The plan was to go away, to the coast, for a week. We talked about it for ages beforehand. My daughter and her family were going to come here and keep and eye on things, keep the dogs company.

Didn't happen.

Departure day minus 3 the cows smashed down a heavy mesh fence to break into the house-yard. There is an apple tree immediately next to the break-in site. Often apples drop over the fence and they scoop them up, but the temptation proved overwhelming and they forced their way in. As you would know, the apples are always nicer on the other side of the fence. The fence they broke is all very temporary...its actually an opened gate that has been left open to create some space outside Sylvia's work room/craft area. Instead of a gate buckled tightly to the shed we have an open gate angled outwards with a temporary fence in place to seal the gap. Its all octopus straps and star pickets, and a hungry cow or two could walk right through it if they wanted to. Which they did.

Departure Day minus 2 the house pump stopped working. No water. I'll cover that as a separate topic, but in investigating that I realized the septic tank pump was playing up, We just hadn't noticed, but it was something that needed to be dealt with.

That afternoon the cows came back again, and this time squeezed through a barbed wire fence, again into the house yard. I must have, by sheer luck, found them just after it happened. The usual carnage of broken tree branches and massive dumps of poo weren't left behind after I had escorted them off the premises, so they must have just been getting the party started. The gap wasn't there before. They stretched the wire, permanently disfiguring it and meaning it needed to be repaired.

Hard to believe a fullsized cow can squeeze through that gap.

Based on that we couldn't go away. The water and sewerage issues were a dealbreaker

While I am comfortable shooing 600kg cows off and chasing them out of the yard, I would not want someone else to do it. My cows are pretty placid, but one of them thinks about being a tough guy occasionally and I couldn't expect my daughter and partner to deal with that.