Merry Christmas! Happy new year! Happy lockdown three..? It’s been a minute since I did one of these blog things. We just arrived back home after a mammoth 1000-mile schlep across central Europe, one which took us from deepest south-eastern Austria back to England in two days.
We stopped off for the night on the way back, in a snowy car-park somewhere off the German autobahn. I always wanted to visit Germany; it was one of the places we were most excited about seeing. This is not what I head in my head!
Going into 2021 after the absolute bin of a year that 2020 was, and seeing the events of the last few days unfold in the US, it would be easy to feel hopeless. Despair is a logical reaction to the external stimuli that we are all experiencing, and hope is a luxury that those who have had good fortune can afford. However, hope could also be seen as an active choice to be made each day. Objectively terrible things are happening to us – family members lost, careers paused, home-schooling and bills and social isolation and on top of everything, the pressure to have achieved something, to come out somehow “better” after this is all done. As if lockdown is an oven, and you are the seventh, now perfect, batch of banana bread. When these things feel too big, when the evil twins depression and anxiety rear their heads, hope is the last thing on a person’s mind. Hope is knowing all the terrible doomscroll-plucked facts and being optimistic in spite of it all. To believe that there must be a light at the end of the tunnel.
While we were in Austria, going into lockdown for the first time, the option of a temporary home gave us the opportunity to hope – for a chance to continue on our journey south, or east, or north. We hoped the situation might improve, that we’d get another chance to explore. Having the luxury of income from our rented house meant that we could, in turn, select an airbnb to live in. This meant that we didn’t have extra anxiety on top of the COVID-panic; of worrying if we were going to get stopped and told to leave by Austrian authorities, or if the van was going to freeze overnight.
Gus taking charge.
When I say that we’re back home, I don’t just mean the country of England. I mean backhome. Like, my mum’s house. Yes, I know that we have our own house in Farncombe, but we can’t go back there because we rented it out, before we realised just how much the world was going to be on fire. And so, we are back where I grew up, which I still call home because, well, it is.
This house has seen me transition from glowering, black-clad teen greebo to perenially hungover uni student. Once I moved out permanently, I was a visiting stressed-out office worker, here for workouts and crosswords at the weekend. Now, here I am again, married, two dogs in tow, quarantining after our trip away. Home. This place is the opposite of adventure; it’s comfort and safety. It’s the next hopeful, tentative step in our journey.
Four months out, two days back.
In Austria, and in fact in the other two countries that we visited and explored (France and Switzerland), it was easy to feel at home instantly. This is because we arrived there in Larry, our mobile house, the mini-Farncombe. The more we travelled around, the more we became comfortable in him. Slowly he became another person in our relationship – not just our living quarters but somehow morphing into a character in his own right. As we anthropomorphised our vehicle and lodgings, laughing at his crotchety old-man ways and finding comfort in his four walls and four wheels, COVID was trailing its sticky, unwashed fingers across the continent for a second time.
At the end of October, Austria announced a strict curfew, which would cause all campsites and other motorhome stopovers to shut up shop. Wild camping was already illegal here, and as we were foreigners there in a pandemic, we wanted to stay within the letter of the law and to be as respectful as we could. This meant that we could either return to the UK and be locked down there, or we could try to wait it out, and find a bricks-and-mortar temporary Austrian home, and a little ray of hope. This is what we did. We hastily airbnb’d a flat in southern Styria.
Hatzendorf, Südsteiermark.
We arrived, begrudging but in generally good spirits. We’d booked four weeks here, taking advantage of airbnb’s discounts for long stays. This place, it’s fair to say, catfished us. It was a small and – by the end of our month stay there – mouldy flat. The thick walls had damp and in the final days, there was mould on the windows which we would have to wipe off daily – NICE. But, it was in general an upgrade from the van, in facilities if not in spirit. While we were here, the Austrian curfew turned into a full lockdown again, and we were forced to reassess our options once more.
We decided to move to a different airbnb, not far away in Leibnitz. This one was more well-selected… Which was handy, as we were there for five weeks, this time, including Christmas and NYE.
Leibnitz, Südsteiermark.Ho ho ho.
These places began as blank slates, pictures on a screen. Soon they became filled with our stuff; the minutiae and details of locked-down Lawrence life. They morphed into home. The dogs, the rugs, the food smells, the empty wine glasses on the side, waiting until morning to be washed up. Then, as we left, we removed our physical stuff, and ourselves, taking a little bit of the place with us. When I returned back to England, my hair still smelled of Austrian incense, which we burned as we released the house back to the owners. A little bit of us will be Österreicher from now on, and we love that. Typical gap yah stuff, I know, I’m sorry, very cliche. But it doesn’t make it any less true. We will remember these strange few months of the strangest year of our lives to date having the scent of patchouli incense, backdropped in snow, surrounded by German-speakers smiling through their masks at us, wishing us a grüß gott (good day). I choose to hope that today will be a grüß gott for you, too!
For us (two humans and two dogs), the last few weeks has got us feeling lockdown-ish. By which I mean, a bit sad. I know that blogs are supposed to be jolly and filled with lots of adventurous!!!! fun!!!!! stuff!!!!!, but the last three weeks, it’s just not really felt right. We are two van-dwellers who are living in bricks-and-mortar houses, and will have been doing for 8 weeks by the time we’re done. It’s felt a little disingenuous to write about anything van-ish, because, well – Larry has become a shuttle service to and from the local Hofer, and that’s about it. He’s currently covered in inches of snow, sat on our driveway, waiting for the Austrian weather to cheer up a bit and for the end of lockdown to come here.
