Saturday

Deanna and I are headed to Europe for two weeks! July isn’t our usual time to travel but I have an opportunity to attend JCrete and it didn’t take much convincing to get Deanna to come along. Since we’re travelling all that way, we decided to spend an additional week in Europe. When I mentioned what our plans were to Dierk König (@mittie), he offered to put us up at his house and play tour guide for a couple of days. He lives just outside of Basel Switzerland. The plan is to stay with him and his family through Tuesday and then make our way to Saviese to spend the remainder of the week wtih Dana and Cedric. Dana is the sister of Tim, one of the fellows I work with at Entero. When I asked him where we should stay, he reached out to her for some suggestions and she offered her home up to us. Deanna and I are very grateful to have the opportunity to spend time with two families while in Switzerland. It’s a totally different experience to ‘live like a local’ and one we’re really excited about.

We had some special requests from friends to bring some Canadian treats. Gerrit’s kids requested some honey. This has become a bit of a tradition that was started when Gerrit visited us in 2015. We have a local honey producer that has a shop not far from the farm. Fallen Timber. In addition to the honey, we also had a request from Andres to bring some maple syrup, Dierk asked us to bring a dream catcher for his son and Dana wanted some Sunflower butter. All these, plus a few other trinkets were packed up in a box which we’ll bring as checked luggage. Hopefully it will survive the trip.

We’re flying from Calgary to Frankfurt (direct) and then will take the train to Basel. We’ve packed a box of goodies to take to our hosts and friends of ours that will be at the conference. It’s a 9 hour flight, followed by 3 hour train trip. That bit of discomfort will be worth it once we’re there.

One of the challenges we have living on our acreage is finding someone to take care of the animals while we’re gone. Dogs and cats and horses and chickens. Fortunately Deanna has a friend she used to work with that is coming out to live and take care of everything for us. One less thing to worry about.

So with that, we’re patiently waiting for our flight to leave. The next post will be from Switzerland.