Bye bye Normandy... for now !

We left Normandy this morning, after 10 days at Lucile and Nicolas' farm. It went really fast and despite the pretty bad weather, we had a blast. We learnt a lot about goats, cows, cheese and we (mostly me) fell in love with goats, which are really friendly and cuddly animals with a lot of character, basically a very big cat. I had to keep myself from sticking one in my backpack to take home with me. Especially my little Croquette, which is a 2 month old goat that had a problem with her back legs and can't walk very well, and falls often (the fact that she cannot stand up when she falls makes it even more of a problem). So we had to take special care of her and we grew very attached to her (as well as most of the 86 other goats - some of them have very bad characters though...). We also spent a great day visiting the region, mostly Honfleur - old town with a lot of typical Normandy houses and Deauville - posh seaside resort town for parisians.
We are now back in Paris and heading to Rambouillet tomorrow for a couple of my friends' wedding. Then we'll spend 2 weeks in Paris before going back to Normandy to another wwoofing farm !

milking the goats

Honfleur - the harbor

Honfleur - the town center

Windy day on Deauville beach

Beautiful Deauville mansions on the seaside

Our next house !

Goats games

Hope - the calf

Goats games

Croquette

Hard work...

What is WWOOFing?

Some people I talked to about our WWOOF plans seemed confused as to what WWOOF is.   WWOOF is basically an organization which pairs volunteers with small family-run organic farms.   So much of what we eat today is mass-produced by factory farms, that its hard for small family farms to compete.   So they rely on volunteer help.  The WWOOF organization simply gives these farms a place to advertise that they need volunteers. And it gives us a place to find farms to volunteer on.  The farms and the volunteers each pay a nominal fee (about $25) to get access to the list of farms or volunteers.   Once we had access, we could look at the 620 farms in France which were currently seeking volunteers and email the ones we wanted to work on.   They each have a profile, similar to what might look like a 'help wanted' ad.  In the ad they say how many hours they expect, the type of work you might be doing and what type of accommodation they offer.   They usually offer a private room and 3 meals a day in exchange for 5-6 hours of work a day, maybe 5-6 days a week.  They can ask for more, but knowing that they're competing against other farms for volunteers, they try to make the offer as attractive as possible.  Alternately, we post up a profile about who we are, what our experience levels are and what our main goals are (learning to farm, or just a new experience, etc).   The farms looking for people can browse the profiles and contact us if they think we'd be good for their farms.  A few emails go back and forth and if you like each other over email then you'll agree to a stint on the farm.  Maybe just for 3 days, maybe for a month, depends on what they need and how long you have.   It seems like the average time is a week or two.  The two biggest questions I got when I told people about wwoof were, 1) "Where do you sleep", and 2) "What do they feed you?", with the answers being wherever and whatever.  These are just peoples houses.  So in this case, we're sleeping in what is basically a guest room.  And we're eating whatever they're having, at the dinner table, with them.  Some places have built little houses away from the main house for the wwoof guests.  I would imagine you might end up sharing a room with other wwoofers if there were more than just us, but I think in most cases, you'd have your own room at a minimum.   The house we're staying in now was built in the 1500s, but has been updated with electricity and plumbing (and even internet).  It has all the things you'd find in a modern house like a gas stove, a heating system, a dishwasher, and even a TV.   Our room is pretty large and has a huge fireplace in there (the opening is 10ft wide by 5ft tall) but its been converted in to a large bookshelf, which is fine as our room stays quite warm in the night.

Ready ? Steady ? WWOOF !

We have have started our woofing adventures at our first farm : The Farm of Esmeralda, in Normandy. The farm is ran by Lucile, with the help of her husband Nicolas and her two kids, Etienne (7) and Helene (3). The work revolves a lot around the goats, and they require a lot more then I thought ;-)

Most of the day yesterday was spent herding the goats around the huge terrain that makes up this farm. (they seem to be walking and eating ALL day). Most of the time though, the goats walk you and not the other way around. There's also a shepherd's dog, Edwin, which is supposed to help with the goats herding, although as Nicolas says, controlling Edwin is half the trick of controlling the goats. Edwin sometimes charges off on his own and steers the goats the other way, just when you had them going where you wanted. And believe me, controlling 87 goats is not an easy task. Not to mention getting them all back into their barn, which can take a looong time (yes! 2 more in; oops, 4 went out. Ok, that's another 3 in; damn I lost 5 more !)

After running up and down after all the goats (Normandy is quite hilly), it's time to put them to bed for the night, separate the adults from the kids (so the kids don't drink all the milk) and feed the baby goats. Some of them feed from their moms, some other will be fed by baby bottles (cute!). There is one little baby goat that was born 2 days ago and is not in the best of shape. It sleeps inside by the fireplace but needs constant attention as it tried to get inside the fire a few times already ! 

8pm, it's finally time to get back home and make dinner (long day !!). We gulped down our dinners and passed out before 10pm, absolutely exhausted.

