Life's a beach with Kayak Chang

After months of planning and talking about it almost constantly, the time for our trip to Thailand was finally here! So let's dive right in shall we?

The route there was Portland-Taipei-Bangkok-Trat. This took 30ish hours and we lost January 2nd in the time change, but who needs it! We arrived in Trat in the evening, with our guest house booked and plans to take the ferry to Koh Chang the next morning. When we got off the plane there, where found out two things: 1) that we could take the ferry right then 2) the guest house we booked was terrible. We decided not to take the ferry that night mostly because we had been traveling for so long and needed a break and our guest house sounded nice.

As the taxi that dropped us sped of we realized, no, this was not going to work. Keith had booked us in Ban Jaidee Guest House, a place that Lonely Planet recommends-but I don't. After traveling for such a long time all we wanted was a nice shower and a quiet room to pass out in. Since there was no one working the desk, we couldn't ask why they did not have a room booked for us, but we did look at the one room that was still available-it was right over the busy street w/no a/c so we'd have to keep the windows open-it was so loud and hot you may as well sleep on the street-aka a room worth the $6 they were charging. Should we have just taken the ferry? Keith went out to try to find anything better and he did!

All the guide books talk about how wonderful Thai hospitality is-we found out our first night! Keith stopped at the Rimklong Boutique Hotel just up the road from the guest house to see if they had any rooms. No, they didn't...but they knew someplace that might. A few minutes later we are being picked and taken to the Baanrimnam Resort-a beautiful place right on the river where we hung out drinking Singha beers (we didn't know Chang beer was a superior beer at this point) and being incredibly grateful for the kindness of strangers that got us to the quiet room and hot shower I had been dreaming of!



The next morning we had to be in Koh Chang by noon. Two taxis, a ferry, and another taxi, we were at the Amari Emerald Cove, the location of Kayak Chang's office. We met the 4 German ladies we would be spending the week with (who were lovely and hilarious) and Andy, our fearless leader for the kayaking trip.



Before I knew it, we were in the water, getting comfortable paddling around in our kayaks. At this point, there is a change worth noting: we were in our own kayaks....not the tandem that we booked and I hoped for. Andy was pretty insistent that I paddle my own kayak. And maybe he was right, maybe I was just being soft, or maybe I just have serious trust issues with my right shoulder, whatever the case is, I was worried that I wouldn't enjoy the trip if my stupid shoulder hurt the whole time. Andy was certain I would be fine, while I was far from sure I would be fine, I did it any way-paddled my own boat the whole time.



With kayaks loaded on the tops of taxis, we were off to start out on our first full day on the water. We couldn't have asked for better weather that first day and really for the whole trip-if you're wondering it was mid 80s-low 90s the whole time.





Views of the islands on the first day.



Andy described the trip as a beach hopping trip and he did not disappoint. Each beach seemed to be more beautiful than the last.




The first night we rolled in to Koh Wai Beach Resort after watching the sunset on behind the island. After doing 18k, a hot shower, delicious family style Thai dinner, and many Chang's was the best way to finish the day!




At Koh Wai Resort





The next morning was overcast and still. For a long stretch we had no breeze, but desperately needed one! While it was incredibly hot, the pictures of the glassy waters are pretty cool!




We stopped for lunch at yet another beautiful beach. According to Keith this beach had the best snorkeling of anywhere we stopped, but me, and a couple of the other ladies opted for a short nap in the shade and watch Russians pose for goofy pictures on the beach.


We spent the rest of the day skirting around the coast of Koh Rang, going in and out of caves. I was freaking out a little bit because of my total lack of knowing what the hell I was doing, but eventually I chilled out-most of the way. The highlight of the day for me was seeing a sea turtle swimming next to my boat-he helped calm me down a little.






We stopped at my favorite beach of the whole trip before we stopped to camp that night on Koh Rang. I know this beach has an official name, but to me it's Cock's Beach thanks to the array of decor at the temple on the corner of the beach. Also it was a completely stunning beach.





