After our dismal coffee experience yesterday and Sarah’s crash course in UK “coffee” we put a little more effort into a place to patronise today. The girls had heard good stuff about The Boston Tea Party so we made a bee-line there. It turned out to be a place Mike and I had been to last year! Over coffee I presented Sarah with a birthday present to adorn her little cottage in a Tasmanian town with the delightful name of “Snug”.

Mike and I had been looking forward to re-visiting the abbey so we could shoot it in HDR this time.

I mused how much taking an interest in photography has affected how I now perceive the world around me. I got sooo much more out of our visit this time around – noticing details that I don’t even remember seeing before.

We briefly considered having a bath but thought better of it after realising (a) the price, (b) it would be all modern looking rather than ye olde Roman ruins and (c) it would be hot and it was a rather warm day already. We frugally decided to have another picnic and stopped by Marks & Spencer for some supplies. We struck on the brilliant idea of buying some cold white wine and a birthday cake for Sarah as well.

We found a spot by the river and sat down for a long, leisurely lunch, cheap wine, good conversation, and a dodgy supermarket birthday cake.

We went for a stroll to the The Crescent and read an interesting bit of trivia about it – Only the facade was constructed and then it was sold off in lengths and people built the rest of their house to their own specifications. We took a walk behind it and sure enough it was all higgledy piggledy.

Mike and I had yet another history geek moment when we read that the lawn in front of The Crescent has a ha-ha. A “ha-ha”, as described in “At Home: A short history of private life” by Bill Bryson, is “a sunken fence, a kind of palisade designed to separate the private part of an estate from its working parts without the visual intrusion of fence or hedge. Because they were unseen until the last instant, people tended to discover them with a startled cry of ‘Ha-ha’! – and hence, so it is said, the name”.

We also pointed out a feature of many houses in Bath that were the butt of many jokes on a comedic tour of Bath we went on last year. There are many recesses in the walls that look like there should be a door or window there. We’d read that when glass was still quite expensive people would paint these recesses to look like windows and doors – I’m still not clear on why doors where expensive though…

We waited out the train’s departure time at a very grand looking cafe over enormous beverages – what is it with this country and pints!? After our time with friends I was feeling a bit philosophical and reflected on how sad it is that, although I’d love to spend more time with friends, even if we were to move back to Australia half our friends would still be on other continents. Then I felt even sadder when I thought that we would still be spending more time with friends there than we can here and it will most likely be a few years until I see Sarah again. I at least count myself fortunate to have so many people to miss so much – I’d take that any day to the alternative.

After saying goodbye to the gals I couldn’t quite bear the thought of going back to Nettle and eating, just the two of us, so we grabbed some very tasty pizza in Bath instead. By the time we left we were racing the sunset, not relishing the thought of cycling through dark fields lined with thistles and hoisting our bikes over stiles surrounded with nettle (no, not that Nettle!). Luckily we made it just in time and rolled into our CL to the sound of our neighbour playing a lovely little tune on a harpsichord. He was sat outside but facing towards the open door of their little old caravan – I think he was serenading his wife. It was really nice way to finish the day – thanks little old harpsichord playing man!

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As we drove up the driveway we were delighted to see that the field we’d taken an awesome panorama of last year had now been planted with wheat, so although the tire tracks were still there they were highlighted with bluey-green wheat instead of tiny white flowers.

Then

Now

Also, I had no idea wheat is so colourful!

We had a couple of days to kill until my high school mates – Sarah, Carmen and Sarah’s mum Diane – arrived in Bath. We were without electricity, however, and with a busted leisure battery, so Mike got a lot of reading done (of the ‘dead-tree’ kind of book, that is – Mike) and I put the finishing touches on a painting and whipped up a little birthday present for Sarah (who’s birthday is in a couple of days).

When the gang finally arrived in Bath we arranged to pick them up the next day and head out to the Cotswolds in Nettle. On the way to Bath we got a little lost thanks to GPS’ charming tendency to discombobulate in built-up areas – just when you need it the most. Unfortunately our “little late” turned into a lot late when I proceeded to walk around Bath looking for them, having made the mistake of relying on my memory instead of the map in my hand. Peeps finally found, we headed back to Mike and Nettle, generally mooched and caught up then discussed our plans for the day. The hefty responsibility of choosing which Cotswold towns to visit was delegated to me as I’ve been there before. Our first destination was Oxford. I’d only seen Sarah twice in the ten years since graduation from high school but we easily slipped back into our friendship and were giggling uncontrollably at the slightest thing like we always used to. It was hard sitting in the front, I really wanted to chat with the gals but Nettle’s rather prohibitively loud when she gets going.

