Goodbye Gingin :(

We have been living at Len and Judy's for the week, helping out with odd jobs here and there around the farm.  The first big rains of the year have finally started.  After months of having barely any rain at all we have had a few days of on and off rain, winds, thunder and lightning.  It is supposed to last until next week. Ah, and! The weather here has been in the minus at night time for the past two weeks.  Everything has been hit with frost, the paddocks of feed are ruined, plants and trees are dying.  Len and Judy say they do not remember a year where the frost has gone on for this many consecutive days.  We have to scrap ice off the windows of the cars in the morning.  The poor sheep are shivering cold.  We have the air conditioning on all the time (recycled air for heat and/or cold).

On Tuesday, the shearer came here and he sheared all 70 of Len's sheep.  I helped out a bit with throwing the fleece and picking out the bad bits and then grading the level of the wool.  I really wanted to make myself a pair of UGG boots with the soft wool.  It was a really cool experience.  The lambs were cute going in, not so cute coming out.  Betsy's dad is from Len's rams so all of the lambs here looked like little Betsy.  David and I had a good laugh at all the different sounding Maaaa's coming from the lambs.

Yesterday, we picked up Kendra from the Regan's Ford bus stop.  She will be traveling with us for a couple weeks up north.  We spent the afternoon in the shed with Len working on a seat for the car.  He welded it all together and this morning David and him screwed it into the van.  Judy sewed together some curtains for us and we put them in.  We also had Darryl put in a bed in the back of the van yesterday.  Someone can sleep on the bottom and some can sleep on the top.  Today has been a bit of a getting ready to go day for us because of the rain there is not much for us to do on the farm.  Judy, Kendra and I sewed little cushions with our left over mattress foam.

We cannot believe that tomorrow we will be starting our journeys travelling again.  We will miss our life here.  I don't think it has hit us yet that we are leaving though.  We are ready to survive off of olives, oil, bread and honey.  One of the ladies I worked with at the school has  a bee farm and I went to visit her this week to say good bye and she gave me a little bucket of honey to take on our travels.  After today, we will try to blog about our travels on our computer but we will not have access to internet everyday, as we are planning to live out of the van for the next couple weeks until we find a WWOOFing place to stop at next.  So, next time you read a blog make sure you read all of them as we may put a couple up in a day OR you can just read a really long post.  We will also try to add in a couple pictures.  We have added more pictures up on facebook and still have lots to post.  We do not want to waste people's download space though. 

Anyways, time to spend some quality time with Len and Judy.

Cheers,

Holly, David and Kendra