A few blog posts ago I alluded to what I’ve been up to these past couple of months but if you want all the juicy details, keep reading. Well, I say “juicy”… Maybe it’s really just the pulp with some pretty pictures. Read the rest of this entry »
It has come to my attention that I haven’t blogged about our trundles since May, so this post is going to be chock full of photos! Since my last Vagabonding Executive Summary, we’ve toured Scotland, fallen in love with York, and been trapped in Belgium. You can currently find us gorging ourselves on bread and cheese in Paris. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s taken me a long time to get this blog organised. Until relatively recently, it lacked focus. I used to post about my travels as well as my art and pretty much anything else that took my fancy. You may have noticed that the travel blog posts have stopped (as have the flights of fancy). We’re still travelling and we’re still blogging about it, but I wont be posting them here anymore. We have a blog — Technomadics — dedicated to our travels, so if you miss reading about our itinerant ways you can still get your fix.
I do still want to share the highlights here however, so I’ll be posting every now and then with the best photos from our recent travels and links to our latest blog posts. Read the rest of this entry »
Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to say goodbye to Lygos Farm and venture out into the big wide world again. We have mixed feelings about this. We’ve really enjoyed working steadily on our projects and all of the comforts of living in a house. We’re a bit worried that going back to live in Nettle is going to feel like roughing it.
We were absolutely spoilt rotten with this house-sit. The home-owners, Anne and Mike, are probably the loveliest people we could have hoped to house-sit for. It’s sort of like having adopted Welsh grandparents.
We set up our workspace in the rustic kitchen — the office at one end of the table and the studio at the other.
Taking Zoe for a walk every day brought more conversation and quiet time into our daily lives and greater appreciation for the changing landscape. We’ve resolved to continue with our new routine. Hopefully, this is something we will manage without a furry ball of excited energy to motivate us.
If it weren’t for our daily walks, I wouldn’t have noticed how the landscape takes on different hues depending on the weather, or how the branches of the beech trees turn purple as spring approaches.
Or just how cute pine cones really are.
We only left the farm a couple of times. We ventured out to celebrate our fifth anniversary and were rewarded with an unapologetically British meal in an old people’s cafe with floral carpet. Mike’s quiche came with a surprising side of corn chips and my “smothered chicken” turned out to be a very 80s meal of chicken and bacon smothered in cheese and brown sauce (think vinegar with a sauce-like consistency). We picked up some olive and rosemary bread and French brie to take home, which was possibly the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth. Quite the culinary see-saw.
We started discussing going back to Australia for the first time since we left. We’ve even decided to get a visa for only one more year when our current visa expires in June, and then head home. This means we’ll only see a fraction of what we intended to when we first set out but we’ve come to realise that we’re perfectly content with that. I wouldn’t have thought my itchy feet were merely a symptom of curiosity before we left but it seems my curiosity about Europe has mostly been sated. I can imagine when it has been completely sated I’ll be perfectly happy to stop travelling. I don’t feel a need to visit a lot of the places that were originally on the to do list because, whether valid or not, I feel like I have a sense of them. I feel like I can extrapolate from the places we have been and imagine what a lot of the other countries are like. This is in no small part thanks to following our friends’ very detailed journal of their cycling tour through Europe!
We discussed buying a house when we get back. I spent a glorious day researching this big new dream and gathering inspiration for interior design. Building our own business felt achievable when our only goal was to cover expenses for travelling Europe and living in a motorhome. This new financial goal makes it much more daunting and serious. I hope that by the time we go back to Australia our business is stable and profitable enough to make a mortgage viable and that we’ve saved a decent deposit. It’s pretty amazing to think that what we first thought was a long-term trip through Europe morphed into time out to build a business and a low expenditure lifestyle that lets us save money!
Despite mourning hot showers, loads of room and plumbing, we are looking forward to finally seeing a lot of the places that were on the top of our list when we first embarked on our travels, yet through many twists of fate have yet to visit — namely, the Lake District, Isle of Skye, and the Alps. Hopefully, we’ll adjust to washing our undies by hand and taking navy showers in no time!
As I write this, I feel stupidly lucky. This house-sit really couldn’t be any more perfect. It’s quite literally, everything we were hoping for in a house-sit. It’s nestled in a valley amongst gently rolling hills in the picturesque Welsh countryside.
