Chapter 2 - The Spanish Goat

View Route Map

"So you guys have had goat before?"

Leaving Killarney was fine, knowing how it's always hard to leave but this time the cold and the lack of dry wood (and people? - the isolation was nice...) and we were off to Sudbury. After making all our required pit stops, we needed our technological fix and found it at the Green Star Laundry. 1 hour of our high. It wasn't long and we were off to the Great White North - well not really but it had been the furthest either of us had ever gone; Spanish, Ont. The Outhwaites were awaiting our arrival. Tony and Barb are two very unique people with a very different lifestyle and some very interesting and engaging perspectives on life. They live off the land, and off the grid. All the energy they use is accounted for, and everything has a full use life cycle or it simply does not make sense. They do not buy flourescent bulbs because they are trendy or feeling guilty about global warming. They buy LEDs because they use so very little power and can be very inexpensive. They do not choose to not eat beef because it factors into a large environmental footprint or that it fuels the cycle of animal abuse; they choose to not eat beef because raising them is expensive and difficult, and if they lose one to predators or otherwise that's there food supply gone for months. Instead they raise goats.

Goat meat is a lot like beef, and if I hadn't been told what I was eating I probably wouldn't have guessed. Tony, Barb, Graeme and I talked for hours and hours that first night and it was great. our politics are so similar it was like dinner at hazelwood, our perspective on life and society was so fresh and new on the other hand. It was like finding someone who had long been forgotten about but who speaks the truth from experience instead of posturing and theoritcal schmoozing. Like Luke Skywalker finding Yoda, and having to re assess life for what it was going to mean to him, instead of what it had previously meant to him.

All in all a great couple of days. I would have liked the weather to be nicer so that we could have helped out around the farm more, and maybe even got some dry firewood out of the deal! I left a beer cooler there but it seems I'm leaving things everywhere I go because i just brought too much stuff.

Leaving their farm we finally had a sence of new adventure, of going somewhere neither of us had ever been. I am really glad Graeme was along for this part of my quest.