Once in Oxford we made a bee line to a park and had a picnic lunch that the girls had brought along, of baguettes, soft cheeses, dips and fruit. Our first port of call was Christ Church College as a few scenes from the first couple of Harry Potter movies were shot there. We didn’t end up going in as the admission fee was a cheeky £6 and we couldn’t really do it justice given that we wanted to see a couple of villages as well. We settled for wandering around the grounds instead. We looked on rather bemusedly at the things the girls decided were photo-worthy. It reminded me how it felt when I was here for the first time – coming from Australia where anything older than 100 years is considered historic and the grandest building I’d seen was St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne with an impressive 125 years of history. Given our speedy itinerary I suggested we just stroll through the city centre a little bit instead of heading to any sites in particular. For the next 20 minutes we walked through some pretty ordinary looking bits of town until we turned a corner and Wham! There you are, Oxford! Unfortunately in all the excitement of having new people around we don’t seem to have taken many photos. Here’s a vaguely interesting building for you:

We stumbled on an exhibition of an edition of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali. I was a big fan of his in high school and of course love the story as well so we eagerly checked it out. I was kind of expecting he would have toned down the crazy for the project at hand but it was pretty much standard, wacky Dali. Definitely not children friendly. Oxford was absolutely teeming with tourists and even if we’d had a whole day scheduled for the town I’m not sure we would have chosen to stay for much longer. Eager to escape the masses we headed back to Nettle and onto Bourton on the Water – the name rung a bell so I was hoping it was the one I’d visited way back in 2003. On the way we spotted a field of deer. Like big geeks we reversed back and got out to take photos.

Mike and I saw a very pointless looking little structure sitting in the field and wondered if it was a “folly”. We’re reading a fabulously informative book at the moment, called “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson and are learning all sorts of random and fascinating things – from the ice trade, to Palladian architecture and the history of beds. A “folly” is a building on an estate “designed with no other purpose in mind than to complete a view and provide a happy spot for the wandering eye to settle“.

Arriving in Bourton on Water (Mike – ….and trying to get the song “Smoke On The Water” out of my head…) I instantly recognised it as the right place and just like the last time I was here there were quite a few people out enjoying the nice weather and dangling their feet in the icy water of the little stream. We leisurely wandered about, spotted some cute little ducklings and grabbed a coffee which we optimistically hoped would taste a bit better than brown water. After laughing at my latte being more like a cappuccino and Sarah’s cappuccino being more like a latte, Carmen and I declared that they didn’t taste too bad at which point Sarah kindly informed us that we’ve been in the UK for too long and have obviously forgotten what coffee tastes like. We defended our statement with the facts that it didn’t taste like brown water, the beans weren’t burnt, ergo not a bad coffee by UK standards, at which point Sarah died a little inside. There was a rather unfortunate but humurous moment when we were having this discussion when Carmen began to say that “we at least shouldn’t complain until…” with the waitress standing right behind her ready to serve the rest of our order. I felt bad for her when we all started laughing after she left but it was just such unfortunate timing we couldn’t not. I hope we didn’t hurt her feelings. Maybe we should have explained to her that we are Melburnians and therefore gigantic coffee snobs. Ah well…

A bit of engaging conversation and a joyless caffeine injection later we headed off for our final Cotswold destination – a town I may or may not have been to – Stow on the Wold. In Stow on the Wold we noticed little yellow boxes dotted around with the word “grit” on them. We were intrigued and opened one up not having the faintest of what we would find within… It was a substance that looked remarkably a lot like… well, grit. At which point we cracked up laughing and imagined people going around saying “I could really do with a bit of grit right about now”. We managed to deduce by the added ingredient of salt that it is for sprinkling on the roads when it snows – probably something quite obvious to most northern hemisphere dwellers but we’re Australians so allowances must be made. Now, who’s for some grit?

