A Little Roundabout Trip To Nebraska, Day 9 - 12, Hartington - Visiting Kathy

 Day nine broke to a pretty day in the upper mid-west farm country with a brisk breeze and a little chill in the air.  By the afternoon, it was a little hazy due to the wind blowing up dust, the vehicles traveling gravel roads, and the web pic of harvesters bringing in the dried corn and soy beans (they just say beans around here).

Our four days in Hartington, Nebraska were devoted to visiting with Kathy (daughter) and Keith (fiancée) at their home and at the Hartington Golf Club where Keith is the club manager and Kathy runs the café, jobs that have at least one of them there from 5:45 am until around 9 in the evening.  

They have a nice post and beam home on six acres just a few minutes from work.  Its located on one of the many gravel roads and surrounded by fields. 

The above pics are the front and you can tell that it's been very dry.  Below is the back yard which has a sprinkler system.  A big improvement they have made is to plant blue spruces clear around the property.

Their golf course clubhouse is very nice with a large bar area and café area where they can host some good-sized events.  Bev is the barfly on the right in the bottom pic and that's the whole pro shop on the wall behind her.

As I mentioned, Kathy runs a little café inside the golf course club house and she has a group of regulars that come in early for breakfast and she has often told me about them.  As it turns out, she has also talked to them about us so one of my to-dos for the trip was to have breakfast with them.  They are all retired farmers and I really enjoyed learning more about farming from them.  Kathy serves breakfast and lunch, M-F and Keith often helps out as did Bev for this day.

She has a standard menu plus a daily special.

During our visit, we watched some college football, played cards, smoked a delicious brisket on Keith’s Traeger pellet grill/smoker - at 1:30pm, it was at an internal temperature of 170F and looked like this - perfect and ready to wrap.

And we hung around the golf clubhouse where they are also the bartenders most of the time.

Keith was excited to take delivery of a new-to-him 85hp John Deere tractor that will be used a lot in the winter to deal with the snow and with the enclosed cab, he won’t have to freeze doing it.

Deere makes tractors with more than 800hp.  These are serious machines.

It was nice to finally make it to their place and see all of the things we've only heard about.

Photos can be slightly enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

10/5-10/8/24 event dates