Switzerland or Bust

I haven’t been here in a while except to check comments. I wrote a few things and then discarded them.

Things are going well. Rhodah and I are preparing for our next trip. The Italian Embassy in Zambia assured us she would be granted a visa, so we hope to visit Paris, Lucerne, Florence, and Rome later this year. I will be going over old ground again in this post, but it helps it to stand on its own.

The European visa system has been confusing for a long time, but covid made it worse because various countries did their own thing with regard to restrictions. For a long time, we did not understand any of it very well. For a while, I couldn’t go anywhere with or without her because covid paranoia was at its height, and travel to the better destinations was forbidden for everyone. Then countries started opening up and coming up with all sorts of different rules, and they were harder on Zambians than Americans. Now things are sort of normal in most places, but it’s still hard to get nice countries to let Zambians in.

When we tried to plan the upcoming trip, we originally thought we would try Israel, with Italy and Greece as backups. Then we got absorbed in Italy and Greece and let Israel go. The Italians said they could give us visas for both Italy and Greece, and they have an embassy in Lusaka, so we worked with them. Other countries would have made her mail her passport to South Africa or Zimbabwe. We thought that would cause an unacceptable delay. Then we found out the Italian process was slow.

The embassy employee who interviewed Rhodah got very upset with us because we had not bought airline tickets. We made hotel and tour reservations, but we didn’t buy flights because they are nonrefundable and we were not sure we would be approved. We had been rejected by other countries in the past. The employee said failing to buy tickets was a major reason. She said we had to buy tickets and then try again.

Now we have tickets, so if they don’t let us in, we can kiss a large sum goodbye.

While we were playing this game, we learned that any Schengen area country can grant a visa for any other Schengen nation. The Schengen area is almost the same as the EU; it’s a bunch of European nations that cooperate in travel and immigration matters. There is no such thing as a visa for one Schengen country. If Spain says you can visit, you can to go Sweden or Poland or any other Schengen destination. We had been given the impression that Italy could only get us into a few countries, and that’s why we chose Greece for the second segment of our trip.

Greece is a wonderful tourist destination, but who wants to go in summer? Knowing we could do better, we decided to go to France and Switzerland instead.

If you have to apply for a visa before traveling, like many non-Americans, you have to choose one main destination. You have to spend more time there than anywhere else. For example, if you spend three nights in Spain and two each in Sweden, France, Germany, and Austria, Spain is your main destination, and you have to get your visa through Spain. If you spend equal amounts of time in Spain and Germany, but you enter the Schengen area through Germany, Germany is your main destination.

Once you’re in Europe, there are no border checks. Or so I am told. You can go wherever you want. If we wanted to, we could forget Italy entirely and spend most of our time in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, if you say a country is your main destination, and then you spend more time somewhere else, the authorities may find out, and then you may have a problem when you take your next trip.

They say they’re trying to prevent smart tourists from overloading embassies that are known to be easy. It’s silly, really. If France trusts Belgium to ascertain that I’m not a terrorist or potential illegal alien before a trip to Belgium and France, with Belgium as the main destination, France should also trust Belgium if I decide to spend more time in France. This is obvious.

In any case, we will be spending more time in Italy than anywhere else, so the Europeans should have no problems with us in the future.

The Italians make hoteliers and short-term landlords inform the local police of the identities of their foreign guests, so I suppose the government would know if we cheated. I’m not sure.

We will be celebrating our anniversary in Europe, belatedly. Don’t worry. I’m bringing a present. I got Rhodah some really nice dishtowels. They’re factory seconds, but you would never know it.

In other news, the saga of the tractor may be coming to an end.

My tractor needed a skid steer quick attach mount in order to be really useful, so I installed one and modified the bucket to accept it. Buying a new bucket was not possible because of Joe Biden and the apocalypse. The installation and fabrication were unpleasant tasks.

At the same time I decided to make these changes, the steering cylinder started spurting fluid, so I had to take it out and have new seals put in. This was surprisingly hard, because Kubota puts its cylinders in the wrong place. I could not replace the seals myself because Kubota won’t publish specs, so I had to pay a shop.

When I got the cylinder in, I turned the steering wheel to move it so it would line up with the attachment points. The rear end of the cylinder ran into my engine’s front gear case and knocked a little hole in it, and engine oil started shooting out. For several weeks, I have been trying to get it fixed.

I could just call the dealer and tell them to take my life savings, but I thought I could fix it. I bought a new cover and cleaned it up and painted it, and I got all the gaskets and so on. I removed the tractor’s top cover, radiator, and fan. Then I learned that the bottom two bolts on the gear cover were buried between the frame sides, behind the front axle.

No problem, right? You undo a few bolts and move the front axle forward.

Wrong. You have to remove the front half of the tractor’s frame from the engine and move it forward. Mind you, my tractor’s engine can’t be started until the oil is contained, so I can’t run the hydraulics, and I can’t get the front loader off without them.

