Wednesday 15 October 2008

Survival is the name of the game







Nearly 2 months since I last posted....goodness me. Where do I start?




Well, we went to Wales at the beginning of September to house sit for some friends...for 3 weeks!!!! Mid Wales. Beautiful hills and mountains, streams and rivers, waterfalls and rocky outcrops. Gorgeous. 5 acres of smallholding with a shetland pony, 3 dogs some hens and a goose to look after...heaven. There was a little hassle with 'our' field before we left, so a friend of ours lent us their horse box to take Bob with us...sort of swopping one woory with another really!! I've never towed a horse box before, let alone for 150 miles down windy mountain roads!! The weekend of the severe weather warnings too!! But we made it. In one piece. Bob travelled beautifully and it was a great experience for us all to have Bob just outside our window for 3 weeks. The boys rose to the responsibility of looking after all the animals and cutting the grass etc There rae lots of pictures so will add those in a minute.


We went to CAT twice and became members so that we can go back again and again. I just love the whole wind turbine, solar power and composting thing. I felt so at home there. I want to live off grid. In a self built house. Simply and as low impact as possible. It felt so feasible while we were in Wales. We even found a couple of houses we were interested in and I even applied for a job at an organic dairy farm!!!! Although I didn't get it :-( No surprise really. We spent 4 weeks in a mobile home ( we stayed on a few days longer!!)and not once did i miss our house. Well, maybe the chickens!


The boys were all keen on the idea of moving to Wales and while we were there, our closest HE family friends moved to Pembrokeshire...we shall miss them and that in itself is enough to keep us focussed on moving to Wales.


So what else did we do? The boys had several trips to the beach and went in the sea, crab catching, visited the Red Kite Centre ( even though they flew over our heads all the time at the house!) and took Bob for a few hacks and even a picnic! Oh and we took the Landy down the Strata Florida byway as directed by Tom!!


We just lived really, but in a beautiful place with plenty of space. I certainly didn't want to come home, and when Rob was made redundant on his return to work, I certainly couldn't see any point. We had already put the house on the market by then. What a month.


We had 2 visits to the vets. One with one of their dogs and one withour own after she picked up the crab catching bait and ran off with it...hook and all. A barbed one so no chance of getting it out ourselves. EEK.