I didn’t remember much about Stow on the Wold, including if I’d actually been there before, and there certainly wasn’t anything that memorable about it this time around either. We strolled about the deserted streets and Mike and I had our second history geek fix when we spotted windows with a circular lump in the middle of the glass. We’d read that this method of production was much more affordable when glass was still quite expensive. As we walked Carmen relayed the history behind a couple of phrases she’d learnt about when she was in Edinburgh. To “cost an arm and a leg” stems from a time when cadavers were in great demand by surgeons who needed to practise their skills as much as possible due to the lack of anaesthesia and the need to work very quickly. Cadavers were in short supply however, as only those of executed criminals were allowed to be used. This saw a spate of grave robbing to supply the demand, as fresh cadavers fetched a pretty penny. Hence, something expensive cost an “arm and a leg”. Interestingly, as Mike and I had also read, a couple of particularly entrepreneurial chaps decided grave robbing was far too much hassle and a bit dangerous, what with the guards and all, so they decided it would be far more efficient to simply murder people. They did and one of them was eventually caught. He gave up his partner in crime and got off light. The other who was not so fortunate was executed, and in a very neat twist of fate his cadaver was used for surgery practise.

The second phrase was “to get shit-faced”. To get shit-faced stems way back to when people threw their effluent out of windows onto the streets below. If you’ve never before felt immensely lucky to be born in the time you have been born, feel free to take a moment now (I’ll wait). Apparently there was an agreed-upon hour to throw this stuff about which unhappily coincided with closing time of all the pubs in Britain. Inebriated fellows stumbled out onto the streets and in their drunken stupor looked up, instead of moving as quickly as humanly possible, when a warning cry came from above. Hence, the term “to get shit-faced”.

We admired a crooked building for a bit – anything slightly wonky is fascinating to a people who come from a country were everything is relatively new and therefore annoyingly uniform. On the way home we stopped off for a good old English pub meal – at a pub, incidentally, that was around long before Henry VIII was busy lopping off his wives’ heads – and a pint of cider. Sarah – a dietitian – ordered a burger with a deep-fried patty of spinach and two types of cheese – a dietitian ordered deep-fried cheese! We had a fascinating and horrifying conversation about all sorts of parasites and how they make their way into your body, punctuated with plenty of real life stories. (Mike – My favourite was the one about the African worm which made its way into its host’s foot, then all the way up into their bowels, where eventually it, well, made its way out, and out, and out, and out) We dropped the guys off in Bath and flopped into bed as soon as we got home, absolutely spent and delighted to have spent a day with such awesome people.

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-Mary Oliver

I celebrated my 28th year on this planet recently. Twenty eight years of my one wild and precious life. This is what I decided to exchange a day of my life for on this particular day.

The Eden Project in Cornwall houses the world’s largest greenhouse. Inside the artificial biomes are plants that are collected from all around the world. It was delightful and quirky and beautiful – the perfect birthday setting for a girl who loftily aspires to bring more of these very things into the world through her art.

There were charming little details like stairs designed just for children… and Mike.

And quirky sculptures throughout.

Despite having looked forward to the rainforest biome the most, it was the gardens I got the most joy out of. I found myself thinking about elements I would like to incorporate into our future garden, namely wonky little fences made out of sticks, little stick teepees providing a vertical home for creepers and rows of lush edibles.

Plus, who doesn’t love purple balls on sticks?!

Surprisingly, another highlight for me was the cafe! It seems somebody told them it was my birthday because it was a baked goods extravaganza – we’ve been without an oven for a year now and every now and then we crave cheesy baked comfort food and apple crumbles – exactly what we ordered at the Eden Project cafe and it was excellent! The cafe itself is surrounded by a beautiful, brightly coloured vegetable garden. Staff filled up their buckets with delicious looking edible bounty presumably for use in the cafe’s cuisine. There was something very satisfying about watching them work and I found myself thinking what a wonderful job that would be.

We topped the day off with a very satisfying Indian feast – our first Indian (not including the horrible, over-priced quasi-Indian we had in Rome) since we were in England this time last year!

A foot massage over an episode or two of our new favourite and surprisingly educational TV program, “The Tudors”, topped off the perfect day.

Ooh I almost forgot to mention the triumphal birthday present. I’d had my eye on this skirt for a little while and this was the last one they had – the one on the mannequin in fact – and it fit perfectly! It was meant to be! Thank you mum, dad, Margaret and Chris! I definitely wouldn’t have bought it without your kind birthday donation. Oh, and chartreuse is totally my favourite colour now thanks to the top I also found that goes perfectly with the skirt! Aaah, birthday serendipity.