The property and surrounding countryside has a generous smattering of those trees with the curly branches that I so loved in Cornwall (oaks, maybe?)
My favourite tree:
The house itself is a beautiful building of tastefully exposed stone walls, and pretty, organic-looking wooden beams, decorated with carefully-selected antiques and found objects, many of which Mike had found and restored from the bottom of a canal while he had done some dredging work. Every single detail, from the door knobs to the light fixtures are charmingly vintage. A staircase in its own cylindrical stone niche winds up from beside the generously-sized fireplace in the living-room, coming out onto a landing that looks over the study adjoining the living-room, and leading to the upstairs bedroom with a spectacular view out over the valley.
I was never one of those little girls who would fantasise about her wedding and having a family of my own but I did fantasise about one day having my own house and how I would go about decorating it — something I’m still looking forward to! I remember thinking that I would only furnish it with beautiful things. Of course, when I moved out of home and began buying necessary household items this quickly devolved into buying whatever was cheapest and least ugly. Mike and Anne’s home has reminded me of my girlish dreams and proven that it is possible!
The beauty of this stone wall is seriously testing my fidelity to our future cob house.
One of our biggest hopes for this winter, and indeed our travels through Europe, was to experience snow. Within our first week here, our wish was granted! There was so much snow, in fact, that we got snowed in! There are many fun things about being snowed in, the most obvious being that the coziness factor is high — but possible the best, is having pancakes for breakfast three times in one week because we’d run out of other breakfast-like substances.
The view from our bedroom window:
We are feeling very grateful indeed, that we’re tucked away in a cottage with a fire, hot water and a bath tub, instead of poor, chilly Nettle.
As part of our house-sitting duties, we take the little jack russell, Zoe for a walk every day on the surrounding (now snowy) hills. A tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Our other charge, Sooty, has a lovely temperament and has reminded me why I’m a cat person. I feel so chuffed when she chooses my lap for her nap and allows me to stroke her, as she purrs with contentment. I’m reminded of our last foster-cat, Meekha, and that I still want a Burmese cat one day because of her.
Another of our daily tasks is to feed the birds. My favourite are the robins with their round little bodies and orange chests.
There are lots of little things about snow that delight us. Like seeing it embellishing a holly tree — such a cliché, yet one we’ve only learnt from pictures.
Or snowball fights.
We were particularly delighted when the pond froze over! Side note: totally digging Mike in gumboots.
This might seem extraordinary to those from northern climes, but even frost fascinates and enchants.
Here again, there is scenery that reminds me of the landscape paintings of one of my favourite artists, Natasha Newton.
The snow eventually melted, only to be replaced about a week later with a much heavier, more impressive batch! We awoke one morning to a winter wonderland outside our bedroom window!
Ant hills and tufts of grass dot the hills with hummocks in a rather aesthetic way, but with snow blanketing their forms and a few brave needles of grass poking through, they take on a kind of abstract, alien air.
It was already a very pretty place, but snow makes everything prettier.
This deeper snow makes walking a vertically-challenged Zoe very entertaining. Her gait becomes a bounce like a rabbit’s and she fearlessly leaps and slides down snowy slopes, going as fast as her little limbs will take her. It looks absolutely exhausting and exhilarating. I’m a little jealous, actually. I have slid down a snowy slope, or two or three, on my butt but not by choice and somehow I don’t think it’s quite the same.
She doesn’t hesitate to plunge her whole head into the snow if she’s picked up the scent of a critter in it’s hidey-hole.
Other highlights of our adopted country-cottage life include making our own bread with the bread maker, having groceries delivered from Tesco for only £5, and having actual fixed plumbing.
Our time here has also seen the release of our much anticipated iPhone app, designed for independent travellers like ourselves — The Cartographer. Apple featured it in the New & Noteworthy category on the front page of the iPhone App Store for a week in several countries, which was very exciting. We’ve also had quite a few reviews on various websites, all of which have been positively glowing!
I took time off from art to work on the marketing side of launching the app, and have finally gotten back to it after more than a month away! I’ve been absolutely aching to illustrate and paint some owls so I got stuck into a triptych on little deep-edged canvases. I’m planning on giving the blog a lot more love from here on out also!
