Saturday, September 11, 2004 - Hickstock!

After that exhausting evening I had to get up early for an appointment with Tim at the gym. He had me on one of those cross-country skiing machines. It was very odd. I couldn't quite get used to the sensation. But it's low-impact, so I'll give it another try sometime soon.

Ah, but that's trivial compared to the rest of the day. The family took a trek to the Western New York Gas and Steam Engine Annual Rally. This is a rather large event (a few thousand attendees), whose main focus is tractor pulls, where they hook up tractors to a weighted sled and compete to see who can get the farthest down the field. There are many different categories of tractors, from little garden tractors to very large farm tractors, plus other specialty tractors like the alcohol-burners. Other things at the show include various engine demonstrations and a flea market. We didn't see the half of it.

Anyway, the reason we were there, because this isn't the kind of event we would normally go to, is because my sister's fiance's family does this for a hobby, and now my sister does too! It was really cool watching them pull that heavy sled down the field. None of them did particularly well in the competitions on this day, but it was still really cool!

Here's a pic of my sister in the middle of her pull in the 4500 lb. tractor weight class!