Procrastinations across the nations

A new year rolled in about 4 months ago and since then Elina has been asking me if I am going to write a blog post or should she… and I say “no don’t, I’ll do it, I’ll do it!”. And so I am. The problem is that the longer I leave it, the more things have happened and the more insurmountable the task becomes. A classic procrastination scenario.

So, the remedy is this catch-up post; it certainly doesn’t cover all of these last months, but it at least gets me back on the blog-wagon and letting you, our dear followers know that we alive and kicking and still enjoying rolling around with the box on wheels.

So, the year kicked off in the olive fields of Greece where we volunteered on a permaculture project for 6 weeks, as you may remember from our last post. It was a great experience on many levels, but once the new year started we remembered that we are travelling and so said our goodbye to our lovely new friends and camped about 5 minutes down the road in the bushes by the beach. This gave us enough space to plan the next moves….

Elina loves to explore as many countries as possible and had her heart set on heading up through Macedonia to Bulgaria and Romania, then Serbia then…I checked the weather…average low of -8 and average highs of 0 degrees. Our old caravan has paper thin walls and is a bit leaky and somehow spending January and February in an ice-cube didn’t appeal. So, we decided to really explore Greece until it warmed up a bit which turned out to be a brilliant idea. We went skiing near Delphi with our old ozzie friend Nick who came to visit, endured torrential rain with our old friend Maite who came to see us, and rented a (relatively) luxurious house for a few days while Nannie Annie visited… We went rock-climbing in world-class Leonidio, mountain biking all over the place and did some graffiti pieces in the lawless anarchy zone in Athens. We visited loads of ancient Greek ruins, which the kids were surprisingly captivated by, and which served as some homeschooling…

Realising that the freezing balkans wasn’t a great idea we caught a ferry back to Italy. We hid Daisy in a shopping bag to prevent the poor old girl getting locked in a freezing kennel for 24 hours and had some comedy moments as she poked her head out at inopportune times!

Back in Italy, we arranged another volunteer project at the lovely Manuele’s house where we built him a rather innovative greenhouse out of wiggly poles and enjoyed amazing Italian foods that he prepared twice daily and guzzled litres of local wine with lunch and dinner. We spent a week or so with him and then dragged the caravan up yet another crazy rocky ascent to get back to civilization.

In pissing rain, we made our way accross Italy, into France to another volunteer project in the gorgeous Ardeche region. It was a setup of a “homeschool hub” where there was to be a new centre for travelling families to get together and join education programmes. Sounded great, and almost was, other than the owners had decided to go to Tanzania and sip cocktails while their kids attended a homeschool hub, in the name of research. Our task was to renovate an enormous leaky silk factory in exchange for living in an iceberg. We made the best of it and burned every scrap of old scrap wood in the woodstove while doing creative stuff with the kids and playing with the abandoned cats!

Off in the caravan again, after another hairy exit up a very narrow steep track, we made our way to our beloved Chamonix, where Elina and I met and where her little brother still lives, with his wife, Amanda, and baby Arlo.

There we spent 6 weeks, helping them with renovations, watching Arlo learn to walk, snowboarding, skateboarding, looking up old friends, lounging in the jacuzzi and throwing balls for the old doggies!