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!

Pre-adventure Adventures

It is now less than two weeks until our departure! We thought we'd start off this blog by sharing a few things that we've been up to lately.

It was our first Christmas on our own, without either of our families, which was an adventure!

We spent it at our place with a couple of our housemates who were also around, and together we cooked up two enormous feasts: Mexican food for Christmas Eve, and for Christmas dinner each of us prepared something traditional from our own family. Rosemary chose to make a Bûche de Noël, which is something her mom has been making for many years. She's always made it gluten-free; since Rosemary found out last year that she had to go gluten-free as well as dairy-free, this cake was full of substitutes (coconut cream beats cow's milk any day, in her opinion). It came out really delicious! Chris decorated the finished cake with some nuts and dried local plants (some from our garden) that were lying around to complete the picture.

His own contribution to the meal was the hors d'oeuvre, something that is a custom in his Dad's cuisine. For this, he made some amazing grilled, marinaded eggplants, and nut pâté, which we put on rice crackers. Our drink was one of the last bottles of pear mead that we made earlier in the fall, with pears from our pear tree.

Going back to a few days before, we celebrated the Winter Solstice by stomping out a labyrinth in the back yard. Not quite enough room for a full-sized one, so we adapted it a bit.

Another recent project of ours was our first large-scale apple cider mead! We fermented a whole five-gallon carboy full of fresh-juiced apples, honey, sugar, molasses and spices. It took some time to bottle! Though it's still pretty young, we made quite a dent in the stash a couple days ago for Chris's birthday.

We wish a Happy New Year to all, and we hope that you'll come back to read about our new adventures in Europe and beyond!