of the restaurant and she loves to go out and collect the walnuts. Her daughter said her mother spends about an hour a day collecting her "treasures". The walnuts are used in the dishes they make, like the walnut torts.

They make their dinners and when they are out of a specific meal they are out! It's much like the old diners and the "blue plate" specials. There are chalk boards with the daily specials as you walk in telling yo what is available. They make preserves there on the property for sale. Santi picked up some quince jam for toast. I think that will be on the menu for breakfast! (Oh, and it is quite good today :)

The outside of the restaurant has walnut groves that the daughter said the monkeys get more of the walnuts than the mother can collect! I looked around but I saw no monkeys! Monkeys here are about the same kind of trouble as our squirrels are at home. It's just hard to imagine monkeys roaming around the country though! I did have to laugh at the Jack Russel mascot that runs the property. There is a large rock in the yard that is surrounded by wild flowers and the dog will jump up there and just look around to see what he can see!

We said good bye to our new friends and headed back down the dirt roads to the highway and the trip home. In the sky the clouds were billowing and the breeze had picked up. Later in the evening, Santi and Peter headed off to church and I could hear the thunder rolling in the sky from a distance.

When I'm at home, I do keep an eye on what times Santi sends either a post or an email and you're right she doesn't sleep much! I certainly can't function on the amount of sleep she gets! Like so many of us, she crawls out of bed and hits the computer. With the time difference her email can stack up quite a bit! I thought I got a lot of email! Whew!