A Front End Loader Seems Like Poetry In Motion.

Our discovery of Stone Mountain right here in Burgenland.

Like any good story, the setting was fantastic. Sunny weather, omnipresent Burgenlandish blue sky and vivid greens mingling in the surrounds. Bob was in his ' new ' shorts ( in fact, an old pair of jeans cut short!!! ) and life was going to be extremely interesting.

Bob has his special project in the garden, and we needed to fetch crushed stone for part of it. Off we set, with a trailer behind the chariot. The nearest quarry is in Badersdorf which seems to be the place to be when you are looking for either yummy cakes ( Aloisia's ), great wine ( Jalits ) or as the case was yesterday, stone.

For some odd reason, I have been selected by a voting public of one, to always be the one to have to officiate, do the organizing and ordering in our marriage. Nice one Bob!

As a quarry novice, I got thrown into the deep end by Bob. He stopped the car next to the weigh bridge and told me to go and organize our stuff from the nearby office. Far be it from me to argue with my man, and so I took the steps up into this container-office. There were a few people present, the secretary, and a few drivers.

" Hi, we'd like to buy some stone please. "

Oh, golly gosh, they had a good laugh at my ignorance. A quarry has a gazillion types of crushed stone, from rocks to pebbles and after their giggles, they kindly said that we should drive around and look for the pile of stone that was the correct size.

Bob and I did a fair rendition of Chevy Chase's " Kids, look there is Big Ben! " and eventually stopped near a pile. Within minutes, a somewhat big front loader elegantly traversed the dusty quarry curves to do its deed.

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These front end loaders are huge, and very mechanical in looks but when you see them in motion, you can't help but be enthralled. This front end loader did pirouettes, smooth backward slides and millimeter precision moves. I bet this driver could thread a needle too with his front end loader...

The driver of it was high up in his cabin but had the required cool sunglasses. As I was sporting my own sunglasses, my vision was not its usual 20/20 and Bob must have spotted my rapturous idolization of the driver's skills. All of a sudden, Bob paraded in front of me, flexing his nice calves...

Normally only big container trucks come along to get their stones and it must have seemed strange for the driver to fill up our trailer. Yet, this is where the poetry in motion came in. With grace and pizzaz, the driver dropped our pebbles into the trailer and knew when it was full.

The driver must have noticed my admiration, because as he finished, he did a gazelle like piroutte and moved on his merry way. Wow, that was really impressive...

You know, anyone can drive a Porsche, but not everyone can drive a front end loader!

Look at the size of it! But isn't our Burgenland weather just the best?

The big drop...the noise did remind me of chalk scraping down the blackboard.

Amazing indeed. Brilliant handling skills.

Bob's trying to get my attention... as if I would forget.

Biggi