Pender Island

We woke up in Courtenay, after I stayed up past 3am sending out messages to new WWOOF hosts.  Later, when I thought about the fact that no one checks their e-mail and responds to it early in the morning before check-out at the hostel (10:30), so I set Tomko to making phone calls to some other host listings while I took a shower.

Shower was a general fiasco (dropping my magic soap in the hallway, spending a lot of time diluting it enough to mop it up) and the manager just said to shove our key under the office door and make sure the main door was locked on our way out.  Thanks, awesome manager boy!  Their British WWOOFer hostel-monkeys were also very nice.  A++, Cona.

When I arrived from the shower, Tomko had two sort-of successes:  A woman from Pender Island and a man from Quadra Island had both said, "Maybe, I need to check my computer to see what other WWOOFers are coming by."  When Tomko named the farm that the man came from, I recognized it on two counts:  (1) they're friends of the Parkers (from Refuge Cove) and (2) their profile says no smoking on the property.  (Most profiles pick the "on the property but not in house" option.)  I did not think that option appealed to Tomko, so I called the other person.

Ellen said that it would be fine, but she had two WWOOFers already... oh, and a third one just walked into the door.  Paul, who we met later, had just landed on Pender Island the day before, bought a Westphalia, logged onto the internet from the library a mile from Ellen's house, saw her profile, drove up to her gate and called to see if she wanted extra WWOOFers.  Sure, why not!

So we packed up from the hostel and headed south for our next ferry from Sidney.


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I indulged in sushi to improve our day, and we made it to the ferry with two hours to spare.  I spent those two hours sitting in the ferry lane, pulling everything out of Byzantium and re-packing, since things had become pretty discombobulated with all our moving around and I hadn't re-packed properly since crossing the border.  Now everything has a place and is where it goes.

Once off the ferry, Ellen's house was just as easy to find as she said it was.  We pulled up to the gate around dusk and I called the house, where Ellen's partner, Rob, explained how to open the gate.  He called it a cougar gate.  Apparently there are cougars around these parts.  (We had been warned of cougars before.  If you see one, look big, spread out your jacket, and don't make direct eye contact, they say.)

Ellen and Rob had a couple over as guests for dinner, in addition to the rest of the WWOOFers--Paul, who I mentioned before; Remy, a boy from France, and a Quebecouis girl whose name I haven't quite figured out.  Frank, who lives a 20-minute walk down the road, arrived during dinner preparations and displayed a newly-acquired black widow bite.  "Did you go to a doctor?"  "No?"  Well, uh, okay dude, but that looks pretty unpleasant.

Dinner was amazingly delicious, conversation was nice, and everyone seemed pretty fabulous.  Frank showed us the caravan where we are staying--small room with electricity, lights, and a space heater that only kind of works, but about twice as good as sleeping in a tent.  (We may be sleeping in a tent later when more WWOOFers show up, since they pre-arranged and therefore "called" it... although maybe Paul will let us sleep in his Westy?  Endless possibilities I am sure.)

In the morning, we learned the morning feeding routine for the animals:  half a bale of hay and two buckets of barley with added minerals for the goats (about 15-20), half a Folger's can of Llama Tex for the llama, more barley for the sheep (5 of them), water and chicken feed for the laying chickens (about 80), special baby chicken food for the three-week old chicklets (swarming everywhere in their heated coop, numbers unknown).  Eggs are collected and washed.

Then our activity for the day was getting two large Douglas fir trees worth of logs from where they had been cut down to the wood shed where Remy could split them with the gasoline-powered splitting machine.  This involved getting into the goat/sheep/llama pen (which covers enough area that I can't see far enough to tell you how big it is), throwing them down the hill until they hit the fence (or careen off and roll somewhere further down the hill where you don't want them to be, dammit), then unhooking part of the fence that connected to the garden, pushing them through one-by-one, and then walking backwards to roll them carefully down the garden path without smashing the tomatoes.  There are many tomatoes.

We were amazing and then had lunch followed by delicious baked apples with walnuts and vanilla ice cream. Mmmmm yeah.