In short, it’s not going to work.

I had a guy out here claiming he could fix it, but he vanished. Does’t return emails or texts. Phone won’t accept voicemails. He is gone. It’s either me or the dealer.

I finally decided to get some steel-reinforced epoxy putty and jam it in the hole, which is very small. As far as I know, oil in an oil pan is not under pressure, so it should just be a matter of creating a seal. People say epoxy putty works, so I’m going to try it.

If it works, I’ll put the tractor together and keep using it while watching the oil. Then when the weather is cool, I’ll decide whether I want to do anything else to it. It may hold for the life of the tractor.

If I can’t get it to hold oil, I’ll give up and pay the dealer right away. But I don’t see how it can fail.

I don’t want to keep fooling with it in this heat. The sun bakes the area where the tractor is sitting, and for some reason, it seems it always starts raining as soon as I walk outside. The bugs are pretty bad, too. I would rather deal with this problem in October or November. January would be ideal.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot for trying to fix the tractor myself, but that’s not right. You’re supposed to try to fix things yourself. I probably saved $1500 fixing the steering cylinder, because it involved removing a lot of parts from the tractor. Over the years, I’ve saved a huge amount of money doing things myself. I cut and moved trees. That’s incredibly expensive. I installed appliances. I did electrical work. I painted. I mowed. I fixed small engines. I used woodworking and metalworking skills to make things instead of buying them.

When you do things yourself, you will sometimes make an expensive mistake, but over time, you come out way ahead, and you become much less dependent and helpless. I apologize for nothing.

I paid a couple of guys $6000 to dig a trench and run 120 feet of wire to my workshop. That was insane. Once the wiring was in and I had 100-amp service instead of the old 50-amp service, I installed outlets and a big breaker box myself. I installed overhead pneumatic lines with multiple drops. I could have done the wire run, too.

I built a shooting platform with a steel roof. It will outlast the pyramids. I built a shooting bench out of thick-walled 2″ square tubing and pressure-treated 2 by 6 boards. If Jesus delays, it will be in use 200 years from now.

I don’t care about making the tractor worse. It’s part of the cost of not being useless.

I had a big oak in front of my house, and it snapped maybe 20 feet up. The upper part got stuck in a horizontal position. The cheapest price I got to drop it on the ground, with no bucking or disposal, was $800. This would have been a 15-minute job. A tree company could do fabulously well charging $200 for 15-minute jobs. I would have been glad to pay that much.

I ended up using a fishing rod to cast a line over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a rope up. Eventually, I had a huge towing strap on it, and I pulled it down with the tractor. Cost: nothing. Cutting it up and moving it probably took an hour. After that, I felled the upright part myself and got rid of it. I still have the stump, but the $800 job would have left it as well.

I can rent a skid steer or excavator and rip up every stump and rock in my yard for under $500. Better than stump grinding, which leaves material in the ground. I’m planning to do this once the tractor is working. I need it to move the wood.

Sometimes I think about buying a new machine. A tractor is a pretty poor all-around tool for this farm. It only lifts 1500 pounds on the loader, and it can’t hold a light to a skid steer or excavator when it comes to digging and unearthing.

Someone told me I should get a telehandler. This is like a skid steer, but it has a telescoping arm on top of it. You can put skid steer attachments on it. You can use it as a forklift and put a car on top of your house if you want. They’re not great for digging, though. They’re about like skid steers. You can move a lot of earth as long as you like shallow holes.

A skid steer would be nice. It would pop big rocks and stumps out effortlessly, and it would be a good forklift. It wouldn’t dig deep holes like an excavator, though, and it would duplicate some of the tractor’s functions.

An excavator would tear out rocks and stumps, and it would let me dig any kind of hole I wanted.

I think the best machine, though, is a true backhoe. There are fake backhoes which are really tractors, and they’re not that great. They call them “TLB’s.” Tractor-backhoe-loader. A real backhoe has a backhoe boom attached to its frame. A TLB has a wimpy three-point attachment, and people complain about them all the time. A real backhoe can exert 5 tons of upward pressure with the lip of the front bucket. A tractor is doing well if it hits 1.5 tons. No comparison.

A real backhoe would push fairly big trees over, making it unnecessary to fell them with saws. Pushing them over would remove the stumps from the ground, solving an enormous problem. If anything remained in the ground, the front or rear bucket would make very short work of it.

A backhoe is great for digging. You can dig a hole for a swimming pool or septic tank with one.

I could use a backhoe to move my berm and make it higher. That would be hard with a tractor.

You can get a decent used backhoe for between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, and you can sell it for about what you paid when you want to get rid of it. That’s a deal, compared to renting by the day or paying someone else to run a machine.

The key is not to have any expensive mechanical problems while you own it.

Something to think about for the future.

Anyway, once the tractor is functioning, I will build a fork attachment for it and start cutting unwanted trees. After that, I can think about machinery to pull the stumps.