02/12/2019 – San Rafael, Argentina

Josh did the animals and I got our breakfast ready. We spent the morning volunteering, Josh did his morning pool ritual followed by some sanding, and I ironed sheets. It is not taxing work but it made me feel pretty braindead after 4 hours of it! We made lunch, which we shared with Frederico out on the terrace. He has a drilling company in USA which he needs a new name for so we spent lunch playing word association to come up with something. It is quite a hard job to do it for someone else! Josh and I cleared up then got our suncream on and went by the pool to read our books. After about 10 minutes we could see big dark clouds heading our way, the wind picked up, and the dogs started to get edgy. We went inside, and sat out the thunder and lightning which surprisingly didn’t bring much rain with it! We sorted the animals out and put them to bed at 16:30 as usual and then waited around for Frederico to take us to the supermarket, which he had promised to do at 16:00. He said there had been a hailstone warning (they are at least the size of marbles here) so it was too dangerous to go out in the car. Once the storm had passed we left at around 18:00 and Frederico took us to a minimarket which he left us at whilst he ran some errands. It was a little bit annoying as he had been promising to take us to the big supermarket (cheaper, more options) every day for the last few days, and instead he took us to a local minimarket. Still, we managed to pick up some bits like eggs, cheese, yoghurts, and toothpaste before being picked up again about 20 minutes later and being brought back to the farm. We made ourselves a scrambled egg dinner and then retreated to our room where we watched The Crown. The Wifi came back on after about 4 days of not working, which we were pleased about! Apparently some people had vandalised the arial, which meant the house had no WiFi reception. Had a few worried messages from mum but there had been no way at all of receiving them!