That night we camped on Koh Rang. The Thai Navy is based where we camped and they set up our tents and provided us with sleeping pads and all. It was a beautiful place to camp-at the end of the pier, the water was full of algae that was bioluminesce. A bunch of Changs, with the German ladies singing, while playing with bioluminesce algae in the water, made it the most magical evening.






The next morning was my favorite snorkeling spot of the trip. We lashed our boats together and jumped into the water and circumnavigated a tiny island. A great way to start the morning! We left as the boats full of tourists arrived-perfect!



This was a pretty short day that day as we roll into Koh Mak. We had a day and half at the Makathanee Resort. It was a beautiful place to recharge for the 25k day that was coming up (and I was most nervous about!) We ate some amazing food there-including fresh crabs for $6! We had some time to rent a scooter and check out the island and found some strange sights around! If you're ever there-have a cocktail at the Banana Sunset Bar!!




The next day was the long 25k day, but it had a great reward at the end, so like anything, was worth the work. But it wasn't a straight shot-there were many beaches that needed visiting along the way! The beach at Koh Ham is beautiful, but strange. Behind the beach is the partially completed resort that has been left for so long it looks like the jungle is taking it back. Rumor has it the place has been purchased and will be finished soon-but it certainly doesn't look like it!


The reward that night was staying a Tantawan Resort. Beautiful, secluded, peaceful, perfect after a hard day on the ocean...okm not really that hard a hard day!






It was also the location of Keith's first Thai massage!



The final stop was Bang Boa fishing village-a village along a a fishing pier-everything built just above water. It's less about fishing and more about tourists now, but is still an interesting place to stop.





That night we all had our last dinner together at the Buddha View restaurant. So here is everyone: Ulli, Susie, Annett, Ursula, and Andy and me.

And we saw an elephant! Chang is the Thai word for elephant and it only took til the last time on Koh Chang to see one!




So there ya go: the 7 day expedition with Kayak Chang! I did it, I was sore-maybe a little bit more than sore-but still I would do it again in a minute and maybe be less of a scaredy cat next time!

Up next: Koh Kood and Bangkok!

A Snow White Christmas

Merry Christmas, all!

Yesterday morning was a little frosty, but there was no snow on the ground. Now there's about six inches! After a week of above average temperatures and rain, it did not feel like it was almost Christmas, maybe more like April. It is now decidedly Christmasy. And we are trying to get in the spirit....but with a big trip coming up soon after the holidays, we haven't been very into the whole Christmas thing this year.



I have been trying to change this since yesterday.

Cupid the reindeer/goat has been a big help with getting in the Christmas spirit. The fact that I got her to wear this the whole time I was milking was freaking amazing! And she looks so fabulous!



Bear, BJ, and little Iggy and Ziggy have been also been enjoying the snow!







Bear and BJ convinced me that shoveling was an exercise in futility, so really we should just build a snowman. Right they were. It would have taken less time if Bear would have stopped eating the damn thing as fast as I could build it and I really don't think it's going to last very long. Bear is eating/tackling the poor guy-that why the snowman doesn't have a carrot nose-Bear would have been gone in an instant!



I started baking for Christmas on Christmas Eve. We're not doing a big dinner, but dessert is always necessary! I've been itching to make a pie for about a week now and for one big reason-I rendered lard. When Keith butchered the lambs, he saved the fat for me. I rendered down to lard in a smelly, but easy process and now have 6 cups of lard. I usually use butter, not lard for for pie crusts-but hey why not! I didn't want to use just lard and I did have some mostly goats cream butter on hand, so a 50/50 mix seemed perfect! Don't know how it tastes yet, but it looks good! (update: Santa came last night and left rave reviews!)




So far this morning we've opened stockings and Keith is off to the hospital for a little bit. These two were dying to get into their stockings! Time to get busy getting dinner started and watching Christmas movies!

Hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and wonderful New Year!

