A Farmer's Life For Me...

Moron de la frontera June 13-23: I only spent 3 days on the farm in Moron de la Frontera. The farm life was a good learning experience and life experience for the kids. It is a very hard life. And in the south of Spain, it is very hot in the summer. !

A little background on the family we stayed with; Anne and Jose have 5 kids. Jose was raised on the property. Anne grew up in Belgium. We all spoke mostly French to communicate although they all wanted to practice their English so we did that as well. Luis is the only son and 16. Daughters Maya (14), Elena (13), Ines (11) and Chloe (5). They are all really nice kids and were very nice to our girls. Ines loves hanging out with Julia. They were instant pals and the language barrier was no problem. We had a few sit down meal with their entire family and some meals alone in our house. We stayed in a separate home on the property. It was very rustic and not many people would have been happy there. James and the girls made the best of it. It is very hot and very buggy. Not mosquitoes but flies. There was electricity and water. No screens on the windows, no fridge, etc. And it was dirty. There were giant spiders living inside. If I found just one of these in my regular house I wouldn’t sleep. But we let them live and it wasn’t a problem. Sleep was hard to come by because of the heat and bugs. Casey has been attacked by bugs. On her head (neck and face) she has 68 bites Last night a dog sat outside barking non stop for an hour at 3:20am. Anne and Jose have only started hosting woofers this past January.

They rise early to work as much as possible before the heat of the day. One morning James went out at 5:30am with all of the men and gathered the hay into bales and stacking them. The girls and I went with Anne and moved the goats down out of the hills into a low pen to milk them. It was total chaos when we got the goats into the pen. We had to find the mothers who were very full of milk and then find babies to nurse off of them. Once a baby drank and lifted her over the fence and dropped her outside the pen. They saved the two fullest goats for milking for the family. Anne let Molly and Casey try but it was hard for them. They did get a few squirts of milk out and were pleased with themselves. Julia had already had a try on a previous milking trip. Julia is a regular farmer and so comfortable with all of the animals. She drags the goats around by one back leg (per instruction).

I’ll tell you some of the farming tasks we’ve done. Weeding and watering gardens, picking fruit and vegetables, we feed the chickens twice a day and gather their eggs. We move the sheep or goats from one field to another. The vet came one day and checked all of the sheep and gave them medicine. We have loaded many bales of hay from the field onto the tractor and brought them to the barn for storage. Julia and James both had turns driving the tractor for this.

Now this may seem like a lot but it wasn’t. On a typical day we would work from 7:30-10 or so then do nothing until maybe 6:00 pm when they would work again until 9:30 or so. In between they rest, eat and do other regular life stuff. But for us, who are only there for our farming experience, it was way too much down time. We were bored a lot. We went to the grandmother's house one day to swim (the pool had very little water), one evening we attended the youngest child’s end of year dance performance. That was a cool local scene with an outdoor show and people lingering around having beers. It began at 8:00pm for a 5 year old! We left at 10pm because our kids were exhausted and the festivities were still going strong. We really enjoyed our time getting to know this family. They were so great and we did some fun things. We decided to leave a little early because it just wasn’t worth it to wait around all day to work more. We’re on vacation after all and wanted to sleep in a bug free and air conditioned room. We left around 4pm today after nice goodbyes. We had brought some gifts (GA and Brunswick bookstore clothes) for their family and they gave our kids some Spanish books and fans.

We drove to a town called Villanueva Del Rosario. We checked into our hotel, had a pizza dinner in town, and are going to bed full, cold and bug free. June 24: Today we went hiking in El Torcal National Park. It is kind of a small version of Bryce Canyon, with limestone rock formations molded over time. Great temperatures with a nice breeze. We found fossils in the rocks. Then we drove down to the Costa Del Sol for an afternoon at the beach. The kids and James have been hot since arriving in Spain so it was fun to cool Off. We loved the people watching with all the European bathing suit styles etc. The highlight for me was when the kids reported that they “saw a lady Lala’s age with no top on!” Hilarious. We headed east towards Gibraltar knowing it was tomorrow’s destination.