I spent a wonderful week in Oloron, a town of 12,000 people in southern France just north of the Pyrenees mountains, another HelpX engagement. Oloron has a chocolate factor so you can often smell chocolate cooking throughout the town. Normally HelpX-ers here help with the large market garden or to build a dome-shaped greenhouse, but I had a really easy week with not much outside work so instead I did some cleaning inside. The Pyrnenees mountains can be seen mu...

I finished up my wood cutting at the HelpX place, then spent a day picking sureau berries (elderberries in English), separating out the stems and the green ones (which are supposedly toxic) and making jam (without pectin, and it actually set!) and syrup. The syrup is supposedly very healthy, often used to cure or avoid a cold. Yes, Deborah, you read that correctly - I actually made jam (with lots of help from the internet). After I left the HelpX place I trave...

I am now in a hilly, rural part of France with small towns and villages, working as a HelpX-er (similar to WWOOF except not limited to organic farming, essentially I work 4-5 hours per day in exchange for a room and meals). This is my first experience with HelpX and it is great! My main goal was to try to improve my very poor French through immersion, and it has improved, but so far my skill at playing charades is playing a bigger role than my ability to speak ...

From Belfast, we flew to Paris. We went up the Eiffel Tower (36 years ago when I backpacked through Europe after University, we couldn't afford to go up, so said "we'll come back", well I actually did come back and made it up this time). Though it wasn't easy - lineups to get tickets, to go through security, to get on the elevator, to buy more tickets, to get on the next elevator to go to the top, and then to get on the elevator to come down. But it was great,...