The adventure starts here!

We have arrived in France! After several hectic days of packing and a relatively uneventful trip, we now find ourselves in the Rhône Valley. The freak snow that had been blanketing France melted just before we arrived, leaving green fields and plenty of mud, and a good opportunity for us to observe the flow of water over the landscape.

One of our first tasks since arriving has been to work on renovating a room, pictured on the right, that was originally the cow shed. We've been sanding the old wormy beam that holds up the upper floor, and planning the earthen floor and cob wall covering. If anyone knows about the finer details of making an earthen/adobe floor on a concrete slab, we would love to hear about it! When this room is fully functioning, it will become our quarters for the remainder of our stay, so we have a special investment in it!

Another project we took on was digging a small pond, when we discovered that a dip in the upper field could hold a large amount of water that was otherwise running right down the hill. In a climate that is extremely hot and dry for most of the summer, water is certainly going to be a challenge, but one we're excited about taking on. So we're discovering ways of retaining as much as we can of this abundance that the snow has left. In the picture, Chris and his brother Paul are hard at work shovelling. Rosemary shovelled a lot too; she just took a quick break to snap this photo!

Since we only narrowly missed Christmas festivities, Chris's dad put on a second Christmas dinner for us, complete with Turkey and (gluten-free) stuffing, and even a bottle of champagne. All very delicious!

We are currently hard at work planning our garden, perusing the seed catalogues, negotiating for the perfect location on the land, and trying to drum up support for using the chickens in our garden plan. This latter is not going over so well. We may have to start a petition.

That's it for now; you can see lots more photos on our online photo albums. And check back regularly! We plan to update this as often as we have news for you and time to type it up!