Advertisement
Published: April 6th 2015
Edit Blog Post
It's 13.11 on the 6th of April. We've been here 2 weeks now - it's incredible how fast the time has gone. We're now over half way through our time at the Old Stone House, and before we know it we'll be moving on.
We spent the rest of the afternoon of Saturday out the back cutting up the smaller pieces of the trees we'd previously cut down for kindling. We had leftovers from the week for dinner, then all watched a film to finish off the evening.
We woke usual time Sunday morning, and got ready to go to the small English chapel in Portneuf town for the bilingual Easter Sunday service. It was an interesting service, with the left hand side of the book in English and the left in French, while two vicars took turns leading the service, one speaking in French, the other in English. The service was predominantly in French however, and apparently the parish lost mych of the English when French services began to be held, saying the English church was pretty much all they have left in the town. As Judie pointed out the whole affair somewhat goes against the Christian principle of 'love
thy neighbour'.
Anyway, after dropping Judie's Auntie Jean (who came with us for the service) off, we headed home to have some free time before the roast. We had a delicious but decidedly not nutritious lunch of pancakes, maple syrup and waffles - then headed upstairs to relax.
Since I'd been pretty inactive that morning however, I wasn't really ready to just sit around, so decided to put on the snowshoes and walk the mile or two down the pipeline and through the forest down to the Portneuf river. The countryside around the house is picturesque, and the snow still a foot or two deep.
By the time I was home by feet were soaked and I was well exercised. Ted popped out to pick up Jean, and the 7 of us sat in the lounge chatting with beer and wine.
We had a fantastic meal of corn, potatoes, cauliflower and ham - followed by a aptly named Maple Summit cake for dessert. The four of us went out after dinner to walk down the food as the sun set, then returned to read and watch TV in front of the fire.
It was back to work this morning. We
went out with Ted to get down a large tree at the bottom of the slope of the garden. We had trodden down a path to two trees a couple days previously which had set hard, so once Ted had chainsawed the tree down we were tasked to carry or roll the 30 odd logs up the hill and to the path to be split.
Bearing in mind at the base the tree was probably 50cm across, the tree at least 10m tall and the wood incredibly dense - this wasn't the easiest task. It took us until lunch to get all the wood shifted, but to move an entire tree up a hill in an hour and a half is not bad going.
We had ham and pea soup with cheese and crackers for dinner, then retreated up stairs to rest before heading back out this afternoon. We have all of the tree to split now, plus sawing up the smaller bits, and stacking it all up by the house. Once we've done this, we've got another similar sized beech to take down, the wood of which is even heavier than the wood we're getting through today. We like
a challenge...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.323s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 10; qc: 29; dbt: 0.2632s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb