So what, you wake up one day and say, “Hey honey, let’s be farmers?”

Something I’m asked a lot is how our trip came about because, as many of our friends now, I am definitely not a farm girl. So, this is the story:

A few months ago, I was advised that having international experience would be valuable for my career and overall life skills. Although I lived in Nicaragua, I could always have more abroad experiences. I went home that night and started researching abroad opportunities. After deciding that, yes, living abroad was an awesome idea,  I turned to Devon and said, “hey, what do you think about living abroad for a while?” Without hesitation, my amazing husband said, “I love the idea!”

From that simple question blossomed the idea to work on farms in Europe – it combines ideal destinations and learning about our passion, food! It also ensures that we’ll have an authentic experience while contributing to something to the “greater good,” which was important to us both.

But how were we going to do this? With Devon’s magic ability to find the best of everything online, we landed on a great web site that posted volunteer opportunities on organic farms all over the world. We just had to pay a one time $35 membership fee and we’d have access to opportunities worldwide for a year. This magical web site is helpx.net. We considered WWOOF, which is almost the same thing, but HelpX was better for our needs, multiple countries.

We decided to start looking in Italy (oh yes, Halbe has been obsessed with Tuscany since seeing Under the Tuscan Sun) and the UK (Devon wanted to visit his namesake, Devon, England). That blossomed into visiting France  and Ireland as well and voila, we had our four countries!

If you’re curious where we’re going the itinerary is:

UK (Wales and Devon) – one produce farm and one goat cheese farm (we get to feed baby goats!)
Ireland (Dublin and Cork) – one goat farm (commercial)
France (Paris, Caen and Bordeaux) – an apple cider farm and a merlot winery
Italy (Tuscany) – a smallholding (a farm under 50 acres) producing wine and olive oil.

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