My last week at Time Out Farms felt more like I was waiting to leave than anything else. Not in the sense that I wanted to get out of there – it was more a combination of circumstances that gave me too much time to think, which in turn lead to me dive into my travel plans and guide books. So much, that I probably spent more time reading than I actually spent with the horses.
Firsty, all those wwoofers arrived. With eight people around, talking (mostly German) all the time, I was so mentally overwhelmed that I eventually couldn’t handle spending time with anyone at all. Instead, I sat in my room reading about Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Washington state and Oregon. Watching TV shows. When three of the Germans, and then finally the last two, left on Sunday and Tuesday, the house got so much more quiet and calm.
Secondly, it rained more or less the entire week. There was a slight brake in the downpour over the weekend, so on Monday I got to ride Portia one last time. Then the rain came back and from Monday evening until Thursday midday, it poured down non-stop. No riding. No grooming. Just mud and the smell of wet dogs. So I read guide books and played card games with the three remaining wwoofers.
Pancake breakfast with the nine wwoofers and a few additionql guests.
On Sunday I had my last pancake breakfast. (Did I ever tell you that? That every Sunday, Diane and Willie make pancakes for breakfast? And that I’ve learnt to eat them the real Canadian way: with sour cream, fruit, berries or jam (home made strawberry-rhubarb sauce was by far the best we had) and maple syrup.)
Fort Langley
On Monday, Benedicte and me (the only two non-German speaking wwoofers at the farm, she is French) biked in to Fort Langley for some chocolate and ended up buying floats at a diner. Fort Langley is this almost-too-cute, film set-like village of two streets with shops selling antiques and British candy and other fancy stuff. The diner looked like a too clean place from the fifties. Even the rock n’ roll playing in the speakers tried to convince us that we in fact had stepped into a time-machine. But it was cute, and the day was chokingly hot, so the floats were just what we needed. You see, floats are these really American things consisting of a glass of some kind of soda with vanilla ice cream on top. I chose a root beer, to get the real American diner experience. It was good. Extremely sweet, but when have I ever had trouble with sweet things? Had I been sixteen years younger, I would have loved it.
Me, having a float at the Fort Langley diner.
The rest was mostly rain, and on Wednesday evening Diane cooked this wonderful chicken dish. The dinner was all laughs and jokes with Diane and Jay, Benedicte and the two Austrian girls. That’s something I’ll miss, being three or four wwoofers at Time Out Farms, enjoying Dianes wonderful cooking each night. Laughing at Jay’s bad jokes and feeling that contentedness in my body that is only possible after a whole day of real physical labour.
On thursday afternoon, I left for Vancouver.
Katja Malmborg 