yes farms! yes food!

baby goats with their butts up in the air all day eating hay! chickens stealing tomatoes off the plant. going for unintended goat rides. shoveling poop hay dust for hours. making and making and making raw goat cheese. eating and eating and eating raw goat cheese. gigantic teddy bear great Pyrenees dog that wants you to love him! felted goat milk soap. surprise chicken with chicks. soft bunnies to touch while you feed them tedious bunny salad. egg hunts for acrobatic eggs. and finally identifying that putrid smell as buck goat urine!

this place is awesome! we are learning lots of different things and having a lot of fun while were at it. these farmers are awesome and they have so much stuff going on its fun to work and hard not to overwork yourself. we've been here two weeks now and it feels so short.

there are a lot of beautiful things close by too... olympic national park is amazing and only a couple of hours away! we backpacked one night in the forrest and fell in love it was great! we hiked a few miles to these natural hot springs and relaxed and got stinky in the sulphery water. we drove up to hurricane ridge where you can see so many mountains its breathtaking. even the beach ten minutes from the house is awesome, logs all up and down the beach you can climb all over, cliffs above and mountains in the distance.

we got a grand tour of seattle by raul (kaitlin's friend from new college). starts with pretty water tower park, then pretty rose garden, to pretty arboretum, to delicious cuban sandwich at the neighborhood troll under a bridge, to scenic drive, to scenic gas works plus lake view, to chocolate factory to dog bar to brewery to ferry then back to the farm. whew! all the while with great company and fun car dance parties. oh and it really started the night before with burrito dinner party with friends and a nice long digestive walk.

all in all this has been a great two weeks. im excited to make goats milk soap today and voyage tomorrow to the mushroom farm!!

Pictures!

If anyone wants to see all 8 billion picture of our great adventure, they are up:

http://picasaweb.google.com/117490582585814749217/GreatAmericanAdventure#

We made it!

So we took off up the California coast, spending about a week stopping at Big Sur, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Arcata, Mendocino Nat'l Forest, and the Redwoods. Of course it was all absolutely BEAUTIFUL. We visited amazing buddies and their cute little kids, and saw some of the most amazing scenery in the universe.
Next we headed up to Oregon for the silliest welcome any state could give us- the Oregon Country Fair. At what is apparently the 'mama of all hippie festivals', we saw all kinds of silly spectacles, including: all kinds of naked and costumed hippie marching bands, an accordion performance about vegetables & animals where the whole crowd was coerced into singing, spinning around, and tickling each other, stilt walkers, puppet shows, theater, acrobatics, a butterfly king, a clarinet player wearing a fez and a rat nose, a woman with a stuffed butt, men in tutus, fake elephants and dragons, old men in pig costumes, old rag time music, a herd of gnomes carrying a giant fake fish, a million naked folks, and more goofy costumes than one can imagine.

We made some great friends in eugene and portland, visited others, and then took off up to the farm in Washington. We got to the farm yesterday, thus completing the first leg of our great adventure! It has been a great success, everything has been totally super awesome and absolutely nothing went wrong whatsoever. My car didn't have any problems at all, we had tons of fun visiting friends & making new ones, saw a million beautiful places, willow only freaked out a million times, Belinda and i made it out here with out beating each other up, and none of us got eaten by bears even a little bit.

whe want to go back to quail springs!

even though we are all the way in oregon now im writing about quail springs in cali, 2 hours north of la, a wondeeful place with wonderful people. a place i could definitely see myself working well with. they are an off the grid community living, making their homes, uplifting their environment, and being really nice and fun while they're at it. they have goats and chickens and turkeys; do permaculture everything, when we were there there was a permaculture workshop for a group of maybe 15 teens. i was really happy to see the creek restoration projects and their efforts to use the water wisely for the land and themselves.we got to see many phases of natural building, meet great neighbors, swim in the pond with fish, eat native reeds, and just fall in love with it all.
thanks to chris and his whole family for having us there and sharing so much awesomeness.

Gila cave dwellings and the desert

We made it out of Texas and drove through the windy mountain desert roads in New Mexico to visit the Gila Cave Dwellings, which were absolutely amazing. The cliff was created by volcanic activity and contains the ruins of cave dwellings built in five caves. People of the Mogollon culture lived there from between 1275 and 1300 AD and it is not known why they were abandoned. The way the structures were incorporated into the natural surroundings was really beautiful and in the caves we saw 700 year old preserved baskets of corn, cave paintings, and years and years of built up soot on the ceiling from fires in the caves.

Next to Arizona where we camped in the desert and saw all kinds of wild life, like road runners and round tail ground squirrels (which look like tiny little prairie dogs). We skipped Joshua tree because it was too freakin hot and headed to L.A. for a short visit with Monica and Kim, where we walked a billion miles from Santa Monica to muscle beach in Venice, ate delicious cuban food, and watched the craziest most awesome film I've seen in a long time, Synecdoche.
Now up the California coast!