Day 86 Wednesday, 3/8/2016, Jondaryan, absolutely freezing 9 degrees (ambient temperature 3 degrees) and more rain. Surely you can hustle up some snow!

We don our winter woollies and gum boots and join a bunch of Japanese school kids, teenagers, for a sheep shearing demonstration using hand shears. The poor old sheep is being shorn for the first time and doesn’t utter a single baa. Interesting to us is that all discussion by the teachers is in English and there is a bit of English grammar bandied about “one lamb, two lambs, one sheep, two sheep, no S.” Then we learn that if a sheep is shorn with wet wool the wool will self-combust when baled due to the pressure. This ‘nomading’ is so educational, is that one ‘d’ or two?

Retreating from the cold we turn C’s pumpkin into a big pot of soup and lock ourselves away from the foul weather.