Feeling the Heat of October

This has been such a beautiful and bountiful summer! And I'm so happy it is over. I can not can another jar of salsa, dehydrate another tray of cherry tomatoes, or freeze yet another bag of zucchini. I am just done. Or I wish I was.

Besides a handful of wickedly hot peppers that have yet to ripen, the greenhouse is closed for the season. There is a little more variety out in the garden thanks to the cold hardiness of root veggies and broccoli, but still, the garden it past it's prime too. But there is a new season that is just getting started and at times it is deafening. Goats in heat.

It's like having a bunch of teenagers with their hormones raging! It started with little Frannie first. She was so loud in the middle of the night that Keith went out to the barn to check on her. Obviously she was just fine, but Keith has to pop in ear plugs for the rest of the right. For the next two days, Frannie and Randy tried their best to get through the electric fence that kept them seperated. They only succeeded in getting repeatedly shocked by the fence. Then as quickly as it started, it was over and the pasture was quiet again. Until yesterday.

Now it's Cupid's turn. I didn't even know that goats that are lactating could go into heat, but oh yes, they can. Cupid is not interested in anything she is usually interested in, like her favorite past time of eating all the food and making sure Frannie and Snowy don't get any. All she want's to do is try to get Randy's attention so badly I think her tail might wag off. We're even getting less milk from her because she's eating so much less-dear god make this pass quickly!




Only Snowy is left. I can't really imagine her any louder or more affectionate then she is on a daily basis, but I know it's going to happen!

This is all just happening a little earlier then we want it to. We are planning on breeding Frannie and Snowy in December, hopefully we don't miss our window of opportunity!

We are going to breed the sheep in November. They all constantly have crushes on Big Sam, so I'm not worried things not working out there! And the ladies are starting grow their winter coats, love these girls!



With all this talk of breeding, how can I forget to talk about the adorable offspring!

Phoebe has been adopted but we still have the boys! They live with the lambs now are just as adorable as ever!!




The lambs are getting big. Even the triplets are finally putting some weight on! And then there's Bessie, who's so huge it looks like she ate one of the triplets!



At least with pretty much all the vegetables done for the season, I'll be able to work on perfecting my cheese making this winter. Until spring, that is, when we'll just be starting all this over!

Thank you Russia!

What the hell do you do with over a gallon of goats milk a day? Everyday. Single. Day. I've been trying to figure that out.

There are the cottage cheese experiments, the yogurt culturing, a lot of chevre in the freezer. Still, there is always more milk in the fridge.

With all of this, Keith has been pushing for cream. Separating goats cream is not the same as separating cows milk. Cows milk cream floats to the top and you just skim it off-how easy! For goats cream you need a centrifuge separator and what I had read was that these can cost $500-1000. Yeah, that was not going to happen! But where there's a will there's a way-thanks to Russia!

Keith found a Russian cream separator on Amazon for about $150 and really, how could I say no? Of course I want cream, and butter too!



This did come with instructions in English too, but they really don't look as amazing! This came in the mail yesterday and I can't believe that I had to wait until today to use it! It did take a little time to put together, mostly because it seemed too easy and there seemed like there were extra parts (there aren't!). Put together, it's a lot bigger then I expected it to be! It reminds me of Sputnik. Spherical, but quite pointy in parts.



Now that it's all clean and set up, let's get it to work! The milk has to be warmed to about 100 degrees before putting it through the centrifuge. I warmed up a gallon and a quart and started it through.





Slowly at first, then more quickly, the cream comes out the top spigot and the skimmed milk comes out the bottom spigot. I wish there was more cream! But still about a cup and half of cream is better than nothing!

I've got 2 quarts of skimmed milk culturing into yogurt. I'm not really sure how that will turn out, since it is the first batch that I have made without whole milk, but I don't doubt it will be edible!

The cream is still too warm to be able to tell how thick the cream really is, but time will tell! On to more experiments!

