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 much clearer through the clean windows!

Once day we hiked into the Pyrenees to look for mushrooms - we found very few mushrooms but it was a great hike. The mountains are surprisingly rugged (not the Rockies, but much more rugged than I would have thought) with huge vultures soaring overhead. A hiker fell a while ago and died, and by time her hiking companians made it to her body in less than 1 1/2 hours, the vultures had eaten much of it. Cody, Michael, Mitch: wouldn't that change Ski Patrol and SAR if you weren't sure if you would be chasing vultures away from the bodies?

Along with all the fresh-from-the-garden and/or bakery food, I also ate pig's feet (no hooves, but lots of bones and fat - pigs don't look like they have fat ankles but they obviously do), pig's intestines (fortunately they were cooked for a long time so no longer looked like intestines), really delicious cheese made from sheep's milk (not sure how do you milk a sheep), duck breast (like really flavourful dark chicken). I also helped make a huge batch of tomato chutney, not bad for someone who wasn't exactly sure what chutney was before I arrived. A slice of bread, some sheep's cheese, and chutney on top - yummmm.