Since not much has changed since the last blog post in terms of our situation, I thought I’d do something a bit different this time around. I’ve never been in any country other than the UK for more than a couple of weeks at a time, but we’ve been in Austria for two months now and will be here until the new year. I thought I’d put together a list of things we’ve learnt about our temporarily adopted home. I’ve always thought that listicles were low-effort and lacking in journalistic nous, but I am on holiday and also not a journalist, so that’s what you’re getting.
1 – The people are so friendly. Seriously, I don’t know if I’ve ever met a more helpful, welcoming, friendly set of people in my life. Everyone we’ve come across, bar none that I can think of, have been more than willing to give their time and to help us in any way they can. They teach English in schools from a young age and to a high level, so we have managed to have full conversations in good English with the vast majority of the people we’ve met here. From campsite hosts to petrol station employeess to airbnb hosts, everyone has welcomed us with open arms (methaphorically – we’re in a pandemic, hello). And often, open schnapps.
2- Which brings me to my next point – schnapps – Austrian moonshine! The Austrian government allows distillation of schnapps at home for personal use. Schnapps here isn’t that bright green stuff that you might have drunk in a poorly-lit uni bar at a questionable time in the morning. Austrian schnapps is clear and strong, a lot like vodka. On the Austrian National Day, we were offered schnapps at 9AM! We’ve been given several types of homemade schnapps as well as the store-bought stuff. They love it here.
3- It has Alps. Lots of them. I’ve always associated the Alps with France and Switzerland, but Austria has a good chunk of the famous mountain range too. We drove through them – Vorarlberg and Tyrol are extremely mountainous.
4- Where there’s Alps, there’s skiing. Well – normally, anyway. And that means price hikes. If you’re counting the pennies, then you’re better off staying away from these types of areas. We’ve found it’s less expensive than Switzerland to camp and live, but more expensive than France.
5- Austria is German-speaking, and has gone through many transformations over the years. Since it’s a landlocked country in central Europe, its borders have changed many times and it’s been part of Germany and Hungary in its chequered past. Its major cities were built by the Romans. It was invaded by Goths during its formative years. Something that my life and Austria’s have in common.
6- There are some pretty famous Austrians. Big shout-out to Freud (1856-1939), father of psychoanalysis and godfather of modern psychotherapy, who lived in Vienna for a large part of his life. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Christoph Waltz, Nikolai Tesla, and, um, Hitler are/were all from Austria. Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up just west of Graz. We could drive to his old hometown in about 45 minutes, and check out the Arnold Schwarzenegger museum, if we wanted to. Museums are opening back up in Austria from next week, so that could be a fun day out…!
7- There are lots of different types of beer that Austrians drink, but we have it on good authority (an actual Austrian) that Puntigamer is the most authentically Austrian choice.
All beer tastes basically the same to me, but Tom likes it!
8- They have plug sockets in their bathrooms. Why?
9- Austrian wine is great. I had never thought about Austria as a producer of wine, but it is – and some of it’s really delicious. The hillsides of southern Austria provide a good wine-growing environment – we even parked up at a vineyard in Styria for a few days, before the curfew shut the campsites. One we have been drinking a lot of (what? We’re in lockdown!) is called Gruner Veltliner, a dry white wine, and they also produce their own fizzy option, called Sekt. They make a Reisling too, which I have yet to bite the bullet and try. We’ve been mainly drinking Austrian wines since being here, as it is widely available, reasonably priced and for the most part, quite tasty. Special mention to the aforementioned vineyard that we stayed at. Watching the sun set over the vines which produced the same exact wine that you are drinking is a pretty special experience, one of the highlights of our trip so far.
10- Wild camping is illegal here. There is a rule that drivers can stop for one night only to prepare themselves for more driving the next day, but it’s a grey area and supposedly only supposed to apply to those sleeping in a bivouac out of their vehicle – so not much good for us very un-stealthy motorhomers, at least one of whom would prefer to sleep in bed (Tom is much more at one with nature than I am). They have the equivalent of a pub stopover provided by some Buschenshanks, and they also have a variety of campsites, as well as the occasional Stellplatz – the Austrian equivalent of an aire/sosta. But generally, if you’re in a home on wheels in Austria, you’re probably going to have to pay, whether that’s campsite fees or a meal and a bottle of wine or kernöl.
11- Father Christmas doesn’t deliver christmas presents here – the baby Jesus does! He’s called the Christkind. They also have a Grinch-like figure called Krampus, a kind of anti-Santa who punishes bad children. In normal years, on December 5th (which happens to be today) they would have festivities in towns, with people dressing up as Krampus and going out to cause havoc upon the townsfolk. Austrians are also famous for their Christmas markets, although this year, these are also not happening.
Well, that’s about all I can think of right now. I had never considered Austria to be high on my list of European countries to visit during this trip, but I’m seriously glad that we’ve discovered it. You can now consider me an unofficial member of the Austrian tourist board. If you haven’t considered visiting Austria, then I can absolutely recommend putting it on your list. And I am saying this having not even visited any of the cities, which look breathtaking and full of delicious baked goods, carriage rides, history, architecture and cafe culture.
This week – musings about dishwashers. It’s better than it sounds, I promise.
If you’ve been following our journey then you may know we are currently mid-lockdown in Austria, and we’ve had to abandon our life inside a motorhome in favour of bricks and mortar. We’ve been at an airbnb to avoid breaking the 8PM curfew that’s currently in effect across the whole of the country, across much of the continent. Yesterday the government announced that the curfew would be extended to a full lockdown from Tuesday, with leaving the house only allowed for essential purposes. This new, tighter lockdown lasts until 5th December, and in alll likelihood will be extended onwards from then, too.
Our adoptive home. Haztendorf, Styria.
