La vie en France

Three days have now passed since our late arrival at Cavalus. Thus far our work has included fence-making and repair, feeding of horses and the cleaning of their stalls. Since you only feed the horses hay and grains, the cleaning of their stalls has not been as bad as one might think.
Today we took a hike in the afternoon with the Spanish wwoofer who is also staying here and whom we call "the Spaniard." This is because for the first two days we could not remember his name. Since learning his name we have gone from "The Spaniard" to a simplified version of "T.S." which lead us then to call him Elliot for literary reasons and then finally to his real name Harry (pronoinced with an accent as guttural eeh-ree). Anyway, he led us on a beautiful hike through two peaks of the Pyrenees. He has been here with this family for over two months so he knows a lot of the trails.
Aside from the hike we've been pretty bored here so far and with bad weather scheduled it seems like this might not change. Our funniest entertainment has been convincing a stray donkey to eeehhh aaawwwe. As if it's not funny enough that there is a stray donkey to begin with. Oh it should also be noted that our host's wife is a Marxist interpretive dancer of some sort. We can only hope for a lesson or demonstration at least.
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And just to make it a little longer...

We missed ourtrain stop in Boussens (Marisa wrapped up in emails, Ed in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), ended up getting off 2 stops later in the town of Saint Gerons, to find that there is no train back to Boussens tonight and even if there were we wouldn't make it in time to catch the bus to St Girons, where Ivan would be waiting.

So, we are now sitting in a comfortable room at the Hotel de la Gare in Saint Gerons and we will catch a 7:30 train then bus to St Girons tomorow morning. It worked out well, Ivan actually seemed relieved to not have to pick us up that late tonight. And we get our own bathroom and shower for one more night!

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Long travel day

Travel days are the worst. Today we caught a 6:30am bus to the Dublin airport, 9:20 flight to Carcassone (France), bus to the train station, train to Toulouse, 4 hour layover, train to Boussens, bus to St Girons arriving at 9:15pm, where (finally) Ivan, our new farm host, will pick us up and drive us home. That's 2 buses, 2 trains, one airplane, and one car. Luckily we managed to fit in a movie in Toulouse, My Blueberry Nights, a mediocre movie but the only English one playing. That was a nice break in the middle of the day.

France is country #6, if you count one day in Austria, and we agreed that it has become a bit of a blur. There's a "wait, where are we now?" aspect every time we arrive in a new place, especially since we see mostly countryside and they all look pretty similar. We'll be here in France for a little over two weeks and it sounds like the place will be fun. We'll see!

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