Well folks, I've waited long enough. Let me get to retelling that next adventure of ours.

After Ben and Diny dropped us off at the train station, we traveled across southern France, cutting through the larger cities of Toulouse, Montpellier and Nîmes. The best part of the journey was seeing the Pyrenees -- beautiful, snow-topped and peaked mountains -- off in the distance. (If you plan on taking this journey, sitting on the right side will mean a slightly better view and significantly less interaction with the people sitting on the other side of the car.) Our trip ended in Valence, where we had to stay the night. There are only a couple of buses that run out to our third host, and we arrived after the last one had already left. A night in a beautiful Mediterranean city -- boohoo. A visit to Valence (one to three days is enough) is absolutely recommended. I found it almost perfect. The downtown area is full of narrow streets with charming bakeries, restaurants and boutiques. There is an intriguing view from the city plaza and pavilion of a large, mountaintop ruin. The park Jouvet is lovely, full of cultivated flowerbeds and students on their lunch breaks. We ate dinner at Le Rabelais on the Place des Clercs; we both had the regional specialty, ravioli. Matt's with mushrooms, mine with cheese. Chocolate mousse for dessert. We met the two French girls at the table next to ours on the terrace. They bought us manzanas -- a green apple liqueur.

The next day was the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré -- a regional bicycle race, a smaller race than the Tour de France but is also very important to cyclists from all over the world. Many of those who win the Dauphiné go on to win the Tour de France. Parts of downtown were blocked off for the race, so we watched the introductions of all the participants and cheered at the starting line.

We stayed at the Hotel de Lyon, a very small and basic hotel, but that was also clean, inexpensive and offered free Wi-Fi in the rooms. Also very close to the train and bus station. (Note to travelers: Valence has two train stations -- Valence Ville and Valence TGV. TGV is outside of the city and requires taking a cheap bus from Valence Ville. The ride is only 10-15 minutes and costs 1.80€. Purchase tickets in advance at Valence Ville bus station.)

The ride out to the village took approximately two hours, cost just under 9€, and had me gripping Matt's arm, fearful of a fall from one of the mountain bridges or over the cliffside.
Arriving safely in the village, our new host was already waiting with her truck to take us up to the farm.

This farm was the one we were the most looking forward to (goat cheese!), but also expected it to work us the most physically. We were quite right about this second part. We originally planned to stay just short of a month; we left early. I feel a bit torn about what to say of our experience. Considering everything, I was not pleased with our experience there. I'm happy we went, of course, and I learned much about myself, about Matt, and about at what point it's okay to give up and throw in the towel. I don't want to give a bad impression of the farm as a whole, as I suspect many of our frustrations to be purely situational. Our host was having some difficulties in her personal life -- her girlfriend was just laid off from her factory job and one of her coworkers had committed suicide. So at 45 years old and with seemingly limited skills, she was unemployed. Our host's husband -- they have been separated for two years -- was also coming to visit for a long weekend. We were once again the only WWOOFers on the farm, and I think we felt a bit neglected.

Rather than to reflect back, I will post something I wrote in my journal during our stay. (We had limited internet access on the farm, so I took to journaling in my Moleskine.)

***

It's our third full day on the farm and it's our day off. We slept in until 8:00. (Note: Normally we woke up at 7:00, ate breakfast at 7:30, were in the stable to milk the goats by 8:00.) We ate our muesli and goat milk breakfast and took off for a day in the valley - that is to say, in the village. (Note: Everyone on the farm ate more or less the same food. Especially the muesli, from the WWOOFers to the goats to the dog.) The village has two sports bars, a couple of churches, a boulangerie and butcher shop, a library that's open 3.5 hours a week, an auberge. Everything closes at noon, so we bought fixings for lunch and ate on a park bench. Matt explored for a bit and found a local's cherry tree, and I watched men lean out of their windows to get a signal good enough to talk on their cell phones. We went to the beach, where we bathed in the river Doux. The water was cold and refreshing, and we prepared by bringing bathing suits, a razor and a bar of soap. After sunning ourselves dry we visited the snack bar near the beach -- a Heineken, in the can, and a Coke, in the bottle. Fountain, caged birds, Nestlé umbrellas and a breeze. A man in a blue Ringling Bros. Circus t-shirt, carrying a green backpack, wearing a ponytail and beard and thick glasses like I've seen Cortázar wear in pictures. Now, I feel like I'm in Florida. Beautiful nature, casual conversation, wet swimsuits draped over plastic chairs, cheap artificial decoration. A caravan.

Our present farm leaves much to be desired. There are at least three large vegetable gardens, too much to care for in addition to the goats, cheesemaking, and the three-month-old puppy, Tuey. (Et tu, Brute?)