Milking Goat-zilla

I still can't really believe that this is really happening. Every morning, regardless of how incredibly hard, how many times I was bit on the shoulder, or how unexpectedly smooth the milking process goes, I walk away with the same thing: about 3 quarts of fresh goats milk.





Of course these pictures are blurry. Trying to take pictures while milking a goat that is screaming and stomping and trying to bite is not the easiest thing in the world to do. I wish I could say that milking was a peaceful, bucolic way to start the morning, but in reality, I have to tie the goat down and work as fast as I possibly can. That is why instead of hand milking I got a little held pump system from Dansha Farms. I know my time with Cupid is extremely short and I am a very slow hand milker and there is no way Cupid is going to cut a newbie any slack.

With this system, I attach large plastic syringes to her teats with a hand held pump that creates a vacuum and boom! there's milk. It sounds easy, but some mornings are easier than other, some mornings the vacuum seals in no time, and some mornings it just won't and I feel like I'm going to go crazy. That was this morning-an epic battle of wills, where Cupid tried to get me stop milking by simply and defiantly laying down on the milk stand. I kept at it milking her one teat I could reach and she finally conceded and stood up on all fours. Milking took about an hour this morning, there have been some mornings (OK, 2 mornings) where it has taken about 15 minutes.

I milk Cupid once a day, at about 7am. The rest of the time the kids get to feed of her as much as she will let them. We separate Cupid from her kids at night to maximize the amount of milk we get from one milking. The way the stalls are set up is that Cupid can still see and be near her kids, but they can't nurse from her. This will also help when we wean the kids from her, since at night they are eating hay and other treats, instead of getting their main nourishment from milk. After we wean the kids, I'll be milking twice a day-I'm not really looking forward to this!

Ok, so milking kind of sucks. But at least we get the milk!



So far I've made yogurt, cottage cheese, and chevre. I also have some goat milk and duck egg vanilla ice cream chilling in the freezer that I haven't tried yet. And still I have almost 2 gallons of milk in the fridge! I'm not terrible at cheese making, but I still have a lot have a lot of leaning to do! At least it's all been edible so far!

And the kids are still super cute and getting bigger everyday!




And while Cupid may fight me tooth and nail when I'm milking her, she also knows that during the day I bring her delicious treats. I think of it as a thank you for today's and tomorrow's milk.



Yes, milking could be going better, but I am so happy with 3 qrts of milk a day! We didn't prepare from the reality of having this much milk so soon and are now trying to get through all out dairy products as fast as possible, as Cupid and I make more every day!

Triplets!!!

KIDS! Finally!

For weeks I've been saying any day now, any day now and when does she have kids?? When I'm in the shower!

The past couple days Cupid has been acting strange-which is a actual sign of a goat going into labor. When Keith said she seemed even weirder first thing this morning, I was hoping today was the day! I ran out and checked her before I took a shower and she was just hanging out in the shade, as usual, no big deal. BUT when I got out of the shower I heard a goat bleating sound like no animal usually makes here at our house. I was positive that it was a sign of Cupid being in labor! I threw some clothes on, grabbed some towels and headed to the barn. This is what I was greeted with!



Could these two kids be any more freaking adorable!! I flew into action. I got Frannie and Snowy into a separate stall, even though they were being sweet to the kids, I wanted them out the way. Them ran on got our Labor and Delivery (or post Labor and Delivery!) stall ready. I put down more bedding, filled up the hay bag, brought in some goat chow, and filled up Mama's water with warm molasses water. I got them all into the stall the only way I could think to-I grabbed the kids and Cupid followed-boom, they're in their own private stall!





They seem content to hang out together, so I run inside to get my real camera, enough of this blurry iPhone picture crap! As soon as I'm back in the stall I hear Frannie and Snowy going crazy bleating outside and a tiny little bleating....what!?! Where is that coming from!

