Draft Horse Auction

Last night I pulled away from the house right at 6:00pm and made it to Arthur sale barn at 8:30pm. It was cold but not too bad so I brought everything in from the truck into the trailer to prepare for the night. I fell asleep listening to the semis and diesel trucks pulling up unloading. The phone rang at 11:30pm, it was Mike and they were lost, he had been driving around Arthur for 40 minutes, he finally asked someone and found out he was only a half a mile from the barn. Diane and Mike gave me a propane heater for my trailer but it couldn't be run while sleeping. It took the chill off so back to bed I went. At 5:30am I woke up with my nose freezing. That was the only part sticking out of the sleeping bags. The heater was turned back on and I climbed back inside the sleeping bag until the trailer warmed up enough to get dressed. We are talking frost on the windows and this is only the 10Th of October. Finally around 6:20am I went in for breakfast. This was kind of disappointing, I didn't have dinner last night, thinking of the good Amish breakfast I would have in the morning but... the sausage tasted like hamburger, the scrambled eggs were watered down so much they were almost tasteless and the pancake was burned, oh well I did get 2 cups of hot coffee with the breakfast, kind of made it worth the $5.00. The bake sale needed to be checked out, and the home made donuts looked good so bought 1 bag for $3.00. Then it was time to check out the horses. The funny thing was most of the horses I had marked in the catalogue were either mismarked or there was something wrong with the plumbing. Before leaving for the sale, I marked the numbers down I wanted to check out and they were all fillies, today there were only 2 fillies in all that I marked. Later I found out they were substitutes.
Mike and Diane were up by this time, I talked them out of breakfast so they went straight to the bake sale tent. Diane bought some cinnamon rolls and Willow (Diane's grand daughter) bought some popcorn. We thought the cinnamon rolls also tasted a little funny so I broke out the donutes again.
The tack part was fun but frustrating. The first group of 5 draft halters I was the only bidder and we got them for $3.00 each, the next set they put 7 halters with 7 lead ropes and that went for $4.00 each but the lead ropes are the bull snaps, not really what we wanted. After that, halters started going for $9.00 each so we passed on the rest. We also bought a 5 tine steel manure fork, push broom, hay rake, and 2 manure forks. One grooming block and 2 head lamps pretty much finished our buying spree. The total was $136.00. The Haflingers were the first horses through the ring and we were shocked at how cheap they went. There was a very nice 4 year old mare trained to ride and drive AND in foal and she went for $400.00. A yearling half Belgium, half Haflinger filly went for $35.00. Mike wanted to know why I didn't bid on her but she was ugly. A beautiful 3 year old Haflinger mare, sport type, not at all drafty, professionaly started undersaddle, was the only one I bid on but she went too high. I stopped bidding at $500.00 thinking I was going to save my money for the black Percheron fillies from Canada but they actually went much higher than we dreamed they would. So I drove home an empty trailer. Karin called while I was driving home and THANK GOODNESS told me I didn't need to come to the Spoon River Drive. They were freezing, and didn't have much business. Only about 45 people wanted pony rides.