today the sky went through four separate thunderstorms and about as many rainbows. i think this was just to counter my meloncholy at the events of the last few days and today in particular.

things haven't been working out so well at the farm. the living situation in particular has become a serious

problem. i think i can safely say that the fault is of the other parties, but who knows. there is a history of this happening here we have discovered. oh well.

it came to a head last thursday with lots of bad feelings and a little bit of yelling. i think we have been more upset by the whole thing than martin and indra. we then took friday off for a much needed break from the farm.

today we had another meeting where we were to tell them what our plans were now going to be (how long we are planning on staying.) so we told them and they basically told us that wasn't going to be the case. (we actually were planning on leaving earlier than they now think we are.) so mrk. and i walked away from the whole thing feeling completely unheard. now we don't even plan on staying as long as we thought we might as us this morning.

so we are now getting ourselves packed and ready to hit the road again. i am really looking forward to it now that we have had a break. we haven't told martin and indra that we will probably be gone before midweek, but we don't really care at this point. we are really disappointed with the way things have turned out.

we will now have to say goodbye to our little home and all the great food. we will say goodbye to the sheep in our front yard, the horses in our backyard and the goats next door. we will no longer get to hear the roosters crowing half the night or the musical sounds of the pigs when they are content (or the aweful squeeling when the aren't!) i am sure the stubborn donkeys won't miss us trying to put them in their stall at night, but maybe the dogs will notice our absence. the cats won't give a damn of course. i will miss the occasional sighting of the barn owl at dusk and the bats flying around the yard. and of course most of all i will miss seeing the goslings grow their feathers and seeing proud papa helmut defending them.

i will also miss seeing the plants we have planted mature, but that was going to happen with our original plan. i think the worst part is not getting any of the strawberries we spent so many hours saving from being choked by the weeds!

we have met lots of interesting people on the farm, all of whom i will think of often when we leave, though some with kinder thoughts than others. i think we will leave as friends despite our bad feelings though.

the advantage of leaving this week is getting to explore more areas of europe we may otherwise have missed. we will hopefully get some time in belgium and more time in the netherlands before we head south east to explore more of eastern europe. our current plan is to head northward once in eastern europe, spend a couple of weeks in poland with a german friend of ours, continue north to explore the baltic republics and then jump over to scandanavia. we hope to spend a couple of weeks visiting various people in scandanavia, gradually heading southward through denmark and back to germany where it will be just about time to catch the airplane home. who knows what will happen to change these plans, we can be almost certain something will!

© Copyright Cheryln Crowl 2000