Farm life

At last TJ has gotten his hands dirty!  We arrived at the farm in Te Awamutu (another great NZ name 🙂), last Friday.  It is a beautiful location, between the mountains with rolling fields all around us.  We are parked up with our caravan on the farm with connection to electricity for lights and the fridge.   The family on the farm couldn’t be nicer, they have welcomed us into their home.  They are a young family of 4, with 2 kids aged 3 and 5 and our kids are already great friends with Rose playing “Mummy” and looking after the other three ❤️.

The first night we were treated to a lovely BBQ, consisting of their own beef sausages and burgers and some venison that was swapped with a local hunter.  Delicious. 

The deal is that we can stay here with our caravan in exchange for helping out around the farm, although the family really don’t expect much at all from us and are just happy to share their home.  However, TJ is helping with milking their 370 cows 2 times per day at 5.30am and 3pm and loving it.  He comes back to the caravan each time, covered in cow s**t with a big grin on his face 🤣.  I helped out too on the first day, it’s great to work with the cows 😀 however I have now settled more into the traditional farmers wife role where I am looking after the kids, cleaning, washing and getting dinner ready 😆……totally different to my life back home!  I have to say I’m really enjoying it, especially as this means I am spending a lot of quality time with the kids ❤️.  Today after school work was done I went off with the kids to Lake Hamilton where there is a lovely huge playground by the lake.  Afterwards we did some shopping and while the men (and the farmers wife) were milking I cooked dinner for the two families (shepherds pie with beef from their cows again).

We plan to stay here for a couple of weeks, or maybe longer, will just see how it goes!  It’s so nice to be settled in one place as we were a bit fed up with towing the caravan all over the place and moving nearly every day to a new campsite.  The caravan also needs some repairs as we have found this UK built beauty is not really suitable for the bumps and hills of New Zealand😬😬😬.  

So this is us for now, chilling out and settling into the farmers life 🙂.   Our next move will probably coincide with the horse show season, as there are a lot of shows coming up after Christmas so will see where the good ones are and probably find another wwoofing opportunity there.

Oh and we’re just not feeling at all Christmassy yet, it’s so weird to be sitting in the sunshine and having so much daylight in December!  We went to the local Christmas parade yesterday (I got sunburnt!) which was lovely but strange at the same time….anyhow we will be hitting the 2nd hand shops this week to kit out our caravan with some Christmas cheer and some twinkling lights 👍🏻

See ya later!