The dilemma is still the same for us. We don’t want to be scrambling for a place or having to drive across locked-down countries and think about self-isolating in the run-up to Christmas. Even if we did make it back to the UK, where would we go? There’s a lockdown there too – our only option would be to move in with a begrudging parent. A loving one, yes, but untimately it would be an encroachment on their space, their Christmas – and their fridge.
Fridge porn. Farnham, Surrey.
Staying is still the most logical course of action, and the safest and most responsible from a possible corona-transmission perspective. We will continue our adventures in Larry in January. We are determined.
I never thought that living in a vehicle would be easier than living in a house – even a vehicle as house-like as a motorhome. When we first set off, I was worried about how I might react to the upheaval. In fact, soon the day-to-day trappings of vanlife became very normal – a comfortable part of life. If you’re thinking of doing it – well, maybe don’t do it right now, in the middle of a pandemic, but when normal order is restored – I can absolutely recommend the lifestyle – make the leap! The emptying and filling of water, the endless washing up, the inside-shoes versus outside-shoes system… These simple, mundane tasks gave me some order to my thoughts.
Yonder, some washing-up draining… Somewhere in Switzerland, I think. Bake-off on t’telly.
What follows are some musings about dishwashers. Please bear with me, I do have a point. In our house back in England there is a dishwasher. In the motorhome, not only is there no dishwasher, but there is also very limited space for dirty dishes to loiter. This creates a logistical issue; it means that there is almost always either washing-up waiting to be done, or drying on the drying rack. The time at which it reaches the cupboard is around the same time that we begin the process of cooking, thus creating more dishes, and so the cycle continues forever.
Living the dream?
I didn’t think about the dishwasher much in our house in Godalming; it was just a dishwasher. If that sentence represents you, then you should maybe stop reading now and save yourself the rabbit-hole that I’m about to go into. But now that I’ve been through the experience of living in a van, I have felt the effects of it first-hand. The dishwasher takes a mundane job away from the person. It mechanises it. It’s a time-creator. For housewives and homekeepers in the 1950s and 60s this was transformative – it meant more time for other stuff. Whatever it was that they were doing, it was not washing up by hand, and that, I’m sure they would tell you, was a good thing.
Living in a house in the UK in 2020 means that you will most likely have a dishwasher, a washing machine, and maybe a tumble dryer. Probably more stuff, too. Hot water comes through a tap at a second’s notice, heating is on a timer throughout winter.
Do we have enough gas for heating and water? How many more days until we do laundry? When we’ve done it, where do we hang it? The floor needs a hoover, and so we need to charge the battery-banks, so we need a hook-up. The washing up needs doing. The washing up needs doing. The washing up needs doing. These questions and minor, regular tasks filled my mind with comforting mundanity, a low-stakes background hum. These everyday tasks, even in the seven short weeks we had lived in the motorhome, had become a framework around which I hung my thoughts and planned the week. I miss it.
Larry in his natural habitat – out on the road. South of France.
This may sound like so much millennial whining about how I want to live a “simpler” life. Really, it’s not that. I deeply, deeply enjoy not having to do the dishes. I cannot emphasise enough how much I do not enjoy housework. I find ways to avoid it – I am not a naturally tidy or neat person.
I also really enjoy our temporary home here in Styria. There is a hot shower with all the water we can use. There are acres of walks right on our doorstep; each path leads us to new discoveries. We climb over felled trees every day and crunch our way up steep hills, we throw sticks into the wilderness. It’s funny – it becomes a little less wild every time we go there. Yesterday, we spotted a family out, one man away to the side with his tractor, weeding. A mum with two kids waved. Their dog barked.
A few steps away from our back garden. Hatzendorf, Styria.
The dishwasher is back and it’s whirring means that I am free to think.
I am glad that we live in a world where washing machines and hoovers exist, where machines save people the effort of manual labour. I am just saying that I have experienced a pandemic in a house, and also in a van, and I know I spent a lot less time worrying about COVID, lockdown, recession and all its accessorised doom and gloom when we also had to think about where we were going to stay that night, and if we had enough drinking water, and how much washing up there was.
I gave up my job on March 18th, and was unemployed in lockdown for four months or so before we moved into the van full-time. Is it any wonder that I gave entire days to reorganising the cupboards? I rationalised our herb collection and took on 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Evenings were for drinking wine. It’s the same concept. It’s easier to exist on an even keel in these times when the ugly COVID doom-bubble that lives in my head is buried under a layer of cupboard rearranging, cooking of elaborate meals, or of washing up. I’m sure I’m not the only one who likes to distract themselves, right now.
They say that people take years out to “find themselves”. I think what I’ve found so far is that I enjoy having meaningless things to think about. Maybe I should have stayed working in data analysis! (This is a joke, please don’t make me go back there).
I hope however lockdown 2 is going for you, you’re content enough, and you’re surrounded by things that make you happy. In these strangest of times, I think a little distraction is okay. That’s all for this week. Peace and love!
I feel a bit like a cheat even calling this a recipe, to be honest. You can file this under ‘low-effort midnight snack’.
The crushed chickpeas give it that tuna-like consistency, and the olive oil gives it richness and shine. The part where you crush the chickpeas is the most labour-intensive job here. If you have a food processor you could use that, just don’t take it too far or you’re halfway to hummus! I use a fork.
I’m not sure where I found the original recipe for this but the basic premise is as follows:
Ingredients
1 can of cooked chickpeas / 1 small can of sweetcorn / mayo of your choice / lemon juice (you can use fresh lemon or bottled) / extra virgin olive oil / green herbs – parsley, basil, whatever you have to hand / salt + pepper
Method
Drain and rinse the chickpeas with a fork, masher or food processor. *If you’re that way inclined, you can save the chickpea water and use it in baking to replace eggs. It’s called ‘aquafaba’.