This morning we woke up at 7am, had breakfast and went straight to milk the goats. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but after a couple of goats, Rick and I were much more comfortable with it (even though Lucile was milking 4 goats when we were half done with one...). The goat milk is used to make goat cheese, in the brand new lab that we helped finishing this morning !

This afternoon is off, so we taking the time to do some interneting (as you can see) and will even try to go for a run. The days work by shift, so we can do 8am - 1pm or 2pm - 7pm shift, plus a little help in the kitchen. Attached are some pics of the farm, the fields, the goats, and us !

We're off

So Rick has been in France for 1 week now.  Spent a lot of time getting used to the time change.  For some reason, it's always more difficult when you go east.  We've had a few nice nights out - once for sushi, once for  Chopin recital at a cathederal downtown, and we headed in to center city Paris this morning to watch the Paris Marathon, which we had signed up for, but were unable to run due to injuries back in Nov-Jan. 

We're off tomorrow to Nornamdy, for our first wwoof assignment.  We're not sure what to expect.  We have a few details, but not much information about what kind of work we'll be doing.   Some of the farms we'll be on will have internet and some will not.  So hopefully this one does and we'll be able to post some photos as we go along.  Otherwise, the next post will be in 10 days when we finish this assignment.  We're staying close (within 2 hours) to Paris for the first couple assignments as we have some paperwork to do for my visa. 

Arrived!

Well, I arrived in France on Sunday.   I tried to get myself ready for the jetlag by waking up progressively earlier every morning until I was getting up at 3am.   Not sure if it worked or not, as I didn't sleep at all on the plane and have been sort of groggy the past couple of days.

Fanette has made a tentative plan for our travels around France.  We've decided we want to follow the good weather, so we'll stay up north during the summer months, and then head south as things get colder.  Here's a little map which will show the route that she's planned out.   

The months in blue indicate where we plan to be at those times.  Right now we've arranged  farms to work on in Normandy for April and May (just assume that if it pertains to planning and I use the word 'we' I mean Fanette).   We will work on booking the other ones as we get closer.

We're also looking at getting a camper van for this year.  Still not sure as we're not sure how much money we're going to need for this year and how much the house will be bringing in.   On paper it looks workable, but things can always come up.   But we have found a lot of nice little campers for between $1500-$3000.

Movin' on up

I'm moving to France.  That's kinda weird for me to say.  Not the France part, but the moving part.  I don't see a year trip as moving, but I guess if you're going somewhere to live for a year, then technically you're moving there.  I met a guy who said he lived in the Philippines and when I asked him for how long he said 3 weeks.  I guess it's all a matter of perspective.  For me a year is more like a trip than a move.  But if you don't have a house somewhere else that you're going back to when you're done, then you're moving!  So yeah, I'm moving to France.   In 5 days.

I think I've gotten pretty good at this moving thing.  By my accounts I've moved about 6 times in the past 10 years.  I've gotten pretty good at it.  Some people say moving is one of the most stressful things a person can do.  It's right up there with public speaking or quitting a job.  But this all feels sort of natural to me now.  I've got 13 or so boxes in the basement, some are to be donated, some are to be sold, some are to be stored and some are coming with me.  The ones being stored and taken are too large and the ones being donated and sold are too small.  I've got 5 days to try to even out the boxes.  It is just absolutely amazing how much stuff a person can accumulate in such a short period of time.  During this trip back we were on such a tight budget, we didn't buy hardly anything, yet there is a basement full of crap that would prove otherwise.  I know I should just get rid of 99% of it.  I'll save it and then a year (or more?) from now look through it and realize it's all crap and give it away.  If only I could see that now and give it away now. 

On the surface it might seem like I'm completely under-prepared for someone moving to a new country in 5 days.  I'm still driving my car, nothing is packed and I have a ton of paperwork to take care of.  But it all works out in the end somehow.  I'm in my element.

Why are we doing this?

I always promised Fanette that if we ever got married, I'd learn to speak French.  Well, no amount of books or classes have worked for me so far.  The only language I've ever learned to any real degree was Spanish, and that I got from spending nearly a year traveling around central and south America.   So we decided we'd spend a year in France while I learned the language.   Our original plan involved Fanette getting a job, us getting an apartment and us trying to make a living while we were there.  Then we ran in to a guy who told us about WWOOF.   World Wide Opportunties on Organic Farms.  They keep a list of organic farms looking for volunteers.   Most farms offer free room and food in exchange for working on the farm about 5 days a week.  This sounded like such a better deal for us.   Its so difficult to try to move somewhere and buy all the things you need to survive for a year and get set up with a job and apartment.  WWOOFing solved all of that, and was really in line with our lifestyle.   Fanette and I have been eagerly learning more and more about organic living (well, I'll admit this is much more Fanette than me, but I'm along for the ride), so it seemed like WWOOFing was the perfect fit for us.

We spent 6 months in the US rehabbing a house so we could rent it out and have some money to get us from place to place.  Now that we're finished with that, we're on to the next adventure.

We plan to make regular updates to this blog so our friends and families can see what we're up to while we're wandering around France.