All I desire

A lovely lie in this morning, made even better as it was pouring with rain and howling a gale outside. Sleeping in Willow in crappy weather is still a real joy as we all compare it to bad camping weather rather than bad house weather. Living in the van is definitely not proving to be an issue yet, I imagine WWOOFing without our own space would be far harder, both logistically and because we need to be able to retreat and be just us and Willow allows us to do that properly, not to mention being a comfortable and homely place to be.

We decided that rain would mean we’d spend the day in Willow as hanging out in the tearoom with three crazy kids bouncing off walls was a less than appetising thought so we put the bed away and set the table up. The kindle is playing up, the bottom of the screen is all funny intermittently so I spent some time downloading and installing a software update. Some searching online shows it to be a fairly common issue and it will need replacing so as soon as we are at an address for any length of time I will get that sorted. Will miss it lots though 🙁

The kids enjoyed some DS time and I had a reply from our planned host who we would have been arriving with today. She had sounded really nice from the off when I was exchanging emails with her arranging to stay way back in December so we are quite disappointed not to be going to her but have no real room for change in this section of our schedule. She remained true to form and sent an email back saying she had done a huge food shop in preparation of our arriving and if we still wanted to come she would come and pick us up and we would fit in the house for the week and she could bring us back to collect the van when it was fixed. Oh how tempting! With regret I emailed back to say as attractive as the offer was we felt rather obliged to stay here and carry on helping out in exhange for our host fixing our van but if it gets sorted early enough in the week we will come as planned and have a shorter stay. We’ll have to see how that pans out really as Mum & Dad are planning to come up on the basis of us being free next weekend but I am sure if we are meant to cross paths with this host something will happen to make it so, like another host will have to cancel on us or something. I think if the water pump was not somewhere else we would have been sorely tempted to take her up on her offer and head off there today though.

We went in for lunch and Ady stayed to help pluck and prepare two cockerels that had been killed this morning for dinner – we’d seen Anna walk by with one under her arm and an axe in her hand earlier, then Alan with the other a short time later so knew they were on the agenda 🙂 Ady also helped chop some firewood and generally made himself useful. I was feeling rather less sociable and spent a couple of hours in the van with Davies and Scarlett reading through the black lines on the kindle screen and scoffing sherbert lemons 🙂

We found a bottle of cider in the van so brought it over to dinner to share with everyone along with a jelly which Scarlett made for pudding. Dinner was potatoes dug up here this afternoon, greens picked here and the chickens so totally self sufficient and very delicious washed down with cider 🙂

So a nice day, with a proper escape route on offer if we need / want it, a nice dinner and some enjoyable time hanging out in the van laughing and chatting.