I am super proud to say that I saw in my 28th birthday, confident that I am putting my one wild and precious life to very good use.

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Our decision to remain stationary until Mike’s new app is up and running and out in the big wide world led us to the intriguing prospect of finding the cheapest CL in the UK in a region with strong internet coverage. What fun! We had no idea where we would end up for the next few months – just lots of little dots on a map – it was like a lottery!

Mike spent a while trawling through the Caravan Club site, looking in ever-expanding circles for a suitable place to relocate to.  They were all rather expensive for our liking, so he embarked on a massive project to write some software to drag the entire several-thousand-site CL database from the Club’s website, and make it easily searchable for price (which isn’t searchable on their site).  Several days later, he had a spreadsheet of the sites across the UK that were within our price range, and proceeded to call through the list to confirm the prices, which are invariably inaccurate.

After a rather silly number of hours of work, he’d narrowed our choice down to 4 sites around England’s south-west. The winning CL turned out to be Langarth Farm just outside of Truro in Cornwall. Looks like we’re going to spend a few months in Cornwall then! At first I was a bit under-whelmed at the prospect, despite having wanted to tour Cornwall for quite some time. Before we changed our plans we were going to travel up the east coast of the UK to Scotland and then go back down the west coast. I’ve been pining for Scotland for months now and it looked like I’d have to wait a few more months yet. As the aforementioned friend pointed out, there is something rather funny about feeling let down at the prospect of spending a few months in Cornwall!

During our trundle over to Cornwall we picked up our new (to us) vintage bikes that we’d bought on eBay! Mike’s is a surprisingly shiny blue beast circa 1960s called “Apollo” and mine, also blue, circa 1970s named “Way” short for “Wayfarer”. We’d been looking for these bad boys for a long time and we’re absolutely thrilled with our new purchases.

Mine was in Plymouth which, from our brief drive through looked like a lovely little city.

We made our way to Langarth Farm down ever-narrowing roads, pleased with the promisingly scenic drive on the approach. As we drove we thought about cycling along these very roads with anticipation. Langarth Farm turned out to have many other features of benefit to an extended stay that we hadn’t even thought to check for – grocery store and fish and chip shop in walking distance, small city with everything we could ever need – namely Indian and Thai food – in cycling distance; there’s even an honesty stall down the road selling eggs, potatoes and leeks!

Our days leading up to meeting up with friends in Bath were spent quietly working away, Mike on his new iPhone app and me in my new marketing role as well as my own projects, albeit to a lesser extent as previously. I’m hoping the next app will do well enough so we can hire someone to do the marketing next time and I can get back to my art and creative biz. In the meantime, I don’t mind the work and I’m learning a lot which I’ll be able to put to good use in my own online biz when the time comes.

We also spent our days going for bicycle rides on our new vintage steeds and marvelling at our friends doing this across continents! The hills (and slight inclines indiscernible to the human eye) of Cornwall defeat me every time and I end up taking my bike for a walk half the time, which Mike kindly documented.

The scenery we cycle through is quintessentially English – gnarled trees, bright purple flowers growing along the side of the road, and of course everything is very, very green. This is an achingly pretty country. It reminds us of Mike’s pretty hometown but on steroids. On one of our rides I commented to Mike how I used to think it very funny that the English settlers in Australia found the landscape depressingly barren and wholly uninviting and that they would try to re-create English gardens around their outback homes – how silly, I thought! Looking at this beautifully lush landscape now I completely understand why they pined for the beauty of their abundant colourful flowers and gentle leafy green woods. The area I grew up in in Australia is characterised by dry scrub, the plants are hardy, tough looking things and the trees are tall, straight and skinny with sparse leaves – and forget about flowers. I can see how this may have proven a slightly depressing state of affairs to our English ancestors.

We missed the lambs at Wootton, and the antics of the local pheasant, Monsieur Squark-and-Flap, but the void was somewhat filled by a rather enthusiastic rooster who I realised sounds just like someone over-excitedly yelling “WOOOOO-HOOOO!”. So, we dubbed him Party Rooster. Every day’s a party for that guy – he loves a good time.

