This is the Life!

OK, so sometimes, it's tough being the Wandering Family. You know, suffering for the kingdom and all that.

This is not one of those times. ;-) I'll go straight to the pics:



If you tuned in for the last episode, the family, being the victims of an epic plot to make their lives a document-laden disaster, had to head for Germany. All seemed lost, or, at the very least, all seemed like it would be a very big headache. Basically, we were having some problems with out paperwork, and it would require a trip to Germany to sort it out.

The trip did not bode well for the rest of the stay. As you can see in the above picture, we used the standard 'lay out a blanket in the train station and form a wall of suitcases around the sleeping child' technique. People look at you weird, but trust me, children sleep only on rare occasions during travel, and you're going to want to prolong those as long as possible. In any event, it was a long, tiring trip.

And then, after the train journey (incidentally, trains are Steven's new favorite thing too, Marth) and a night flight, we arrived here:

Lovely Mundelsheim! As we mentioned, my gradmother's cousin lives here, and we've managed to keep in touch with the family through the years. They live in a wonderful house in the farming town, and own vineyards and orchards as the family business. It is such a wonderful place to visit, and they were nice enough to have us even in the middle of the harvest season.

Steven showing off the local produce ...

I think what I'll do is the apple harvest pictures this time, and the grape harvest next post. Of course, we've been doing both concurrently, with B staying home to cook for the family while I'm out in the fields with them most days, but we've both managed to get out some.

The first step in apple harvesting is to knock them off the trees. Here at the farm this is accomplished first with a two-stroke machine that looks like the offspring of a weedeater and a pipe wrench, which shakes the branches in an attempt to knock the apples down. The remaining 20% or so are knocked down by the old-fashioned method - a guy with a long stick whacks them.

Then, the machine seen above goes around sucking the apples off the ground and putting them in the bin on the back. It then dumps them into a giant container, where someone sorts through to remove the rotten apples. Then, the giant container is loaded onto a tractor and taken to the juicer. Voila - apple juice.

So far, I seem to be good at the stick-whacking, which rewards being tall, and bad at the apple-sorting, which penalizes it. Steven, meanwhile, is an expert in his own mind at sorting (sorry, I can't seem to get the video of him 'helpfully' throwing away perfectly good apples to load).

Of course, B is also an expert sorter, and has spent several afternoons out in the orchards.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Thanks to all of you who have been lifting us up. It did seem that we were in for a rough time for a while, with all of the confusion about our paperwork. It's certainly a long way from being resolved, so please continue to remember us, but there was a point at which it really seemed a tall mountain to climb.

And, to top all of this off, we then found out that our paperwork was rejected because of a HIV test that we had been told we didn't need! However, just when things seemed at their grimmest, and we were looking at multiple flights back and forth to Moscow, a friend emailed and said that he could work it out through a personal contact!

We're soooo thankful for that. Now, it looks like we can have everything done in another couple of weeks or so, and then we'll have long-term permission to stay in Moscow for a while.

I'll leave you with a picture of Steven contemplating the mysteries of an apple tree.