Well, we’ve finally done it and left Cornwall! When we decided to settle down in Cornwall for a bit and get some work done, neither of us anticipated we’d be there for six months! Until recently, we hadn’t any idea what we were going to do over winter. We didn’t particularly fancy travelling during winter, but nor did we want to stay in Cornwall for another four months! Luckily, we managed to score a house-sit in a cottage in the Welsh countryside over winter. So, we’re headed to Wales via Exmoor National Park in Devon.
Perhaps the thing that best illustrates our style of travel is our attitude to double-dipping. Despite our mammoth travel to do list for Europe:
…we quite happily revisit places if we feel we didn’t do them justice the first time around.
Places we’ve double-dipped, to date:
Places we intend to double-dip in the future:
Our last visit to Exmoor left us wondering what the difference is between UK national parks and everywhere else in the UK. Having spent the day plodding through farm-land, we were pretty sure there must be more to Exmoor and resolved to return again one day, having done a bit more research.
Having visited a second time, we still haven’t a clue what distinguishes a UK national park from anywhere else in the UK, but our preparation paid off.
Unfortunately, we ended up arriving in Exmoor after dark — unfortunate because we missed some truly beautiful scenery and because it was absolutely bucketing down and the roads were tiny, windy and unnervingly close to a river that looked like it was thinking about engulfing the road at any minute. Driving a motorhome at night in the rain on unfamiliar tiny, windy roads is… interesting. Despite having smashed our left tail-light earlier in the day due to some reversing in adverse conditions, Mike valiantly delivered us safely to the caravan park.
The next day, as we began our walk we both noted bemusedly that not only were we taking a day off in the middle of a product launch, but we were doing so to stroll through the countryside and woods of Devon using the very iPhone app we were launching to navigate — brilliant.
These woods put me in mind of The Forbidden Forrest in Harry Potter (I love how frequently the English countryside conjures images in my mind of fictional fantasy lands).
This is one of the first scenes of many to come in the following weeks that remind me of the landscape paintings of one of my heaviest art-crushes Natasha Newton, who draws her inspiration from the autumnal and winter English landscape.
We noticed the hills that were covered in shrubs on the unattractive brown side of autumn, were in fact the same we’ve seen blanketing hills in Ireland and Cornwall. I can’t remember the name of the shrub, so here’s a picture from Cornwall:
When in flower it makes for quite spectacular scenery, so of course now I’d love to do this walk in summer! Given most of our site-seeing involves national parks, we find this happens quite a lot. There’s something special about every season and it always feels like a real treat to see the same place at different times of the year.
After walking on top of some fairly bald hills overlooking run-of-the-mill pastural landscape for a while we began to descend into the woods we’d come to see, hoping for autumn colours. On the way down, we were both thrilled to see a stag — he didn’t stick around long enough for a photo, however.
We rewarded ourselves after our moderately long but not particularly strenuous walk with a pub meal. I got my carnivore on (something I only get to do when we eat out) and devoured half a gravy-less chicken with chips and limp, overcooked veggies while Mike had the fish and chips. I still enjoyed my roast chook, despite the madness of it being served sans gravy. Aaah, English cuisine… We both went native (or close enough) with our beverage of choice, cider for me and Guinness for Mike — both were excellent.
There have been a hand-full of places that have made me say, “This is one of my favourite places we’ve been to so far”, with this being the latest. Sometimes, I wonder how I’m ever going to be content to settle down anywhere in Australia — I say this of course, as someone who hasn’t actually seen much of Australia! It’s not just the English landscape that I anticipate missing in Australia, though. It’s the stone cottages, the quaint villages, the seasons that bring wild-flowers in spring, autumnal colours in autumn and snow in winter. The romantic in me, wants to live in a stone cottage in the woods and look forward to seasons that mean more than a slight shift in temperature. One of the reasons I yearned to travel was because I felt like I was in Melbourne by default rather than choosing to live there. I guess we’re just going to have travel Australia when we get back and find our home! I really do hope we can find somewhere that captures my imagination like some of the places I’ve discovered over here.
Kennall Vale Mills in Cornwall is the site of an old gunpowder mill that was shut down in 1914 and has been reclaimed by the woods around it. We visited it in summer with friends and resolved to return in autumn, as anything pretty in green is even prettier in shades of yellow, orange and red!
I’m reading Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper at the moment. The characters in the book are searching for a long forgotten city. I imagined stumbling onto a place like this by chance and not knowing what it used to be or what happened to it. Sometimes I regret the lack of mystery in the world these days.