Punctuating the uneventfulness of our quiet days spent in Cornwall, the only other things of note are that our boiler miraculously fixed itself and we now have a functioning shower again – reaffirming our “If it aint broke don’t fix it; if it is broke, don’t fix it – it’ll fix itself” policy; Mike sent his passport and Australian drivers license off to the DVLA with baited breath hoping they send us back a British license and preferably don’t lose his passport in the process as we hear they are prone to do, and we finally got around to “spring” cleaning Nettle. Huh. I didn’t know our skylight was white. And what happened to our windowsill terrarium?

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I was quite keen to do the Itinerari Segreti or “Secret Tours”. According to the Lonely Planet the Ducal Palace is reputed to hold dark secrets that can be found through a passageway disguised as a filing cabinet in the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci (Chamber of the Council of 10), which to me, sounds deliciously like a Dan Brown novel. Alas, tours only run once a day in English and we didn’t quite make it in time. Reason Number 1 to come back to Venice.

Our next destination proved to be a rather elusive little boutique selling marbled paper called, “Carte”. A blogger friend of mine had coincidentally suggested I try my hand at making some papers a few days earlier so I thought it would be pretty snazzy to check out this ancient craft brought to Venice from Japan via Turkey and Florence. Unfortunately navigating the warren-like streets and canals of Venice in the rain with dodgy GPS proved to be too much for Mike’s sanity. I found the rain rather atmospheric and enjoyed the novelty of wandering around deserted lanes and back alleys rarely trodden by tourists. As we huddled under shelter from the drizzly rain, we once again poured over the puzzling map while a grocer with a cart stocked full of produce rattled by singing a loud tune with obvious relish. For some unknown reason we only own one umbrella and when it rains we huddle under it together. This is usually cozy and fun but today Mike was on a mission and he marched on ahead as I bemusedly followed along behind. We passed what must have been a school or kindergarten two or three… maybe four times during The Hunt. Each time we were amazed at the cacophony of tiny little voices all speaking at once emanating from inside. For full effect turn the volume waaay up.

We aborted the attempt before Mike went completely postal and spent some time wandering the streets of Venice, blessedly without a destination in mind in now very soggy shoes. Despite sogginess, we were delighted to have the opportunity to linger and take tons of photos of the beautiful grunge of Venice’s lanes, canals and buildings.

I’d resolved, during our visit to Venice the day before, to buy a carnevale mask. I’d seen one that was decorated with card suits and was hoping to stumble upon it or something similar again. I did a spot of window shopping but decided to leave serious shopping to the end of the day once we’d done a bit more sight-seeing.

After wandering around in circles a bazillion times we finally managed to find the super cheap pizza place from the day before with a little help from Andrea. Navigating in this place is near impossible. I was super stoked that we’d managed to eat for under €10 in Venice! We even managed coffee for a couple of euros! We chatted for a bit about combatting grumpiness and making the most of less than ideal conditions when sight-seeing. A handy life-skill too me thinks.

Two unsuccessful plans down we decided on our next destination, something that is impossible not to find in Venice – the Piazza and Basilica di San Marco. As we approached we noticed a whole bunch of tourists huddled underneath the arch leading into San Marco, sheltering from the rain.

We made our way through the tight huddle and out into the wide open and blessedly empty expanse of Piazza San Marco, the rain having emptied the piazza of tourists except for those speedily making their way across the void to shelter. If there was ever a reason to visit Venice on a rainy day this is it!

We’d barely noticed San Marco when we were there with Silvia and Andrea the day before as we were distracted by hordes of tourists and interesting conversation with our new friends. This seemed rather startling as we looked on it as if for the first time.

We’d downloaded an audio tour of Piazza San Marco by Rick Steves to listen to once here but noted with some consternation that the iPhone’s battery was dangerously low – all that navigating to find marbled paper! Damn you marbled paper! We’d listened to his audio tours at the Colosseum and The Forum in Rome and found them immeasurably more entertaining and informative than any of the dry, cheerless, uninteresting and gratuitous detail-gushing, date-quoting audio tours we’ve been subjected to by the official tourist offices. While Mike wandered about trying to find free wifi to set up my iPod (the backup option) with our silver bullet for important historical sites we don’t understand the significance of I meandered around the balcony that surrounds the periphery of the piazza happily snapping photos. Audio tour backup almost-but-not secured, we took our chances with the weary iPhone and waltzed out into the centre of the piazza under cover of our umbrella, blessedly un-jostled by the masses. While the rain pattered on our umbrella, we listened intently to all the fascinating reasons why Venice exists in the first place, why it is famous, and very special.

