[orange4boy]

Holy crap! What a week! You thought the bridge collapse was exciting...

Thanks for the concern. It happened at night luckily, not while we were crossing. Today we had a small excavator in and he brought over some old girders salvaged from an Expo 86 building which will be great as a bridge. 75 bucks plus an hour of machine time. We will put some temporary decking on so we can get back and forth easily for now. But that' not the big news...

Unfortunately poor Robotrak took a tumble today. I was driving it up to help with collecting the decking and a branch got caught under my canopy and was going for my head. I ducked and jumped out instinctively but Robotrak kept going and I didn't have time to stop it. It was quite horrible and spectacular to watch it tumble down the embankment through the trees about 40 feet down, bits and pieces flying. It was seriously like a bad episode of CHiPs. The end of a high speed lawn tractor chase. It was stopped by a big alder and a boulder. The excavator driver helped us retrieve it later with a chain and his boom.

Poor Robotrack has a suffered a fractured control panel casting and the canopy and hood are a mangled mess. My ego is slightly bruised but everything else seems fine, miraculously. We will rebuild her... We have the technology. Not the 6 million but maybe like 60 bucks? As you can see, I'm trying to maintain a sense of humour about the whole thing but it is a serious bummer.

I'm very happy to have been a spectator and I now have some safety ideas in mind like a seat switch and a really strong roll cage. I guess lawn tractor safety would have been the moral of the story at the end of the episode.