When there's too much rain to farm.....go camping!

Kia Ora!

I'm sorry you haven't heard from me for awhile.  We've been quite busy building strawberry planters, weeding, creating a driveway, transplanting bananas, cooking in the pizza oven, mapping the orchard, and answering the daily e-mails we receive from potential wwooferes.  The past two weeks we've had help from two fabulous wwoofers from France.  We were able to accomplished so much more with four pairs of hands instead of two!  I'll elaborate more on our recent projects another time. 

It's nearly midnight here and Chad and I are packing for our first overnight adventure off the island!  YeeHaw!  Not sure where we're going.  Chad's in charge of that.  It all started because our chickens were too old and stopped laying and for the past month or so we've been diligently trying to find replacements.  It's not easy to do on a little island.  Folks are pretty possessive of their animals.  After several failed attempts of trying to coordinate multiple parties' schedules to get chickens from the mainland to us, Chad and I have had enough and are going to get chickens ourselves.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well, not so simple when it involves a ferry, several buses, a train, and who knows what else, and on the return trip you're carrying four chickens.  Suddenly 90 some dollars worth of chickens turns into a couple hundred dollar day trip.  So, with the gracious offer of his van from our friend and neighbor, Russel, and at the encouragement of our employers, we're taking three days off and going on a chicken retrieval/camping trip.  Oh yes, and we'll be stopping for bulk groceries in Auckland so that we'll have staples to feed the wwoofers we've got booked though October.  The rain is pouring down outside, we're still not sure if dogs are allowed in the campgrounds, and we realized today that we have no gas for our campstove since we had to empty it out before we left.  But we've got a trusty map and the mac and cheese is packed so I think we're good to go.