Thursday, June 18, 2009

Greater than 70...


Well as you all know David and I have been getting ready for our trip to Hamilton, Ontario this summer where we will be biking about 70mi a day for 7 days straight. Well yesterday we got serious and David came up with the idea to bike to Twist of Fate Farm (check out their website at Twistoffatefarm.com, it has their wonderful story on it). This farm is who our house has decided to support by buying all of our meat there. They are a small local farm located just northwest of Manchester, NH, who care for their animals, raise them on grass and medicate them only when they are sick. They also spent a lot of time deciding where to have their animals butchered, visiting many different placing and choosing a place in northern MA where Twist of Fate felt the butcher respected the animal up until the return of the meat. This farm is a great source to know about and support, starting out by raising animals for their own table it quickly became a small business for them providing meat for their friends, neighbors and now parts of MA.

We have loved all the products we have purchased from them and enjoy each visit
we make, which is about once every 6wks. This past visit it was David and I on our bikes. We had been sitting around the house the previous day, David being in between paint jobs and I patiently or not so patiently waiting for my license to show up. David thought it might be a good idea to take advantage of the good weather and get some riding it.

It was wonderful, the terrain was intense, with wall like hills that were longer than a mile and sections of pothole roads, but also beautiful landscapes. The weather was beautiful, the sun out and the breeze at our backs. Of course it was heartbreaking to show up at the farm, 36mi later to find out they aren't even open on Wednesday...ahhhh! Seriously, I was heartbroken, the ride there was hard enough but to not even achieve our goal, to bike all the way home empty handed. What a bummer. So we decided to stick around, it was about 11:15, we could realistically wait until 1pm to see if anyone showed up, there are a lot of animals that need taking care of so someone has to show up. So we did, and while we waited we checked out the animals who are so cute.

Baby Pigs, so small they have to sit in their dish to eat, I wanted to steal one.

Thankfully about an hour after waiting the owner of the farm showed up to feed the animals. Which I guess was pretty lucky for us because she now works full time outside of the farm so it's not often she shows up in the middle of the day like that. But we did get our meat, and successfully carried home 30lbs of frozen meat. David carrying most of the load on our trailer in a cool and I carried a small amount in my panniers, making the ride home that much harder but making us that much more proud of our feat!!!


David with the trailer filled with meat!

3 comments:

Mary Lundquist said...

I love this story. You guys are truly amazing! Jesse gave a chuckle as I read your post aloud. Do you both have huge biking muscles now or what?! You must be in serious shape! All right!

-m

David Shannon-Lier said...

it was awesome, I'm so glad you guys like it :-) David of course has huge muscle legs but I'm still working on mine, he just gets his quicker :-) But we feel great and are both really excited to go on our trip this summer. We have a bunch of different rides to look forward to but this past weekend we did our first camping trip off our bikes, rode and camped at Harold Parker State Forest. It was really great!

miapap said...

hey guys glad you made it love the blog we are back home for acouple of weeks then off to ark trout are calling e mail is lytlesjj@yahoo.com have agreat fall love &all that stuff john&janet