In a medium-sized bowl, crush chickpeas with a fork. I like to leave some bigger bits in there.
Drain the sweetcorn and add it in. Add the mayo – a bit less than you would if you were just making a tuna sandwich filling.
Then add a glug of olive oil and a good amount of lemon juice for tang.
Season to taste and add whatever herbs you want – I’ve also seen recipes which add seaweed here for an extra fishy flavour.
It all takes about two minutes to make. See, it’s not really a recipe, is it?
Serve warm over baked potatoes, or cold as a salad topping or sandwich filling. It works as a burger filling too once it’s had a chance to firm up (could you even panée and fry it!?). Straight from the fridge is fine too.
This recipe is either vegetarian or vegan depending on the mayonnaise you use.
A big lockdown decision.It’s a long one, so buckle up.
It’s been awhile since I last uploaded a blog post. Here follows a list of excuses:
About two weeks ago, I started writing this blog. It was 1500 sun-soaked words about the two countries we had just been in (Austria and Switzerland, honourable mention to Lichtenstein), written whilst sat in the October sunshine, beer in hand and a smile on my face. It was optimistic, it was glowing; it had come from the mind of someone unbothered by second wave COVID fear.
I lost these 1500 blissed-out words due to a file corruption, and after spending a couple of hours squinting at my laptop screen and saying “fuck” a lot, I gave up trying to get it back and put it down to a lesson learnt – don’t use Wordpad. Or, if you do, don’t save your document as RTF. ANYWAY. I resolved to re-write it and get something uploaded within the next day or two, giving myself a couple of days to fester in annoyance.
Then the European second wave lockdown announcements came, and suddenly I had bigger things on my mind than writing gushing descriptions of Alpine countryside, as nice as it is (and it really is). Were we going to drop everything and come home? Stay in the motorhome and brave it in an uncertain country? Rent somewhere cheap and wait it out?
Alps an’ that. Trummelbach falls, Switzerland.
Now that we have made our decision, made the move and we’ve had time to take stock, I thought it would be a good time to have another crack at getting something written down, to draw a line under this last fraught few days. On a side note, I prefer to write longer-form here, but I would love to put out more regular updates too in this format. I’m not quite sure how to do this, but in the future I might post shorter stuff too sometimes. Watch this space, and let me know what you think.
Switzerland and Austria – a journey of three parts
SECTION ONE: Tactical manoeuvres
We started out in a tactical mindset when leaving France, trying to pick the best route possible to avoid these restrictions that we knew might affect us. In old war movies, they would stand around large maps, pushing little green men (troops, not aliens – or at least, not in the films I’ve seen) from east to west and back again, trying to out-manoeuvre the enemy. That was us, trying out evasion tactics, only instead of army men and tanks, it was a motorhome and two boston terriers. And a fridge full of wine.
Forward march… Our route through a COVID-bound Europe.
We were thinking about what our next move would be after leaving France. Our original idea when planning this was to come through via the Alsace and then either go south towards the Pyrenees and then onto Spain and Portugal, or else east, into Italy. Well, when we checked the entry restrictions for coming into there from France, it was more complicated than we thought. Luckily, we were right next to Switzerland, which was less complicated to get into. Let’s give it a go again, we thought, but properly this time. We knew Hungary and Czech were closed to us, but we thought that Austria-Slovenia-Italy sounded like a good next few moves. We crossed the border to Switzerland and the street signs turned German. Achtung!
SECTION TWO: The nice bit
The bulk of our trip through Switzerland and Austria was basically still quite relaxed. I can’t emphasise how nice the Alps are. Snowy mountains next to crystal blue waters is an absolute classic combination. It’s almost enough to make me want to take up skiing. Not quite, but nearly.
The Alps are just showing off really. Lauterbrunnen valley, Switzerland.Tom finds water wherever he goes. Plan-de-Croix, Switzerland.
The big difference that we noticed immediately upon arriving into Sweitsch was that people weren’t all wearing masks indoors. It was quite surreal. Nice, in a way, to not be surrounded by constant reminders on people’s faces that we should fear them, or that we are to be feared ourselves. Not nice in that seeing these reminders has become commonplace and without them, both Tom and I felt uneasy. We wore our masks, and got to exploring.
George doesn’t really care where we are, as long as he’s near us and he’s got a stick. Trummelbach valley, Switzerland.Our first night in Switzerland. Plan-de-Croix.
We were bamboozled by impenetrable wild camping laws and expensive Swiss campsites. For this reason, we decided to get into Austria sehr schnell. We only stayed in Switzerland for four days, but it was really worth it. We managed to avoid self-isolation, and we got to see some sights that really are, as my dad says, “ball-achingly beautiful” (cheers for the visual image, dad!). Apart from our first night, where we stayed in an off-season ski lift car park at Plan-de-Croix, we stayed in official campsites and they were very expensive (around CHF35 per night). So if you want to come to Switzerland, bring your overdraft.
Spot the van… Free parking in Plan-de-Croix.
The journey to Austria was uneventful, as far as border crossings go. In fact, nobody’s checked our passports (or the dogs’) since Folkestone. We actually travelled through Lichtenstein in order to get into Austria… We spent an approximate total of fifteen minutes there.
“Quick, get a picture of Lichtenstein, before we’re out of it!”. A not-very-good photo of a sign that said Lichtenstein. The only photo I took while we were there.
Once we were into Austria, our vague plan was to get through the higher-risk areas or Vorarlberg and Tyrol at a relatively quick pace. After this, we’d hang about in Carinthia and Styria for 14 days or so, bumble about seeing the sights and eating pretzels and drinking pilsner, and be able to pop straight over the border into either Slovenia or Italy afterwards.
