DAY 94-98: Our first week of WWOOFing

Our first week of WWOOFing was quite the wakeup call. I mean, we knew this experience wasn't going to be all rainbows and sunshine, but I don't think we were prepared for how tough it would be.

Our first task was to replant raspberry bushes from a small hillside behind the mobile home. First we had to dig about 50 holes in the middle of the lawn by the river. This took us a solid half a day to do 25 holes that were deep enough to accomodate the deep raspberry roots. This sounds relatively straightforward, except we had 3 inches deep of grassroots to pull up before starting to dig. Then underneath this were rocks the size of my head. I swear, multiple times Lizzy and I came across some very old rock walls. Eventually, Lizzy and I split up. I kept digging the hole while she dug and pulled out the bushes from the hill side. All in all, planting these raspberry bushes took us about two days. By the end, we had some serious hand blisters, despite the gardening gloves my mom sent us (Thanks Mom!)

So Monday and Tuesday we planted raspberry bushes, and Wednesday we weeded a garden that looked as if it hadn't been touched in about a year. Let me just say- NOT EASY. While we ripped out this garden, the golden lab Jake continuously barked at us until we threw him rocks to go fetch. What a weird dog. As the ducks and chickens kept creeping closer, we started throwing the rocks in the middle of their flock so Jake would chase them off. All the birds would run away for about an hour until they returned- all except the one eyed goose.

Jake in the our weeded garden!

Lizzy attempting to remove a rock.

The One Eyed Goose. God this thing was creepy. It was huge first of all, it came up to about my waist, and because it only had one eye it would cock its head to one side and looked a bit crazed as it ran around the yard. The One Eyed Goose would follow Oliver wherever he went. From the mobile home to the house, from the house to the car, literally everywhere. And let's just say that because of this, the One Eyed Goose and Jake the Dog were not friends. They consistently got in fights. Lizzy and I always secretly rooted for Jake to put this old bird out of commission, but sadly this never happened.

On Thursday, it was Thanksgiving!!! Oliver was so kind to take us shopping the day before so we could spend all day on Thursday cooking. We made a large Thanksgiving dinner for Oliver and his friend Mary (who also lived on the property), Oliver's daughter Sinead, Star (the B&B manager), and his friend Margarita (who kept escargot snails on the property in a greenhouse) and Margarita's daughter. It was quite the crew at the table and it was an amazing meal. After dinner, I skyped my family briefly and Lizzy and I walked to the only bar for miles. It was pretty funny as we walked into a little Irish pub in the middle of nowhere that only locals went to. We got a few looks, but we enjoyed ourselves and our first Thanksgiving away from home.

Friday was another day of garden weeding- funnnnn. Our backs were killing us so Oliver kindly allowed us to take the rest of the afternoon off. We spent it taking a nice stroll down the road with Jake the Dog.