A couple of interesting tidbits we learned from said tour:

As probably everyone knows acqua alta (high tide) in Venice means Piazza San Marco becomes completely submerged. Maybe something most don’t consider, and I certainly hadn’t, is that the water also seeps into people’s homes and other buildings. After the water recedes one must be very careful to wash everything it touched to protect it from the sea water’s corrosive influence.

The bell tower we were to ascend later had actually collapsed in 1902 and the golden angel which adorns it landed right at the front door of the basilica, standing up. The cynic in me wonders if someone came along unseen and respectfully righted her.

Feeling in much brighter spirits after our very successful audio tour despite sloshing with every step we took we headed to San Marco Basilica hoping the iPhone would hold out for another audio tour in there. Alas the Basilica had closed not long ago. Reason number 2 to return to Venice. Bugger, I was reeeaaally looking forward to that!

We approached the bell tower (the Campanile) hesitant to hope that it was still open. It was! And what a view – a damp, cold, view.

I love that this looks like a vintage photo:

We’d originally planned to stay after dark in Venice as this is invariably described as magical. Alas, feet that had been soggy for an entire day and thoughts of a comfy dry Nettle begged to differ so we resolved to grab a mask and get going. Reason number 3 to return to Venice. I half-heartedly perused mask shops but The One continued to elude me and I didn’t have the heart to prolong Mike’s soggy misery. Aaand reason number 4 to return to Venice!

We stopped off for a pick-me-up coffee and gaped at the exorbitant bill. I guess we didn’t quite make it out of Venice without being ripped off. So close! I made a quick purchase of two blank Carnevale masks – the long-nosed mask of the quack doctor and pretty columbina – to paint myself and we sloshed our way to the train station.

We left Venice with 3 objectives out of 8 achieved but I think we excelled at the most important one of all – just wander, get lost, and soak it all in.

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Our one year digital nomad vagabonding anniversary came and went the day before yesterday unacknowledged. This time last year we awoke to our new tabula rasa life in a BnB in Camden, London having just flown in the day before. I think a little reflection is in order.

Then

On the 31st May last year I wrote this in my notebook:

“Come Sunday evening a melancholy befalls in the realisation that I have to go to work tomorrow and the next day and the next day and so on and so forth. Well, this is officially my last Sunday of mourning the weekend for hopefully a very long time, if not forever. This week is my last week of work before I take annual leave and then move to Europe with Mike to re-evaluate and re-invent out lives. I never again want to have a job that makes me mourn the end of the weekend. I either need to have a job I love or a job that takes up as little time as possible”.

A note to the people of seaac (my previous workplace), if you are reading this: I still love you and seaac! I thought I wanted to be a social worker since before I knew what a social worker was – in fact, I even talked to Steve, our beloved leader, about all of this in my exit interview. Turns out I’d prefer to be holed up in a little studio day and night drawing and painting strange but beautiful fictional characters and designing yummy collage papers and patterns! Who knew?

Now

I’m working on the marketing side of things for A Tasty Pixel, Mike’s software development business. I’ve learnt how to use Photoshop so I can design my own collage papers and surface pattern designs and have plans to learn how to use Illustrator as well. I’ve designed over 100 of them and even had a hand in designing Mike’s new website! Hopefully Mike’s next iPhone app will do well enough so that we can hire someone to do the marketing next time and I can focus on what I love. Until then, I don’t mind this type of work. At the end of the day I have complete autonomy and that counts for so much. What I would love to do is sell my collage papers, surface pattern designs, textures and brushes online as downloadable files. I’ve pretty much got it all worked out, now I just have to find the time to do it!

Then

A couple of weeks after arriving I wrote this in my notebook:

“The world is full of wonders and we’re going out to see them. This is probably the most amazing thing we’ll do in our lives and this is the beginning. It is all ahead of us. I’m really excited about spending TIME, precious, preciuos time on art. Learning, learning, learning. The thought of learning has always grabbed my imagination with all of its connotations of possibility and the unknown”.

I also remember updating my facebook status with something like this: “I have dallied for too long: Too many paintings left unpainted”.

Now

I’m still really excited about seeing the wonders we have yet to see. Scotland is our next super exciting destination. I dream about being in a remote Scottish countryside surrounded by dramatic mountains, achingly pretty lochs and at the mercy of fierce weather.