“Little Sparrows” with cheese sauce. Pork cordon bleu for Tom. Imst, Tyrol, Austria.
As we came out of Tyrol, the landscape transformed from craggy Alpine peaks to rolling hills and wheat fields.
Einkauf am Bauerhof Sorger, Pirk, Carinthia, Austria.
This campsite was on the site of a farm with fully stocked farm shop, a friendly owner who fed us schnapps immediately upon arrival, and an amazing three-legged dog called Timmy. One of our top spots so far. In fact, when it all kicked off with the virus a little later, we considered calling them and seeing if we could park on their land for the duration of lockdown. That’s how welcomed we felt there.
In order to pass the time before we could enter Slovenia, we booked a fishing trip, as Tom had been missing his hobby, and it wasn’t much more expensive than a lot of campsites we had been staying on. Tom found Inkognito II lake which looked perfect – and we ended up having the whole place to ourselves for the duration of our stay. We drank beer in the sunshine, talked about maybe booking a place for a week once we got into Slovenia, and planned pie-in-the-sky visits from friends and family. We started talking about Christmas.
Inkognito lake 2, Deutschlandsberg, Styria, Austria.
On day three of the fishing trip, the lockdown headlines hit.
SECTION THREE: Should we stay or should we go?
As France and Germany announced new lockdowns, we realised that Austria, Italy, and in fact pretty much all of the countries that we were bordered by would likely follow suit. Our enemy – those little plastic men in tanks that we had been plotting against – they had outsmarted us. We may have been doomed to fail to begin with. Austrian news sources got hold of leaked documents about a second wave of measures, and we spent a couple of days speculating on what the lockdown might entail, and what we should do. I had mentally started planning our route home. Tom had, too.
This few days while we were deciding what to do were emotionally draining, confusing, relaxed, then agonising, then confusing again. Sometimes all of those things within seconds of each other. A layer cake of different restrictions, a mille-feuille of excitement and stress. A structurally unsound croquembouche of failed travel plans. I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows; I’m not sorry.
The official announcement came on Saturday evening, and by this point we’d moved on from the lake. We were sat in a Buschenshank, which is a type of small, family-run restaurant attached to a vineyard. We were drinking locally-made wine and sharing conversation with the locals, surrounded by vineyards, greenery and rolling hills for as far as the eye could see. Everything was rustic and rural and very, very Austrian. Larry’s wheels could have been heading back towards the M25 the very next morning.
Weingarten Toni Peter. Bad Gams, Styria, Austria.
The new lockdown measures included a curfew, which meant that we could not reliably stay in campsites. Not speaking German, and being tourists rather than business travellers, there was no viable way that we could see to continue our trip in the motorhome. However, neither of us wanted to go back to the UK.
Our options were as follows: We could rent a place here and wait it out. We could drive home, and stay in a family member’s garden. We could drive around the UK from spot to spot, and run the risk of getting moved on by police or locals.
We ended up staying put; the least worst option from a range of nicht sehr gut choices. We chose an airbnb in Styria, in the eastern part of Austria. That’s where I’m writing this from right now.
Now we have a door we don’t have to wiggle to open.
I’ve got homemade brownies and freshly-baked naans sat on the countertop, and the dishwasher (dishwasher!!) is full and whirring. The washing machine too. The dogs have acres of fields and woodland to run around in, just outside our front door. Larry is having a well-earned break, and we are going to take some time to give him a deep-clean and do some tweaks. We have some certainty in our lives, at least for this month.
We’re both trying to look on the bright side and see it as another facet to our adventure. A chance to live like a local for a month… Or more! Tom has been great with seeing the positives, for which I’m thankful. It’s been a strange few weeks, and it’s going to continue to be weird, but we have each other, we’re safe, and we made this decision on our own. We chose to stick it out. Some people chose to go home and have been turned away from borders, or are living in their vans in inhospitable places. We are lucky.
I’ve always liked the idea of living in another country for awhile. I didn’t realise that country would be Austria, and that the time would be now! This blog has been a long one, and I’ve not gone into much detail of the actual park-ups that we’ve stayed in this month as so much was going on. If anyone would like to have a closer look at our journey and more details of where we’ve stayed, prices, info on facilities etc, the link is here or also in the menu options at the top. Just look for “Location Tracker”.
It’s been a busy few weeks and we’ve been through it emotionally. Next time I’ll have lockdown projects for you to read about, further general Austrian adventures, and much less agonising about which part of the world we plan to inhabit. Hopefully. It should be soon, too, as Tom’s guitar from @driftingdan is due to arrive today, so I am sure I’ll have some extra time on my hands 🙂
Thanks for reading, and wherever you are, stay safe. Peace and love!
Featuring our first night fail, thoughts on the nomadic lifestyle, and a disappointing Flammkuchen.
Hello again. Thanks for coming back!
G & G doing their best “good boy” eyes.
This week I wanted to write a little bit about travel. I don’t mean just the nuts-and-bolts of our or any trip, the details, highlights – or memorable balls-ups. I mean more in a general sense, why some people feel the urge to travel. To leave rather than to stay. To get in their motorhome, or van, book that flight or ferry, and leave their known, comfortable world behind.
We are extremely fortunate in that we have been able to choose this life rather than having it thrust upon us due to financial difficulty or personal circumstances. We have a house which we chose to rent out. We had close family nearby, the types of neighbours you can invite for a glass (bottle) of wine when they come to collect their amazon package, and pre-pandemic, we both had stable, full-time jobs. We chose to move into a vehicle for leisure purposes; the decision was not forced upon us in order that we could remain living a comfortable life.
