Our first week on the Fire Island Kids goat farm and things are going well, all things considered. 

Goats are some of the more mischievous pets one can own, and they are always trying to escape or cause trouble in one way or another. One of my projects this first week was working on new shelters for the male goats. It rains here most afternoons, so they need some protection, but they destroy things quickly – I thought I was tough on gear. Because the shelters are heavy once they are built, I was assembling them inside the goat pen. While I was building, they were trying to tear it apart. Every time I turned around, they were climbing on top and knocking it over, or knocking the tools and screws all over the place – and then acting innocent, of course. 

We also discovered that goats (non-fixed goats, I should say) and chickens make a lot of noise. Chickens especially tend to make noise with little motivation. If one lays an egg, it screams about it. If one is about to lay an egg, it announces as much loudly. Sometimes, they will cluck and holler for no reason, and other times they will join in with others making a racket. Fortunately, we have some earplugs, as we are staying in the loft of the barn. 

After working for a week, Andrea and I took our weekend up north to Spencer Beach to go camping. Unlike our camping adventures in Michigan, the weather was in the eighties and sunny during the days, and in the high sixties (Farenheit). We were able to simply hang our hammocks, no sleeping pads or anything, and sleep right on the ocean breeze. It was a perfect night. 

After hiking around and exploring the area, we saw a couple of historic heiaus – historic temples. These specific ones were pretty important and sacrificial temples, one of which (Luakini) was the temple that King Kamehameha built to fulfill the prophecy of ruling all the islands, where human sacrifices also took place. 

Although we would love a car to explore the island more efficiently, we gained some experience taking the bus around and hitch-hiking. Before living here, Andrea had never hitched. She said she would still just hitch with me but is feeling much more comfortable about it. I would like to do an informational post about hitch-hiking because I think it is often misunderstood, but in Hawaii, the hitch-hiking community is pretty great. A lot of people hitch around until they get a car of their own, so they are more likely to give rides once they do. Where I would try to hitch for hours in some places on the mainland, I can get a ride within a few minutes here. With any hitching though, traveling takes longer than usual, so we spent a good portion of our weekend exploring parts of the island on the go. 

A lot of the island is barren and not what most people would call “beautiful,” but it is an incredibly unique part of the world, and the big island alone contains 8 of the 13 climate zones. Even when it seems like lava rock is everywhere, there are some of the wettest spots here too (Kauai hosts the world’s wettest), so there is plenty of life. 

There is plenty of life here on the farm too. Every day brings excitement and new skills to be learned. Life is simpler here in many ways, but it feels great to be adventuring again.