Goodbyes: Leibertingen, South West Germany 22 Jan

Thule and Han's 200 year old house - with our cottage at the left.

About a three hour train ride from Munich and we arrived in Beuron. Thule our host arrived to pick us up and take us back up the hill to the cattle farm. It was lightly snowing and with plenty of trees around it looked really pretty. It was cold and on arrival they were busy getting the cattle and farm duties done, so we made ourselves comfortable in our guesthouse. It had some chairs and a beautiful big clay oven, a small table and up stairs in the loft was two single beds and a couple of low tables and chairs. Looked good to us! About 30 mins later they invited us to the house for tea. This was a bit of a shock really to see how differently they lived. Both clearly loved their animals big and small. Two dogs, a big bitsa and a Hungarian dashound as cute as could be. Three cats who spent all their time on the kitchen bench or kitchen table. They had 35 cattle, 9 ducks, round the same number hens, 9 geese and a horse. All were kept in the stable overnight and let out into the meadow (snow paddock) for the day if the weather permitted. Our jobs were to feed hay and silage twice daily and muck out stable and lay straw down for the night. Feed the geese, ducks, hens and horse. We also gathered, cut and stacked firewood and Murray did some welding jobs and I did some other repairs to gates and stuff. It was good work - such a different way of farming to NZ. It snowed pretty much all the time, two afternoons of reasonably clear skies. Temperatures only got as low as -9, so that was not so bad, especially as we were working.