Days 4 and 5 on the road trip. The Daves met up with some of the other guys from Tuesday and toured some of our plants. I had been doing the commercial work for the plants for several years and had never been there so it was pretty interesting to me.

We had to wear Nomex lab coats so it looks kind of funny.

At lunch both days I participated in presentations at lunch for the field guys. I got up and told them what I did and how I did it. They were very polite. They kept the yawning down and only a few went to sleep.

We spent the night at a hotel in a town that had the most feed lots and beef packing plants I’ve ever seen. We had dinner with our local managers. We got out late, around 9:30 pm. I went geocaching. I didn’t find any skirt lifters but I did find one cache that I thought was pretty cool.

It was a post office box in the driveway of a fruit stand. I thought it was very creative.

After lunch the last day, we drove the 377 miles back to Tulsa. We stopped at Braum’s at the Blackwell and had the usual. Large chocolate mix with heath bars.

Got home about 10 pm. Great to be back. Gone to long.

As an aside with an autism angle. The national poster person for Autism and Asperger’s syndrome in particular is Temple Grandin. Ms. Grandin, who is an agricultural engineer, has Asperger’s syndrome and has been a great advocate people with autism and has published several books and magazine articles.

In her chosen field of designing packing plants she is also famous. She has some sort of empathy with animals. Her most famous innovation is the inlet ramp from the yard to the killing area. She designed them to be a ramp with a continuous curve that narrows gradually. Somehow the cattle stay calm as they are driven into the wide inlet that goes up at a slight angle and then turns, all the while getting narrower.

I saw a couple of those ramps on this trip. It is very eerie watching the cattle moving very calmly in line to their doom. It is almost enough to turn me into a vegetarian, but not quite.

The whole mysterious thing is like at the crux of Asperger’s Syndrome. Very high intelligence and a different way of looking at things combined with a strange sense of empathy with a total lack of sentimentality. She sensed the cattle were nervous so she determined how to alleviate that while still facilitating their deaths. I cannot quite get my head around it.