I would still like to spend more time on art. It’s funny, for the first time in my adult life I’m neither studying nor do I have a “job” but I am busier than I have ever been. Sometimes when I think about all the things I want to do and learn I feel overwhelmed. I think it’s a pretty good problem to have. Now that I’ve found my passion it’s gained its own momentum. It’s as if it was waiting, dormant, and as soon as a shaft of light fell upon it, everything that was already there, in waiting, unfurled and is growing bigger and bigger the more light it gets.

To round off, some things I know now that I wish I knew then:

1. Put some bamboo mats and towels under your mattress or you will be re-constructing your bed in 9 months because a dirty big patch of mould is growing there.
2. Driving the entire length of France on toll-ways will cost you a small fortune, which you could use instead to buy a small island or put towards your firstborn’s university fund.
3. One month in Ireland is NOT enough time – not even close – and indeed three months in one country is not enough (unless it’s Tunisia) – slow down!

Some things I never anticipated:

1. Learning how to use Photoshop – those familiar with the mutual animosity between myself and all things computers will appreciate the enormity of this
   
2. Starting a small business and being self-employed – not something I ever envisaged for myself but now I wouldn’t want it any other way. Also, knowing a great deal about running an online business – didn’t see that coming.
3. Having a blog and meeting kindred spirits online – I used to think blogs were rather self-indulgent, pointless things and I was even quite sheepish about telling people that I had one to begin with (ditto for twitter)
   

Some things I’ve learnt:

1. How to have an argument – Mike and I live together, travel together and now work together all in a 6×3 metre space! We need to be able to resolve arguments and we’ve gotten pretty good at it.
2. I can wear a pair of socks (light use) 5 – 10 times before they start to smell
3. I don’t think I ever would have dreamt of, let alone done, any of this – the business, the design, the blog – If I had’ve just stayed in Melbourne working 9-5 Monday-Friday with 4 weeks off a year. Not a chance. There’s something about drastically changing your entire life that opens up boundaries you didn’t even know were there and lets you begin to imagine that things can be different, very very different.
   

Michael:

My mother made this comment about our experience just recently, but it’s worth repeating because I find the fact of it really remarkable: That this thing we’re doing is totally multifaceted. The travel stuff is wonderful – one of my top priorities for my life – but equally valuable is the creative side which has been really rewarding (although not quite financially rewarding, yet – we’ll get there!).

The most awesome aspect of this is Katherine’s artistic journey, and I’m loving seeing her artistic side prospering. Plus, the glee she gets from art supplies is a thing to behold.

Personally speaking, I’m loving the indie software developer lifestyle to pieces. It’s a creative outlet that suits me perfectly, and I love designing software and putting the pieces together just so – which satisfies both my creative side, and my OCD side. My mother used to joke that me, working (tapping studiously away at a keyboard), was rather similar to me taking a break – party time (tapping studiously away at a keyboard). It’s pretty much that way still, and doing this job means I basically never work, and am in fact constantly playing. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Actually, the one thing that does get better than that is having a beautiful, changing view out of the window that we can go and explore from time to time, at our leisure. When we started out, we didn’t have a clear idea of how the travel thing was all going to work, but we’ve sorted it out and found our pace. We love being in the country, fields, woods, mountains, and really enjoy hiking (although not for too long!). Cities have their appeal too, but our hearts lie in the wide open horizons, or the deep green (or preferably, orange and yellow!) of woods.

One thing I never anticipated was the people we’ve met along the way. I certainly hoped that we would make connections with people as we went, but given that we’re not exactly gregarious (I almost wrote ‘egregious’) people by nature, I wasn’t sure how successful we’d be. Don’t get me wrong, we like a good pub, maybe once a year. For a few minutes.

However, we’ve met some really interesting people and made some wonderful friends, always in unexpected ways: On the side of a volcano, in the back-alleys of an ancient Tunisian marketplace, in the car park of a little Italian town, and through my involvement with writing WordPress and iPhone software. A great adventure still to come will be spending some time living in Padua (and learning Italian!) and getting to know our wonderful new-found friends there, who I originally met via my product Loopy.

