She grabbed my laptop, my sister sitting by her side, and they began searching for farms to escape to. Within five days, we had booked a cheap farmhouse and we knew we had to find a dog nursery for Ron immediately, since the farm owners wouldn't allow pets. This broke my heart.
I didn't want to go in the first place (if you've been following me recently, you'll know I'm in the claws of depression right now and everything sounds like a bad idea), and hearing that I would have to leave Ron with strangers made me panic. A bit of history: we found Ron seven years ago living in a dumpster, with clear signs of violence from his ex-family, and he's still psychologically marked by the abandonment. I agreed to go because it was my mom's birthday, so I felt obligation toward her & pressure from my dad, and also because I wouldn't have to spend a cent. Free vacation in the mountains!
The idea of going to a farm and getting to be with donkeys, goats, gigantic dogs, geese and other animals I never get to see in person got me a little excited. On the farm's website, everything looked ideallic. The reality was that the house was indeed ideallic, but the conditions of the animals disturbed me, and that is why I didn't take pictures of them. To some people, these conditions wouldn't seem torturous; my family certainly didn't think anything of it. But to me, no animal should be wearing annoying iron collars with headache-inducing bells and other artifacts of torture. They were also confined to tiny spaces. I was in a constant state of anxiety during my stay there because I couldn't take my mind off the animals' conditions and I couldn't stop thinking of Ron and his abandonment issues. Would he feel abandoned in that place where we left him? Would he eat? Would he sleep well?
The whole vacation turned out to be as fastidious as I imagined: leaving Ron in a strange place + disturbing animal conditions + my dad and sister slept all the time and I was perpetually bored (I thought the whole point was to explore the mountains, be in nature, have picnics... ?), and I found my family's company insufferable overall.
What I did like was being surrounded by nature, literally engulfed! (have you seen the vines eating up the house? glorious!), sitting in the patio by myself for hours watching the bees, the silence of the place (the nearest town was 15 minutes away by car), the lack of television, the contemplation and meditation, exploring the mountain a bit with my mother, playing charades and "guess who?" every night for five hours, staying up until 1am due to amazing, profound conversations where we'd discuss everything about human existence, and of course the utter gorgeousness of the house itself. I felt as if I was living in The Burrow (Harry Potter reference ;) . We also drove to the country of Andorra because it was literally thirty minutes away by car. Andorra is a tiny country located between Spain and France, it is so so so tiny that people outside of Europe don't even know of its existence. Well, here I am to tell you curiosities about Southern Europe ;D