Where We Stayed the Weekend

We stayed the weekend on a German farm!!  Although we're somewhat used to the farm atmosphere, :)  it was fun to experience life (at least a little bit) on a farm in Germany.  The kids especially had fun with their rabbits and baby lambs!!  This farm has been in their family for over four hundred years (which we thought was pretty neat!!), but our host just recently moved back out to it about 10 years ago.

It was a bit of an adventure trying to find the location of the farm.  We first went to the wrong Hartha!!  They really shouldn't have two towns of the same name so close together. :)  Anyway, we stopped in this little town that obviously shuts down everything really early because the streets were so dark!!  Daddy went into a restaurant to see if we could get some directions which didn't end up being too helpful.  The people were very nice and tried to help, but didn't speak any English and after being back and forth on the phone with our host at the farm (who also barely speaks English!) we got back on the road.  Providentially, our hosts had some friends over who could speak a little more English, so we ended up getting on the phone with a nice lady who tried to point us in the right direction.  She said they would meet us at a certain place and then we could follow them the rest of the way.  Thankfully we were only about thirty minutes away!  

The funny thing though was when the lady said they would meet us, she told us to be looking for two people "shaking hands" on the side of the road and that would be them.  We all thought that was kind of funny, but then Sabrina pointed out that maybe the German "shaking hands" is what we would call "waving".  Ha ha!!   So we were curious if they would be shaking or waving hands.  Sure enough, Sabrina was right and we came upon two people waving at us along side the road!!  

Thankfully we made it there safe and sound and got settled in for the night.  It worked out really well and we enjoyed staying there for the weekend.

An arial view of the farm from a picture in the hallway.

Shenandoah settled in her "special bed" :)

The showers were interesting - they didn't have a door!!

Daddy

Myself

Stasia

Sayer and Seth

After going to bed quite late (once we found the farm and got all settled in), we were all pretty tired, but there was no sleeping in to be had for me!!  The boys were obviously not affected by want of sleep and were up bright and early (before 6:00!!).  Since they were on a pallet in mine and Sienna's room, that meant I was up early too (because they couldn't go out of the room until I was up)!!  Oh well, they slept in later the next day. (thankfully!! :)

The rising sun

I was delighted to find they had bee hives!!

Sabrina fixing breakfast

Stasia

Farm fresh eggs!!

(its been a while since we had those!!)

Homemade jam and yogurt.

The breakfast stuff was provided for us and the younger ones greatly enjoyed the yogurt (as we normally make our own back home and never get the already sweetened kind from the store!!).  Shenandoah called it her "dessert".

Us kids ready for the day

We visted with our host and hostess (as best we could :) and explored the farm before setting out for the day.

Farm buildings - look at all of that firewood!!

This looks familiar

This was a new sight though!!  The baby lambs were so cute!!

They were very sweet too

They went back into their barn and the younger ones were trying to coax them back out

Shenandoah loved the rabbit!

Two of the lambs lost their mama, so they are being bottle fed.  Our hostess brought out a bucket of milk with two bottle tops down in it and the lambs drank it right up! (I was expecting it to be actual bottles :)

Pigeons