I love a nice hydrangea…
We feel so green with regard to all of this business stuff it’s easy to forget we’ve learnt a thing or two along the way. There’s so much information out there about running a business that it’s pretty overwhelming for someone who’s starting from scratch and it’s difficult to know where to begin. I haven’t actually read any conventional books on business (although I am currently reading “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” and am thoroughly enjoying it) but the two (yes, two!) that I have read have each introduced me to a concept that has completely obliterated many of my assumptions and given me some firm foundations to grasp onto. Another guiding principle I use doesn’t come from a business book at all but rather a sociology/social psychology one – an area a bit closer to home, for me.
I’ll talk a little bit about each over three blog posts.
This one is by far my favourite as it provided me with an alternative to an area of business I had nothing but contempt for and it has had the biggest impact on the way we run our business. I first came across this concept in Chris Guillebeau’s ebook “Art + Money”. To quote from his ebook:
The “anti-marketing” approach is all about relationships, your story, and giving value… When you’re selling art, or any product that you passionately care about, you want the buyers to be people who truly want it. You want to connect with the people who are into your work, and let them realize on their own how much they want it.
The beauty of this concept is that it is not only a painless way to go about marketing, it is enjoyable, as long as you’re passionate about what it is that you do. Basically it works like this:
It’s basically word of mouth on steroids.
A slightly more cynical take on this concept is to connect with “influencers” in your niche, a concept I read about in “Cloud Jacking: 7 Steps to Dominate Your Niche”. This can be done as authentically or disingenuously as you please. For example, we took a fairly strong dislike to the number one blogger in our target niche. We didn’t un-follow him straight away but after a time it became pretty clear that even if he did like The Cartographer – which we didn’t think he would – we didn’t actually want it associated with him or his website. We un-followed him and could put our efforts into connecting with people who we respected and were genuinely interested in getting to know.
The Cartographer hasn’t launched yet so I can’t tell you if any of this has actually worked for us but there are plenty of case studies out there for whom it has: Tim Ferriss, Kelly Rae Roberts, and Natasha Newton, for example.
For me, marketing always had negative connotations so I feel like the anti-marketing approach to marketing makes the entire prospect of running a business, at the very least palatable and at the very best enjoyable and something I would do for free.
I kicked off our new blog series on the business side of technomading with a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating little ditty on the evolution of our business. To summarise, for all you late-comers (you know who you are) we started out with the grand and slightly naive plan of creating an automated iPhone app business (the apps sell themselves, you see) which has graduated into what we have now – the very sobering realisation that without concerted and continuous marketing, updates, and customer support any app, no matter how shit-hot, will be lost in the noisy black gaping void of a hole that is the iPhone App Store. Accordingly, we are working our little butts off. I wrapped up the post with the (hopefully) tantalising teaser that in this post, we’ll explain why we really don’t mind all that much.
We’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”. In it, he recounts the story of a typical Jewish immigrant couple, the Borgenichts, in New York in the 1880s who bootstrapped their own garment manufacturing business:
“When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.
Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfils us… Work that fulfils those three criteria is meaningful… Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning”.
The work we are doing on A Tasty Pixel has those three qualities, but I would also add a fourth dimension — we are pouring our everything into a product we believe in and can be proud of. Our app, The Cartographer, was built because we needed it as travellers and we’ve found it immensely useful on our travels. More than that, it has been crafted into an artisan iPhone app with an exquisite design. It is feasible, as an entrepreneur, that you could be doing work that has Gladwell’s three characteristics of meaningful work whilst working on a product which holds no inherent meaning for you. I can’t imagine that would be particularly captivating for long.
Our dream of an automated income began after reading Tim Ferriss’ book “The 4-Hour Work Week”. One of the assumptions the book is founded upon is that:
“…for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfilment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is”.
This clearly doesn’t apply to us. Sometimes when we’re travelling, Mike pines for programming. He’ll quite happily tap away on his lappy until 3 in the morning and then lie in bed for another hour, brain buzzing away at the problem at hand.
Obviously, marketing and operations management is not my dream job but as least I’ve still got Gladwell’s three tenets of meaningful work going for me, and that’s a lot. Of course, I’m still in mourning for my creative endeavours and grieved a little bit last night after the realisation that I’m going to have to work full-time on A Tasty Pixel for the next month until launch, maybe longer. As the darkly comic universe would have it I’m feeling super inspired lately, I have several paintings in the works and I’m really excited about them all as well as some newly learnt techniques I want to give a whirl but they’ll have to wait. Presumably my marketing and operational duties will become more manageable once we’ve built up some momentum. If not, our voyage of discovery will continue, possibly into the realm of outsourcing or streamlining my duties. In the meantime, I’m learning invaluable entrepreneurial skills.