We live in a quickly-restored room that has a ruin on one side and a cellar on the other. Next to the place where they slaughter the goats. On the wall hangs an old scyth and a pitchfork. Goat skin carpets. A dry toilet that we have to empty regularly, no drinking water, spiders the size of our fists that our host forbids us to kill.

The hamlet is high on the mountain with little around to offer shelter from the sun. The soil is very dry. Great view of the valley, especially at night, and the moon has been swung strikingly low in the sky and is big. When a car drives up one of the hill's winding roads, the headlights glow and curve like a fluorescent snake.

We work from seven to eight hours a day. Outside it's 30 degrees (86 for us Americans). We haven't been taught how to make the cheese, but at 8 am every day we do our best to milk the goats. Our host is Belgian, has lived in Germany and Africa, is not very talkative to us. We receive privacy but no place to spend it. This farm feels more like France than the others, maybe because we hear the language so much more.

***

As time went on, the puppy went from adorable to annoying. No shoe or leather glove was safe. We continued to work 7-8 hours a day, always milking the goats twice a day (8 am and 7 pm). We ate an unsound amount of goat cheese and milk. The milking was all done by hand, so we joked that should one of us ever be stranded in the mountains, we could always milk a goat for food (presuming, of course, we could catch one, and one that was giving milk). When we first arrived, our host gave us some of the fresh milk in champagne flutes. It's her version of champagne, she says. Still very warm from being inside the goats. Politely, we finished the glasses.

We never did get to make any of the cheese -- which is what we really wanted to learn. In the gardens, we picked berries (I realize this sounds like a task for farm girls in whimsical fairytales, but is really quite laborious), strung wires for tomatoes, cleaned the goat stable, spread manure and of course, pulled weeds. One of the hardest tasks was using hoes to break-up and build the soil around the potato plants. But the highlight of our stay for me was harvesting (accidentally or otherwise) potatoes. I could dig for potatoes all day! Very rewarding, even when they are the size of marbles. Real cute little things I liked to stick in my pocket.

Here's a story I'm sure at least one of you will enjoy. As previously mentioned, our living quarter was outfitted with a dry toilet. Not the fancy kind of dry toilet you see in green-living magazines, but a bucket with a wooden seat built over it. After using the bucket, we would take a trowel full of sawdust and dump it in the bucket. This covers the smell. It works quite well, I admit. I came to the decision that it would be one of Matt's duties to empty (as we so endearingly called it) the shit bucket. So every other day or so, Matt would take out the bucket, clean up any spots that resulted from poor aim (oops), and walk down the driveway to the dumping hill. One day, Matt concluded that it was my turn to empty the shit bucket. Okay. If I can sleep within ten feet of spiders that probably could and happily would feed on a small bird, I can empty a bucket of feces. So I walked with the bucket and the dog down to the hill, grabbed the rim with one hand and used the other hand to hold the bottom, and tossed. But instead of tossing the contents of the bucket, I threw the whole bucket. The little slick flew out of my hands. So I had to climb down into the pile and retrieve it. Eugh.

Our last working day coincided with Fête de la Musique. We spent the later part of the afternoon at the outdoor concert and around midnight, after a hot dog and some wine, we made our way back up the mountain in the dark. Another WWOOFer arrived our last night, so she was given our living quarters. We were transplanted to an unfinished room with no door or windows. The room is where they slaughter the male goats; blood stained the concrete and a large meat hook hung from the ceiling. There was electricity, so we plugged in an industrial floodlight so that we could see our way up the ladder into the loft area where our mattress was stored.

By the time we were finished, we were very tan and very thin -- but also strong. Unsurprisingly, meals heavily composited of muesli, salad and goat cheese don't offer the same heartiness as, say, meatloaf and baked potatoes. But after working farm tools and climbing up hills long enough, even skinny people such as us will bulk up.

So where did we go, after having had enough of the isolated farming life? The big, bad city (MY big, bad city) -- Berlin. And after spending a week hiking and looking for the right view, what did I get to see from the plane? The peak of Mont Blanc.

Here is a poem I started at Le Bourmier and finished at La Bouyssette.


It's high noon and you wouldn't know it
if not for the paternal sun, benevolent though
by and large mischievous, and the more certain papal bell,
its cast iron clapper signaling to a vacant
and outdated village square.

The neighbor herds her plucking hens
before their operose bird-blood overheats,
but the laggard chick Phaeton, dressed in dust,
totters eastward, his tiny feet stamping ground
feeling for the spring.

Just as the peaked summer teases the aged farmstead
for its tenacity despite another sparse harvest,
each methodical toll of the steady bell mocks the seasons
for their affected, medieval rituals and for their
idle revolutions.

