Another Week at Mossy's Seaside Farm

Another week at Mossy Kilcher's Seaside Farm has gone by. I have been working a lot, keeping the place very tidy. Doing my job well and working hard is so natural for me, having grown up in a country with Lutheran work ethic and as a child of assiduous farmer parents. After giving my all, it was rather easy to get a day off when I wanted to join some people from Seaside Farm for a boat tour to Seldovia, a village at the mouth of Kachemak Bay. On the way to Seldovia, Rainbow Tours took us around Gull Island seabird rookery, home to 15,000 seabirds, and I could finally see a puffin! In addition, we saw lots of sea otters.

In Seldovia, I walked the short Otterbahn trail. The trail itself was nothing very special, but it felt sooooooo good to breathe some fresh air - I think I have been breathing so much dust when cleaning the cabins and rooms! It was equally good to escape for a while all the "Tuula, today I was hoping that maybe you could help me with this"...

Having only three hours for exploring Seldovia first sounded like a very short time but Seldovia is such a small place (only 300 people) that it was enough. Before the boat left back to Homer, I still had time to go and see the historical area with some houses on stilts. They actually reminded me of my stay at a hostel in Chile in 2010 (http://mundodetuula.blogspot.com/2010/05/hitchhiking-boat-trip-new-travel-mates.html).

Even though I said I have been working hard - which I have - the truth is that I can sleep until nine in the morning, talk with the guests in between work, take my time choosing the matching sheets, and a few times, when I have finished cleaning a beach cabin, I have done a short walk on the beach.

In addition to all the farm animals and guest lodges, Mossy also has a raspberry patch. The berries are ripe now and they are so yummy!! I have helped with weeding the patch, or clearing the organic raspberry jungle, as I would jokingly call the last corner where nobody else had yet worked. Saturday evening, I went to clear it for an hour. But an hour became four hours as I just could not stop. Porcupine is an animal that I had never seen before this trip. They look cute and funny but could destroy Mossy's raspberry patch if they got inside the fence. That is why, one evening Mossy and I had quite a mission: we had to catch this intruder who had climbed to a tree (they are so slow and clumsy, but still they climb trees!) and transport it far away from the farm.

Yesterday, Mossy and I drove to the end of East End Road, about ten miles away from Seaside Farm. It was such a beautiful ride with stunning views over Kachemak Bay! We also visited two old homesteads, which was very interesting. One of them was the place where Mossy grew up. Her parents were artistic and educated people, idealists from Switzerland who came to Alaska in the 1940's in search of a more simple and self-sufficient way of life.

Now the time has come to leave this most beautiful place. I will go to Anchorage for the weekend and fly out on Monday. But I love the view from Seaside Farm so much that I am seriously considering coming back next summer.

"You never really leave a place you love. Part of it you take with you, leaving a part of you behind."