So that, my friends, is a little insight into why the transmogrification of our automated business model into a what-the-hell-kind-of-a-frenzied-time-guzzling-monster-with-no-end-in-sight-business-have-we-created is really not so very bad.
It occurred to me the other day that we should be blogging about our software development business, A Tasty Pixel — our hopes for it, our progress, our setbacks. Is it madness that this only occurred to me 15 months into our technomading lifestyle?!
At the moment our business is absolutely all-consuming. Five months ago we decided to stop travelling for a bit to get some work done and we’ve still got another 2 solid months ahead of us before launch.
In this time we’ve watched our project evolve, branch off into unexpected territory, and have adjusted our goals accordingly. It seems obvious, now that I’ve thought of it, that we should be documenting this thing that’s taking up so much of our time and energy and plays such a vitally important role in our lives. It’s an amazing (for us) thing that we’re doing and I want to record it for providence. I also want to take time to reflect on what we’re doing. That’s something I’ve really appreciated about travel blogging – the perspective it provides. I think blogging about our business will make me appreciate our accomplishments, assess our decisions and progress and hopefully, if we’re very, very lucky, reach out and connect with like-minded entrepreneurial souls who we can share this experience with.
But first, to get our gentle viewers up to speed, some back-story:
Before leaving Australia we read Tim Ferriss’ book the “4 Hour Work Week” and were rather captivated by the idea of “automation” or as we’ve come to call it, “passive income” – basically you sell a product and automate as much as you can so you don’t have to spend more than a day a week on it. This lead to the grand idea that Mike would make iPhone apps – which of course you only need to make once – then sell it forever and ever for wads of cash on the iPhone App Store…
And thusly we progressed:
Goal: Mike does what he loves and we have a comfortable passive income once x amount of apps are out on the App Store. (Technically, the first iteration of A Tasty Pixel was Mike making apps in his “spare time” *ahem* whilst completing his PhD before we left Australia.)
Business Model: Mike makes stuff he wishes existed and puts it on the App Store and waits for the money to roll in.
Goal: Unchanged
Business Model: As above, plus after some prodding from Katherine, Mike dabbles in marketing.
Goal: Unchanged
Business Model: Mike makes stuff he wishes existed and Katherine is promoted to “Operations and Marketing Manager” once we both realise that if Mike runs every aspect of the business himself he may be able to release an app within the next decade or so.
Goal: Mike does what he loves. Delusions of a passive income are, at the very least postponed, after Katherine’s realisation that without concerted and continuous marketing, updates, and customer support any app, no matter how shit hot, will be lost in the noisy black gaping void of a hole that is the iPhone App Store.
Business Model: Work our little butts off.
I don’t know if you can tell from the above business models, but neither Mike nor I have any education or experience in business. We’re both what I believe many people (comprised mostly of my extended working-class family) would call “over-educated” (3 degrees, 1 honours, and 99.9% of a PhD between us).
Alas, despite all those many years of book learnin’ not a snippet was dedicated to the exchange of goods and/or services for monies. Luckily, I have a degree in psychology so apparently I know how to manipulate people into parting with their money — at least that’s what my psych lecturers told us when they mentioned that a whole lot of psych graduates use their powers for evil and go into marketing. I remember shuddering at the thought, and now here I am — not that I’m complaining! I’m one of those strange people who takes an exorbitant amount of pleasure in organising. As a kid I had borderline OCD tendencies and they serve me well today.
So, where we’re at right now is the realisation that in order for our business to be successful we either need to do a crap-load of work or pay somebody else to do it (we both take far too much pride in our work to have any love for the idea of outsourcing, however), with no end-date in sight. When and how we are we going to find the time to travel Europe in our motorhome again? We have no idea but I’m hoping once this iPhone app that we have poured our everything into is out in the big wide world things will balance out and we’ll be able to focus on A Tasty Pixel, travel, and I’ll be able to get back to my passion – art and design and creating my own little creative business.
I think the next blog post will be about why, despite the death of our “automated” business model, we really don’t mind very much.