We decided to pack up our things and go for an adventure, pretty much. There were some obvious reasons why this might be good. Adventures are enjoyable. They get you out of your common-or-garden life, away from the drab and drudgery of the everyday. And whichever way you slice it, 2020 has been something very easy to want to run away from. However, that escape can also be a cover for something else, something more insidious than a pandemic, more subtle than global recession. An escape can be as bad as it is good, if the thing you’re escaping is likely to follow you. Which, let’s be honest, it probably is, unless you’re a caveman and the thing chasing you is a recently-speared bear. Which I am not (a caveman. Or a bear.). As a trainee counsellor and psychotherapist, keeping tabs on what is going on internally for me is really important and this is what I’m talking about. I don’t want to hide it all under a rock. Bears hibernate, but they wake up again.
This is a picture of a real bear; I couldn’t find a picture of a metaphorical one.
For me, fending off bears looks like keeping a journal both in my phone and also physically. This is a sort of cross between morning pages (a technique used by struggling would-be authors the world over – probably some authors that don’t struggle, too) and a diary. It involves everything from ideas for short stories, thoughts and musings of all descriptions. It also has the odd noted down phone number, recipe plan, or occasional string of all-caps swearwords (don’t tell me you’ve not been there, it can’t just be me). I am trying to use this time that I am lucky enough to have, usefully and with purpose. I am trying to spear my bears, or if I can’t spear them, I’m at least sharpening my weapon… And if that doesn’t work – when I find that I’ve not magically scribbled my way out all of my problems – I’ll at least have a finely-honed focaccia recipe when I get back! Check out the recipe page for anything I’ve got around to writing up yet.
Emo musings within cheesey notebook exterior. Like a croque-monsieur but with less ham, and more existential dread.
There is a massive caveat here and that is of course, this “running away” issue may not be an issue at all. It’s certainly not applicable for all travellers. But it’s definitely true at least sometimes, for some people. It is something I was aware of and have witnessed in others, and I wanted to keep tabs on it for myself. So, I will. 🙂
Now that I’d decided to bring my personal bears along for the ride, we needed to decide where we would go – or if the ride would even happen.
Before we left, people questioned our decision in travelling to Europe in 2020. Scratch that – we questioned our decision. The way we saw it, we had three options.
Option 1: Stay at home. Tom continues delivering post to the good people of Cranleigh. I get a job. Larry stays on my dad’s drive except Saturday evenings. Pros: We stay in our house. Cons: Everything else, really!
Option 2: Go away, but just do the UK. Tom quits work. Pros: We still get to have our adventure. Larry gets to stretch his legs (wheels). Cons: Possibility of local lockdowns. The UK is not very exotic. Also, rain.
Option 3: Go away as originally planned to Europe. Pros: Excitement. Memories we’ll cherish when we’re old and grey. Sunshine. Local delicacies. A warmer winter. The adventure of a lifetime. Cons: Global pandemic.
We chose option three, obviously.
Tom carp-hunting in France, 2018, pre-pandemic.
France is a place that we have been to a fair amount on family holidays over the years. It is not a place that we have been to in a pandemic, but at the time that we left, the 14-day quarantine upon going back to the UK wouldn’t affect us because of how long we were going away for, and many other EU countries were still allowing free movement to and from France. So we trogged on. We thought France would be fine – an easy place to start- and I’m glad to report that for the most part, we were right! Apart from the first night. It had other ideas for us. Cue all-caps obscenities.
We did the tunnel crossing on a Monday, early evening, via the passenger route. After we’d arrived in France, we had a long drive where we bypassed two aires that were full. Parc D’Olhain was our last chance for a decent park-up in the fading light. We started off poorly and made our way through the park’s one-way system the wrong way. It went further downhill after this. There was a very sweary interlude, an incident with a ticket machine…
We woke up the next day and everything looked sunnier.
Parc D’Olhain.
Parc D’olhain really was like a centerparcs, with a ‘parcours’ – a huge jungle gym – suspended over much of the central area. It felt like we were there in off-season, not the end of summer. It was a ghost town. This was to become a theme through our entire France journey.
We rambled through France for about three weeks in total. For anyone that’s interested,I am maintaining a live map with exact stopover spots, candid bonus photos, and little notes about each location. The link above will always stay the same, and I am also including a shortcut to it on the homepage.
We realised as we went that cities were going to be difficult on our budget. That was fine with us. The towns and villages that we came across were beautiful, and we’re country bumpkins really. I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow on each park-up here, but I will talk a bit about places that were noteworthy. Like this place. This was Lens, our third night.
Avion, Lens, Northern France.
We had a rough plan to get out of the north and into eastern France. You can blame Rick Stein for that. I’m sure he’s the cause of many clueless Brits turning up, phrasebooks in hands, searching for that perfect Flammkuchen that he describes… This vegetarian was a bit disappointed in hers, which I had when we went to Strasbourg, about ten days in. Had I been fully vegan, which I have been before and plan to return to once we’re back home, I would have been presented with a tortilla and some raw onion! I am making it sound like I’m really ungrateful, and really, I’m glad that I got to try this local delicacy. in meatless form. It’s fantastic that France is still full of traditional, regional fare. Really. But by this point both Tom and I were realising that eating out was going to be a bit difficult for me in this part of the world.
Don’t meet your idols. The flammkuchen I had in Strasbourg.
Once we had made one long schlep into Eastern France, we were treated with great, free park-ups, most of which were by stretches of river. One that jumps to mind was this one. There was the Soulanges canal on one side and the river Marne on the other. We also saw our first close-up eastern French church. Not bad, right?
