Finished Packing!!! I leave Sunday!!

On Sunday, I fly off to Los Angeles and from there I am going to be working my way up the West Coast, working on one organic farm after another through the WWOOF program.I basically got a a huge book full of organic farms of all shapes and sizes all over the U.S. that welcome travelers to work on the farm for a couple of days, weeks, months, or even years. People are wwoofing all over the world on every continent. Anyway, I've decided to start out in Southern California.I plan to stay about a week or two at each farm until I get to Oregon where I'm hoping I'll find a farm to work on for long term.    I've already set up my first four farms and I'll tell you about them when I get there.

Yeah, besides packing and stuff, I spent most of my time here in New Jersey on the computer reading about different farms on the west coast, and also practicing on my guitar.  I'm really excited about this trip, this adventure.  I've been looking forward to my next adventure for some time, and to be traveling, well, it's a great feeling.  I think I've felt that I wasn't capable of doing this kind of thing, backpacking, that I'm not really that kind of guy. I mean, I never felt like I'm a real hippie or anything. I'm not that tall, I'm balding, glasses etc.  It's taken a long time, but I've finally figured out that I can do anything I want in life.  And I want to see new places, keep meeting new people and experience  different ways of living.  I guess I am a sort of hippie.  

The past year I spent on Havaveadam was amazing. I don't know how to describe it easily.  I had been interested in Sustainable Living for some years before that, I even made a webpage entitled Building an Artificial Island in the Middles of the Dead Sea

Six months before I got to the farm I went down to Kibbutz Lotan to volunteer for a couple of months, while I was there I applied for their Green Apprenticeship, but I didn't get in.  I;m sure it would have been a great experience, but I;m happy with the way things turned out.  I spent almost a whole year living in a very small community of people growing food, building with earth, wood, straw and stone, educating other people about Sustainable Living, and of course caring about each other and our environment.  I spent three months apprenticed to Chaim the farmer and at he same time I participated in a Introductory Permaculture Course, which really opened up my eyes to lots of different ideas and concepts in ecology and sustainable living.  Israel is a small country and so the number of people involved in Sustainable Living, Permaculture, Natural Building etc is small compared to other countries, but that's also it's strength.  In less than a year and a half, I met most of the Permaculturists in the country, people giving courses, people who have organic farms of their own. I visited a small farm in the Golan where a married couple grows a quarter acre of whet for their yearly flour needs and has ten goats for dairy products too.  I visited houses made of straw, of stone, of earth.  I met a girl who spins her own wool.  Stuff like that.  I'll try to write more about the things I did this past year in future postings.