The Funny Farm

The last thing Jacks and I wanted to do was spend Christmas in a hostel with a group of people that I am beginning to have serious doubts about. I blame the parents but I won't get into that now.

After 2 good experiences with Help Exchange we decided to give it another go and arranged to spend a week on a farm in Alexandra, about 2 hours north of Melbourne. We had a little caravan and all our meals were with the family inside their home. The owner of the farm is sadly very unwell so our duties were fairly extensive, from milking Daisy to gardening with the redbacks. We thoroughly enjoyed it and got to know a place and community that we'd never heard about.

Our host family went off to Melbourne for Christmas so we had lunch with a German couple that was staying on the farm and doing some cherry packing down the road. We needed to catch the bus the next morning and had no way of getting to the town the bus left from. Luckily a little Christmas Fairy (pun intended) name John adopted us for the night and gave us a ride to the bus stop the next morning. We helped him ever so slightly on his farm (feeding his animals and playing with 1 hour old kids) but most of the night was spent side-stepping his mad dogs and listening to some very entertaining stories of his escapades as Lord Carter's butler and his teaching days in India.