Soulanges, Grand Est.
That’s the moment it all really began for me. This idyllic spot was totally free, in a picture-postcard village, where Tom was content in his fish-spotting. Lac du Der was close by, and Tom was vibrating with excitement at the thought of this, so that’s where we went next.
In case you are unable to encyclopaedically reel off fishing stats like my husband can, I’ll fill you in. Lac du Der is the largest man-made lake in France, with 48km2 of water and 350 million cubic metres of water. Google told me those things. What I found out for myself is that it’s very touristy, smells of old pennies, and the mud on the bottom stays under your toenails if you’re not very diligent in washing it off.
Me and the dogs enjoying a frosty dip in lac du Der.
The other thing we found out at Lac du Der is to always check, if you’re staying on a campsite, what the fees are. We needed electricity due to problems with our fridge (all fixed now), and none of the aires we visited around the beaches of du Der had any spaces, or hook-up. So we plumped for the badly-planned, more expensive option. Lesson learnt: don’t trust searchforsites or park4night’s price comments. Take them as a guide only – don’t pin your hopes and dreams of that perfect camping spot only costing four euros! That may be the pitch price and then there’s often a price per adult on top of that. A lot of places also charge for dogs too, and we’ve got two of them, so it can really add up. Of course, in France, aires are free or very low in price so if you don’t have specific needs for a campsite like laundry or electric then you should be good to go!
A few days after this lake visit, we decided to book a four-night fishing trip at a lake near to where we were. This may sound a bit of a strange thing to do on week two of our year-long adventure. I can explain! It was Tom’s birthday. He is an absolute carp fishing OBSESSIVE. We knew that we’d be doing something fishing-related on this section of the trip because it was his birthday during this week, and he’s always been fishing on his birthday since forever.
We found this place and it was available for the dates. We could even stay in a swim (like a pitch for angling) that we could park Larry in. Perfect! Tom had a good birthday, I hope. He even caught a couple of fish on the third night. Two in two hours! I, the proud wife, was more than happy to get out of my nice warm bed, down the ladder and into the rain to take pictures of my beloved. And I am only being slightly sarcastic.
Fish number 1 of the night, Tom’s birthday fishing trip.
Some other notable things we saw in eastern France were:
Rocher de Dabo, a 19th century chapel 664m above sea level.
The pictures really don’t do this spot justice. A must-visit.Jesus wasn’t wearing a mask but I think we’ll let him off.
Strasbourg
The dogs and I fighting the crowds outside Strasbourg cathedral.
Bergheim vineyard and town
The medieval walls date back to 1311.
The vineyard we stayed at made and sold their own wine on the premises. This was a Pinot Blanc, “Klevner” in the local language.
Tom drinking more Pinot Blanc. and smiling cherubically.
This beautiful park-up in Neufchateau.
We also went into Switzerland one day, as there was some mail that we needed to collect there. Here is the one photo I took of our park-up, before we were moved on by a forest ranger type. We retreated back into France, away from the rumoured 10,000 Swiss francs fine for wild-camping! (Don’t worry, we made it there properly in the end. Look out for this in the next blog.)
All the while I’ve been doing my writing, trying to be mindful, and remembering to smell the roses as I go. Because next year, this is all going to feel like a dream. France was great, and we would totally go back there if more countries become problematic to visit, COVID-wise further down the line. It’s big enough that we could explore it comfortably for an extended amount of time, and it’s also one of the world’s best wine-producing countries. So I could think of worse places to be, while the world is burning.
I hope everyone is having a good week so far, and that wherever you are, lockdowns aren’t affecting you too much.
That’s about everything for the France blog, I will be updating instagram when I have another update.
Welcome to our first blog post! This is all very exciting.
I’m really hoping you’ll read along with us every few weeks (ish) as I document the adventures of Larry the Lunar. Introductions, then: my name is Gill, and I live with my husband Tom and our two dogs Gus and George in our motorhome. It’s a 2009 Fiat Ducato Lunar motorhome – 6 berth! – with a cosy overcab bed and, at the time of writing, squeaky wheels (getting it seen to next week, don’t worry. We think it’s the wheel bearings). Now, it wasn’t all this way, of course. In order to catch you up on our current situation, there’s a bit of backstory and bits about us, if you’d like to read on. If this is tl;dr or you’d like to ‘skip to the good bit’, our real, abroad adventures will begin with France. I will put a link >here< when that post is up, it should be sometime in the next week.
Before
A year ago, we were both working full-time, living in a three-bed house in commuter-belt Surrey, in England. Tom was working as a postman, and I was in a job in HR for a large multinational corporation – and hating it. I felt I’d sold my soul to the devil, was chasing the wrong thing, and there came a point where I realised I needed to make a change. So, I did. What I just described to you in two sentences took me probably five years (or maybe my whole life – deep, right) to realise, but that’s the long and the short of it. I began retraining in a different field – while reducing my hours to part-time, and realised that I would need to go back to university to get my Masters. I’m retraining to become a psychotherapist – I can write further about my career stuff if anyone would be interested; I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and it might be very self-indulgent. Even more self-indulgent than creating an entire website about this trip we’re on, if humanly possible! But I am more than happy to if anyone would like to hear more, or needs any advice about getting into that field, as it’s quite confusing to work out all of the different accrediting bodies etc.
At the time that I was beginning to retrain – this was pre-COVID – I thought that I would start my Masters in September 2020. I would quit my job fully in March – that much, I already knew. Tom was on a week’s notice and could easily get a job back with the Royal Mail because of his experience if he did ever want to take some time off. We realised that we had this gap, this window of opportunity… We’d been consuming a lot of van life content on youtube (shout out to @ash_pollard’s Lost In Europe channel as this is basically all his fault). We looked at each other, and we thought “we HAVE to do this.”