Meadowside the lonely wether Quasimodo bleats
for his mother, who deafly feeds his she-twin.
Suckling greedily, her inbred knees buckle and
her hind legs falter, a result of some infantile,
milk-borne disease.

The resonant and lusty knell finishes, its closing note
carried away by the western zephyr. The stale soil
cracks under the sun, whose ray, thick
and august, surveys the hamlet -- a tragedy
flanked by superstition.

Excused from terrestrial constraints, the spider,
ensconced in the dun shade of the belfry's eave,
defends her citadel, a neurosis detected in the perfection
of her lacework. A horde of her kin abscond from
their webbed asylum, relieved.

The stoic bell pitches soundlessly over
the calloused fields, an idol among rogues.
The predatory sun keeps even the ruffed buzzards
from savaging the deserted estate. It's high noon and
wouldn't you know.

How we perceive ourselves, as Americans: Big. Much too large for European homes. We were always knocking shoulders, hips and knees on the doorways of the gîte. Stubbing toes. Dwarfing teaspoons. Eating the most out of everyone.

Annie -- another of Diny's neighbors, an elderly German woman married to a Russian -- feels similarly about us. She told us stories of WWII and the Occupation. To her (being a child) the war and air raids on Munich were amusing. She was young, an only child. Her family built a bunker. She remembers being sent by her school into the windows of bombed buildings in order to pull valuable items out. Her and her classmates were instructed to help clean and set-up a veterinary hospital that had been bombed -- only to have it bombed again once they were finished picking up broken test tubes and needles. When they liberated the work camps, all the real criminals were also released. It was a dangerous time and all they had was stolen. She recalls the Marshall Plan and the planes dropping candy and shoes. Later, her family owned a villa and the American officers staying in the area demanded to stay with them. The first thing she noticed about them was their gigantic size. They opened the door to find giants before them -- all of them wanting, above anything else, a long, hot bath.


Corinne also told us her impressions of Americans. She says, most everything she knows of America and its citizens comes from movies. Of course she knows better, but she has the impression that we are all movie stars. Tall, confident and good-looking movie stars. Who speak the "nose language." She traveled to the States when she was younger, taking a grand tour of the country with her family. But the most memorable part for her was staying at a holiday ranch in the Southwest -- riding horses in the morning to eat breakfast prepared over an open fire and watching real cowboys.

Matt and I found the privacy we were hoping for at our next farm. Again, we were staying in the gîte, but this time it was a separate house from our host's. We had our own bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and even a TV. (We satisfied our nostalgia for American culture with tapes of old Simpsons episodes and a viewing of Jaws.) The property was big, but enclosed by trees. We could hear the neighbor's dog bark from farther away, but not much else. On hot, sunny days (of which there were many), we could swim (European style -- topless) in the bio-pool. A bio-pool does not contain any chlorine, but is heated by the sun and salted to keep down the growth of algae.

Diny and Ben are Dutch and retired to France after careers in pedagogy and engineering, respectively. They treated us with respect, generosity and curiosity -- we were their first WWOOFers. They kept two llamas (Louis and Victor), two donkeys (Eeyore and Maya), five sheep and a few chickens. Diny had a large vegetable garden and some fruit trees, though still not anything we would call a traditional farm. She sells her produce to guests renting the gîte and to a couple of neighbors, but generally keeps it to feed Ben, herself and company they have. Once again, we ate very well! We ate mainly vegetarian meals, but there were a few treats for us omnivores. I especially loved Diny's chicken curry (and took the recipe) and another dish with red currants and duck, along with some sort of savory sauce. One evening, Ben and Diny were going to a dinner for a cultural group they belonged to and invited us along. We ate a proper, multiple course French dinner at the Hostellerie de Goujounac. The restaurant is owned by a Dutch couple, but they prepare French food -- and do it very well.

Many of the neighbors in the area make foie gras and paté, so I had some of that, too. Plenty of Gouda, and strawberries! Diny's garden produced so many strawberries we couldn't pick and eat them all. Much of our garden work involved harvesting, which in an obvious way is more rewarding than planting. We plucked and shucked broad beans (known in the States as fava beans. We love these!), and spent several hot hours picking currants, strawberries and raspberries so Diny could make jam. Jam-making is something everyone seems to do here, and it is a surprisingly easy process. I certainly plan to bring my knowledge back home. Fig jam and chutney, oh, oh.

Diny taught us how to care of growing tomato plants, like how we are supposed to remove the thieves growing between the branches every few days. Diny had the benefit of using organic manure to fertilize her garden and her soil was practically ideal. It didn't have as much clay as in the Dordogne and very few slugs.

For the animals, we built an electric fence around one of the meadows on the property and moved the llamas and donkeys. Our last day it rained, so we cleaned the sheep stables. The job was exactly as one might imagine: pitchforks, a tractor, a stall of straw and manure. Not so bad, really -- if you don't mind getting a little dirty.

One of our other tasks was to split the firewood. Preparing the firewood is a two-year process. First it is collected from a tree that has fallen in the surrounding wood. Then it is stored to dry out. Then split. Then stored again. Then cut to the proper length. Then placed near the house to be used when necessary. Of course, we were only on the farm for a couple of weeks, so we only had to worry about taking the trunks and quartering them. Ben keeps a hydraulic-powered machine in the garage that wedges into the wood and forces it to split, but sometimes Matt had to hatchet the thick or flexible pieces that resisted the machine. His persistence is something to admire -- except when it involves fatigue and axes. Then I had to step in and tell him to give it up. After all, we aren't exactly insured.

In our free time we took walks and rode bikes to the neighboring city of Puy l'Eveque (dating back to the middle ages). One day we went with Diny to the market in Prayssac -- a pretty market full of vegetables, fruit, honey, meat and cheese in a busy town. Highly recommended. Another day we took a walk with the llamas to one of their neighbors, Madeline, a 94-year-old French woman. The house she is living in is 400 years old and was owned for several generations by the family of her husband, who had died at least a couple of decades ago. Now she never leaves the house, but is more than happy to accept visitors. Even for ones who show up unexpectedly, she will pull out a box of cookies (madelines) and pour peach-flavored syrup and water cocktails. She spoke no English, but I could understand her French almost perfectly -- even though most of the conversation revolved around village gossip. It was inspiring to see a woman so full of life at that age. She has the most amazing memory, reciting dates and antecdotes with no trouble at all. She even remembers where she was and what she was doing the day of the Normandy invasion.

On Sundays we all took the car for touring the Lot valley. I never realized until this trip that south of Paris, France is very rural and very hilly. Actually, the Lot valley seemed to be a hybrid of upstate New York (the mountainous terrain), northern Michigan (the sounds of birds, crickets and lawnmowers, lots of evergreens), and Malta (the villages with ridiculously steep, narrow roads that are only accessible on foot). There are several famous grottos, some with paintings and others with spectacular rock formations. It seems that any worthy town has a grotto or medieval ruin to offer its tourists. My favorite trip was to the grotto in Padirac (le Gouffre de Padirac -- l'incroyable aventure souterraine).

First we took an elevator (and then climbed down stairs) down over 100 meters. Once underground, a boat that could only hold eight people at a time took us on a trip 500 meters long, floating on a subterranean river and twisting through the vaulted passageway of the grotto. It was cold underground -- the air stays at a temperature of 13 degrees Celsius, the river only 12. In some parts, the river is as deep as six meters. After the boat ride, we disembarked and continued with a guide walking us through the grotto. In one "room," a giant stalactite drops down 60 meters into the middle of the lake. In another, a stalactite 75-meters-long hangs from the wall. The vault is 94 meters high, which means that only 9 meters of earth separates the grotto from the earth's crust. As for the stalagmites, this huge vault means a long fall for water droplets. Instead of slowing forming upward, these strike the floor and spread to create formations that look like shells, or piles of plates -- or as I observed, brain coral, cauliflower and mushrooms. The lack of lighting made it difficult to take pictures. It is impossible to think of E.A. Martel, the man who discovered the grotto in 1889, exploring its depths without adequate light, steps or ladders.

We headed ground-level for a roadside picnic. We also drove by the medieval town of Rocamadour, which is built into the cliff and is known for its church. I didn't get to see it, but Rocamadour's plaza houses a fragment of a sword rumored to be that by Roland. Of the Song of Roland. You know.

On our second Sunday, we headed to a small church with relatively well-preserved 15th-century frescoes. The left wall illustrated the seven sins, the right wall depicted angels passing on souls to St. Peter at the gates of heaven. Check them out in my photos on Flickr! We also visited the bastide of Monpazier (a perfectly quadrilateral village founded in the 13th century), and the Château de Biron (a beautiful hilltop castle, seized by the Cathars in 1211 -- according to Wikipedia).

Sometime in there (June 6) was Matt's birthday. It rained intermittently. The cabin fever raged. Where are we going to stay in Berlin? After Berlin? Diny prepared a special almond and raspberry cake for Matt and we closed the evening with a round of Yahtzee.


Halfway through our stay, I began to feel that we were at summer camp. We would work outdoors and call it fun, beat off the sun and bugs with bandanas, made sure to eat two big Brownie bites of everything and we would look forward to the occasional swim and venture into town.