April 2018 — Team Clearing and (nearly) Summer Weather

We kicked off April with the most epic Easter egg hunt here at Cara Creek Eco Lodge, and continued adventuring and exploring, rain or shine for the week that Rafa was here. He loves the fact that just simply living here is one big adventure. Rory’s mom, sister and nephew joined us for a few days too. We met them in Porto when they arrived and enjoyed a day of exploring there before all heading back to the foot hills of the Serra da Estrela. We absolutely loved showing them the progress we’ve made so far at Cara Creek, and better describing our upcoming plans for building this summer. 

bedtime stories with a head lamp🔦

Since then, we’ve been lucky again with some fabulous Workaway volunteers who arrived the second and third weeks of April. Fortunately for them the rain has lightened up, and it's been summer type weather so plunging in the river after work has become part of our daily routine. Well besides the afternoons we’ve had random rain/hail storms😬... But we're getting there⛅!

All the mimosa trees have been cut down for some time, but it’s a whole other beast to now clear up the piles of firewood, small trees for mulching, and rotten wood. Over the last couple of weeks we've made quite a dent in our piles thanks so the help from our awesome volunteer crew. We have plenty of mulch that will be used to shade out the mimosa trees, and for our future garden. With a bit of wet weather we’ve been able to get through some of the larger piles by burning them, which goes a lot faster than mulching.

Jenny and Ben (aka Benny and Jen) and Adrianna have also continued with the supporting wall for the spiral shower. Aurelie and Jerome (who designed the spiral shower) are returning from their holidays -- and by then we should be ready to begin the rammed earth process. Alex and Jo have decided to commit to staying with us until mid July, and focus on helping to develop our permaculture based organic garden. If you or anyone you know is interested in coming to join our team please follow the link here. We continue to love meeting volunteers from all over the world -- at the moment from UK, Mexico, Australia, Portugal, and France and Netherlands once Aurelie and Jerome arrive back next week.

Rory’s still making some finishing touches on the octagon deck such as posts on every corner to then put a shaded roof, and some hand rails on every other side. But it’s totally usable in the meantime so it’s been wonderful to host some yoga classes down on the river. Everyone has raved about practicing there so far.

As we begin May, we’re looking forward to getting some consistently good working weather. We have plenty of volunteers booked with us through May, so there will be lots of progress in the coming weeks. If you want to join our adventure see some detail here and contact me with any questions! Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for more photos and frequent updates! As always, thanks for following along!