A Surprise Around the Corner

Yesterday was spent on the road -- or at least a big chunk of yesterday.  I made sales calls today. 

I love making sales calls, but, management responsibilities prevent me from getting out in the country as much as I would like.  It seems there are always e-mails and reports and paying bills and personnel issues and new projects and on and on and on.....that make it difficult to get out and make sales calls.  But, I decided a few weeks ago that this week would be devoted to calling on prospective customers.

One of the things that make my job enjoyable is that most of my travel is in ranch country.  I love ranch country.  I love the wide-open spaces and the people.  I love the small towns that sometimes only have a few hundred people for population.  But, most of all, I just like to see the miles and miles of wide-open spaces dotted with cattle or.........what I saw today.

I had just made a call on a feed yard and plugged in the address of my next stop into my Garmin (I honestly don't know how sales people found some of these places before Garmin) and the directions had me turn north on a gravel road.  The gravel soon gave way to dirt and then sand.  Fortunately, it was a damp morning and the sand was OK for travel.  I was watching the screen to see what was ahead and the windshield to see if the Garmin knew where it was taking me.  It looked to me like the road was getting narrower and the occasional weeds in the middle made me wonder if I might be headed for a dead end.  In fact, ahead of me it looked like the road disappeared into a pasture.

I was wrong.  It just turned.  Below is what I saw.....