The Farm Where We Reached Total Hippie Status

After exploring Maine a little, we went to our first farm as WWOOFers. WWOOFing stands for Word Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Basically it works like this: people come to a farm to work on things for while, whether it's carpentry, harvesting, you name it, in exchange for a place to sleep and some fresh food. The whole thing is set up through the internet, they've got a whole website and everything. We found out about it through our friends, and it sounded perfect for our trip. 

So after a couple months of searching for farms, we found this little family farm somewhere in central Maine, a couple hours from the coast. I had no idea what to expect. I was keeping an open mind about it, but living at a random person's house for a month sounded, well, a little crazy? But my family was excited about it and it started to rub off on me a little. I loved the idea of being closer to the earth for a while. Helping animals, picking vegetables, and spending hours just doing nothing under the Maine trees and the warm August sun. 

I did get to do all of these things. They had a lot of rabbits (for meat, sadly), goats, ducks, and 1 chicken named Peeps. It was the cutest little chicken you've ever seen. But anyway, they also had two gardens with carrots, broccoli, green beans, kale, onions, garlic, a lot of beautiful wildflowers, ect. We'd help out everyday or so with the gardens, harvesting the random little plants they needed help with that day. 

Mostly, though, we picked blackberries. a TON of blackberries. A thick, menacing, bush the size of a house was just chocked full of sweet berries that'd leave you with purple lips and fingers. We picked for hours until we couldn't fill our buckets any more. Then, the next day, we'd come back and there were just as many as there were before. I swear that bush was enchanted or something, a never ending berry bush. 

Also, every day Ella and I would go to the garden, pull out a couple carrots with their long leafy stems, and go the (very spidery) barn, where they kept the bunnies. At first the bunnies were pretty afraid of us, they would hide and jump away when we came in, and only creep out when we were still. Then when we went enough consecutive times, they got used to us, and it was awesome. They were hardly afraid anymore, just excited when we came with our yummy, dirt covered carrots. We'd sit in there for a while just letting them crawl on us, and chew on their food.

As fun as some jobs were, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a brief, slightly unsettling list of other things we experienced at the farm. Here it is:

• The farm had no shower. And when I say no shower, I mean NO shower. No bath, no little faucets we could wash our hair under, nothing. So mostly, we just went down to the Lake and used some biodegradable soap whenever we got really stinky.
• Their plumbing was broken, so there was no sewage dump for our bus. And we couldn't let our tank overfull, so we couldn't put much into it. Can you see where this is going? Long story short, we all peed in Taco Bell cups for one month straight. 
• We ended up getting sick, and I hate to even think about it, but mom said it was probably a parasite. No barfing, but it wasn't the most pleasant. There are a couple possible causes for this: Due to the plumbing fiasco, there was some fecal matter on an area of the farmland, there was duck crap everywhere, and we didn't really know where our water was coming from. Dad's theory is that it wasn't a parasite, our bodies were just rejecting the water which is totally possible. I like that theory a lot better, so lets just say that. Anyway, we all got better when we left. 

Overall, I don't regret going to the farm, though. I think it was a good experience, and a part of our path. And hey, it's where we reached total hippie status.

Beginning The Trip

We left Fort Collins the day school got out. Normally, we wouldn't be in a hurry, but my parents had to attend a wedding in Maryland (note: only my parents, no "kids" allowed at this wedding. Still slightly bitter about that, but I'll get over it). Definitely a bummer that I didn't have any time to have any last summer hangouts with my FoCo friends, but it was exciting to be heading out.

Our first destination was Westminster, MD, not just for the wedding, but to stay there for a month or so. We have many friends there, and it was my first home, so it was the perfect place for me to go after leaving my favorite place in the world and crying my eyes out for a day. The familiar people and places in Maryland totally made me feel better about leaving, so it was great.

There were other little places we went before and after MD just to visit family, like Ohio, Tennessee, and Vermont and they were great, and I'm so glad I got to see so many people I love, but overall they were pretty uneventful and totally unblogworthy. So let's skip to the real adventure, to the first place we went just cause we wanted to. Maine. 

We chose New England because it's gorgeous, there's lots of fun stuff to do there, me and my sister have never been, and LABSTAH. My parents said they loved Acadia National Park, so it's where we went first. Driving into Maine, the woods were thick and the air was warm but crisp, not at all like the muggy, humid air in the more southern states we had been in for so long. The Visitor's center said the Sand Bar to Bar Island right off the town of Bar Harbor  was a must do (Man that's a lot of 'Bar's), but there was only a short period of time every day to go, because of the tides, so we left our dog and bus in the parking lot, and headed for Bar Harbor on a shuttle. 

Before going to the sand Bar, I'd never really thought about the lunar tides, and I didn't know how drastic they were, or could be. But after we walked down the quaint little streets of Bar Harbor, passing by seaside shops, smelling the fresh caught steamed lobster, and hearing the honks of the ships in the bay, we reached the sand bar and I knew just how much power the moon had over the water. 

There was a stretch of land that connected the beach to an island. It was maybe a quarter mile long, and a couple hundred feet wide. The "sand" (whoever named it Sand Bar had a very loose definition of sand) was white because of all the sea shells and little pieces of rock. We walked out on to it, our feet a bit wet. It was weird thinking that all of it would be totally submerged within a matter of hours. As we explored the bar, finding little creatures and seashells, I tried to imagine what it was like under water, to look up at the sun through the murk and the seaweed. 

The next day, we heard Sand Beach was cool, and the only real sand you could find in Maine, so we went there (something about the way it's shaped makes the rocks crumble more fine than other places, making sand. Despite what my grandpa says about them shipping it up with trucks). When I first got to the beach, the thing that struck me was the light green water that stretched out between two massive cliffs. It reminded me of the keys, or some place tropical where you can see your feet through the crystal water. It was much more rough than the keys, though. The waves crashed against the rocks and made that sound that makes you want to spread out a blanket, put on some sunscreen and forget about everything for a while. So, that's what we did. Then, after a few hours, we packed up our stuff, drove around that darned one way road around the whole island, and went home.