A plan formed. We would rent our house out and use that money as our income, and take six months off to travel around Europe. We could easily do it and be back for September. No problemo. We found a motorhome that we liked and could afford. We put the deposit down at the dealership on the same day. And – that was it! Wow, how clever are we?! We said to each other. Or, well, I definitely said this to myself. We mentally patted ourselves on the back and proceeded to pack our things into boxes in preparation for our tenants to move in.
Coronavirus had different plans for us.
My last day of work was March 18th. I bade everyone farewell and promised to send photos from my travels, gave out our new vanlife insta handle with abandon. I cancelled our tv package, our council tax, requested our final energy bills. On March 23rd, Boris Johnson announced a UK-wide lockdown [angry Boris Johnson rant redacted for everyone’s sake]. Tom managed to remain in his postman job, and I was proud of him for working so hard. I stayed at home to save lives. I pulled out of tenancy agreement with the letting agents, uncancelled our tv package, put in a very large wine order from Sainsbury’s, and hunkered down. I was now one more unemployed person in lockdown Britain.
Four forward to five months later – oh how I wish we could have fast-forwarded through those months! – lockdowns were easing. Now we weren’t staying at home to save lives, we were eating out to help out. Schools and offices were making their tentative moves to the dreaded phrase “the new normal”. We realised that if we were going to make this trip happen, then we could still very possibly make it work, so I deferred my Masters to 2021. At the time of writing, I hope to be able to attend face-to-face seminars, rather than the virtual ones being arranged for those I know in the 2020 cohort. Tom actually quit his job this time around, and this time, we thought, it was really GO TIME!
We’d spent some of lockdown giving Larry a facelift ready for our now 12-month-long trip. It had ballooned from a six-month whistlestop tour (Eiffel tower -> the Alps -> Italian mafia -> Schnitzel -> home) to a much longer one (Eiffel tower -> vineyards -> shall we stay here for another week? Oops, got distracted by some cheese -> have a nap -> wake up -> point in that direction -> go over there for a bit) type of trip. Also, neither of us had ever lived in a motorhome before. When we told people this, people looked at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were.
This was really it now, we’re finally, finally doing it! This is what we thought. Can you tell that something bad is about to happen? I’m giving you a fairly strong hint right now, so hopefully you’re getting it. We drove to a gorgeous park-up spot, the first of many, so we thought. It was near to the MOT place we were to get Larry checked at. This would give us the full year in Europe, interrupted only by some family weddings we would come back for – we aren’t ones to turn down a free bar! We sat and ate dinner that evening looking at the rolling hills, full of last-day-of-term excitement. We couldn’t get our heads around the fact that we had a whole year, starting from that moment, to explore the UK and Europe… Which was handy, because the events of the next day put a right spanner in the works. I don’t have pictures of this park-up because we were so busy drinking beer and revelling in our new-found freedom. But rest assured, the view was lovely. And so was the ale!
We drove the fifteen minutes to the MOT place in the morning. One mile away from the garage, in the middle of Friday morning traffic… Larry wouldn’t go into gear. Thank whichever gods you prefer that we were at a low speed when this happened. Tom (driver extraordinaire) managed to limp it around the corner to the MOT place, where the guy told us that it was the hydraulic clutch system. They would look at it on Monday morning, they said, and we’d be back on the road straight away.
Three (yep) weeks later, one full clutch replacement, one failed MOT, a giant oil leak in the engine and subsequent new timing belts and accessory belt replacements, plus new water pump… We were on our way. This was actually, really, properly, actually it now. Minus, of course, the earth cable the garage had forgotten to reconnect, which caused a further total three (it’s the magic number) mobile engineers over the course of the next week – to properly diagnose and fix. Moral of the story – if in doubt – add another cable!
Oh. Sometime in this non-travel period, I fractured my ankle. No big deal. By now I realised that this wasn’t going to be an easy ride.
After this set of mishaps, we decided to do a quick UK trial run, to test out the engine’s capabilities and get our confidence back in our 11 year old moho. We were shaken up. The duration we decided on was ten nights. This time, we actually managed to get further than stop one on our itinerary. In fact, it was MUCH more successful than our previous attempts (or starts of attempts… mini attempts. Attempt-lets). Larry was running fine, finally, one Peak District earth cable blip notwithstanding, and everything in the hab was also working well. The fridge worked! The shower worked! The engine worked! Nothing was stopping us, and it was a really nice feeling. It’s great when everything works, and this is how we felt on this ten days.
We had some great ‘wow, this is really our life for a year’ moments. Good ones, and not so awesome ones too. We realised quite how small the shower actually is, for example. We also saw how fast a person (even two tall-ish folks, like us) can adjust. There was the dirt and the washing up and the ladder to the overcab – all annoying things but nevertheless, we found they became part of the fabric of our everyday life without much fuss at all. Rather than it being a slog with lots of inconveniences, mostly it was a joy to live this life. Apart from emptying the toilet. Obviously.
I won’t run through the full list of places we stopped at during our UK trip, but I have compiled a full list of all of the places we’ve been for anyone that’s interested in following along geographically. Watch this space! But do let me know if you’d like a mini write-up on our full England/Wales ‘trip before the trip’ and I’ll throw something together.
That’s it for blog number 1. I am working on the France one right now and I should have something up in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, here’s the link to our instagram. If you want to follow along there you’re more than welcome.
Leave a comment if you’d like. Are you travelling? Is coronavirus scuppering your plans? If you are travelling, whereabouts are you? We’d love to hear from you.
Wheels, Woofs & Wine 