Damn! Cupid must have had her first kid out in the pasture and left it there!!! Sweet Frannie and Snowy were licking him and I ran out and grabbed him and brought him in with all of them. He is so much littler and was wet and covered with dirt! But none of that stopped him. He saw his Mama, found her teats, and got down to business! He is my favorite!



Obviously, every time I go out to the barn, the kids are cuter. They're finding their feet a little more, a little more curious. I forgot to tell you! It's two girls and a boy. The white ones are the girls and the black one is the boy. The girls names are Phoebe and Selene-although I haven't decided which is which yet! And the boy...I'm just not sure yet. I'm sure something will come to be-he seems really sweet so far!







I will now proceed to get nothing done today, but hang out with this new little family! Tons more pics to follow!!

Randy the Billy

While still Cupid hasn't had kids yet (we still have about 2 weeks until kids!), but we do have new animal additions. Three this week-so far!

This morning I had to go out and run an errand. It was something I thought about waiting for Keith to help me with, but it's going to be such a hot day today and I just wanted to get this taken care. So I hopped in the pickup and drove to Lostine to pick up our billy goat, Randy.



Randy wasn't his first name and it probably won't be his last. When Kate and I picked him up near Tollgate around Christmas, his name was Gunner. We quickly decided that name did not suit him at all. So we changed it to Fabian. How could we not! Look at those curls! He was Fabian for a while, pretty much until he got unleashed around the ladies. That's where his one track mind became very obvious, so for now he's Randy.

Randy is sharing his space with our other bachelors, Sam the Ram and Little Sam. Little Sam isn't a bachelor as much as a lamb that accidentally didn't get castrated and we had to get him away from his sisters before any other accidents happened. While both Sam and Randy are pretty chill on the scale of aggressive males, Sam has to show Randy whose the boss of the bachelor pad. Cue Sam the Ram ramming Randy (with Little Sam staying the hell away!).



It's barely been an hour since they were introduced and they have calmed down a lot. I expect some posturing from them pretty much forever, but I think the worst of it is over. And what handsome fellas we have here! All that manly beard and chest hair, our ewes and does (sheep and goats) are very lucky ladies!



I knew at some point I was going to have to bring Sam to our place, it was part of why we had the pens built into our new fence. But of course unexpected things happen and we have more animals, in this case chicks.

See, I thought this hen was sick. In my experience, when a hen sick she tends to quarantine herself. All the books say to quarantine the sick hen completely from the other hens, but she had put herself in the far corner of what is usually the goat stall, but there aren't even goats in there right now, so I just didn't worry about it. Yes, there was a chance she was being broody, and checked for eggs under her for the first week and there were no eggs. I repeat NO eggs! In my mind she was just not well and would either get better (they usually do) or die, one or the other. And I was completely wrong! And no, I didn't check for eggs under her again-oops.



We have only hatched two chicks so far, but she's sitting on about 15 eggs, again-oops. One is with it's fierce mama, hopping around, being all adorable. The other was abandoned by the mama hen-I have no idea why. I was out in the barn looking for more chicks and I found another one, about a foot away the hen, freezing cold. I tried to put this tiny chick back under mama's wing and she attacked it. She flung it to the side and when it wasn't far enough away tried to violently peck at it.

That was it. I took it away and now it's upstairs in the closet with a heat lamp and a cocker spaniel for a mother hen.



And now we have more than one mother hen. These two hens have somehow worked out this co-parenting situation. I really have no clue what's going to happen when/if more chicks are hatched. These two keep wrestling over whose eggs are whose, so how their going to work out chicks I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see.



Since tomorrow is the 4th of July, I have to give a corn update! It is almost weed knee high by the 4th of July! About half of the corn plants are actually knee high and they are only going to grow to about four feet tall anyway, so we are off to a great start!



The greenhouse is doing great! The winter squash is almost all taller than me-yay! Most of the tomato plants are with full of tiny tomatoes or loads of flowers and some of the peppers are already starting to ripen!



Hope you all have a wonderful 4th o'July!