The online side of this mobile social life has been fascinating – we still have quite a number of people we’ve met online to catch up with some time: Users of software I’ve written, other bloggers, and other people who’ve come across us online (or vice versa). We’ve made some great friends who are currently cycling across Europe (actually, they’ve just bought a little red car and are heading towards, and then across, Siberia), who we discovered while doing a bit of travel research in Tunisia, and we dearly hope to meet them in person one day – then kidnap them and keep them all to ourselves, in our enclave of ‘favourite people’ that we will one day build. nothing

The last thing that I find surprising, in spite of my ever-overly-optimistic self, is just how feasible this thing has been. Okay, we had some fantastic help to begin with – some great, long house-sitting appointments that meant we went almost a whole year rent-free – but apart from the initial, mostly recoverable outlay (Nettle), we’ve generally been living on less that it would’ve cost us to live in Australia – particularly with the horrendous housing situation there lately. My blithely optimistic anticipation of this whole thing has been actually pretty spot-on. We can do this for a lot more time yet, even if this indie software thing doesn’t take off.

So, in more ways than one, becoming ‘vagabonds’ (‘technobonds’?) has been a real enabler for us to pursue the things we really want to do with our lives, travel aside. It’s taken us away from the distracting, (albeit dubious) attraction of a steady income and jobs about which we’re ambivalent, freeing us up for the more important things, while actually lowering our living expenses to make our ‘buffer’ last longer.

That’s pretty cool.

Things I am glad I now know:

1. What Katherine says is right. (Katherine’s note: this is a work in progress)
2. Taking a wrong turn or getting lost never matters – relax, go with it.
3. It’s probably not a good idea to wild-camp in a big city, and especially not a port. Just…don’t.
4. It doesn’t matter how much you don’t like marketing/PR stuff, or how much you’re too engrossed in developing a product: Do it!
5. Don’t look too closely at how your motorhome’s put together, especially the raised bed (or as I like to call it, flimsy-sleeping-platform-of-death).
6. If you run out of food, you can make pancakes with flour and water! (Although they’re not so good if you’re out of water too)

Here’s to another year of technomadding!

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I can’t say I remember for sure who stopped writing first or who moved without providing a forwarding address but I remember it being you – maybe you remember it as being me. All I know is that I wanted to write to you again; it had been a long time. I wasn’t sure if the address I had would still be yours. I had a phone number. The plan was to call, ask for you and if you still lived there to hang up and write my letter – talking on the phone was more than I could handle. I called, the number had been disconnected. Maybe you even moved because of me, because I had your address and you’d changed your mind. I feel that even if did decide I definitely wanted to find you again that I wouldn’t or shouldn’t because it seems you’ve decided you don’t want to be found and I should respect that.

This is what I will do. I am online – facebook, my blog, twitter, flickr, deviant art – I’m easy to find. You probably know how to use google, you know my name, you can find me if you want to. I figure, I’ve googled your name, my little sister’s name – she’s just old enough now to have a Myspace account – what’s to say you haven’t googled mine. Maybe you already read my blog. This line of thought has brought me to “Letters to Louise” – it’s serendipitous your name starts with an “L”; I like the alliteration.

I might not write frequently – to be honest, I don’t think of you all that much – I don’t say that to be mean (of course you understand, as I believe it’s the same for you). That is to say, we both have lives to lead and all of this is very much in the background, barely ever thought of and even when it is, rarely in any depth.

So all that’s left is to decide what to include in my letters. I have a few “sections” in mind which might change or expand as time goes on.

This is Something I Like

Smelling things. I like the smell of glue and paint and petrol and pens and flour.

This is Something I Remember About You

You gave me a strange little old book full of what you described as hilariously out-dated advice (possibly specifically for young women?) but with some little nuggets of wisdom too. You wrote in the margins, adding your own advice. One thing you suggested was to have a list – maybe 21 or 50, I don’t remember – of women I admire. I must confess I haven’t made my list but I would like one. I don’t even know that many women that well! That’s certainly something I intend to rectify and I am working on it. I worry when I think of this book that I’m not 100% sure where it is. I’m anxious to find it but alas all of my worldly possessions are in boxes on the other side of the world. I will look for it when I get back. I feel exasperation at my adolescent self for not treasuring it. Teenagers!

This is Something I Wonder

Does my little sister know about me and is she on Facebook or Myspace? This brings me to another thing I wonder – how do I spell your last name, because of course I’ve googled it but is it an a or an e and is there a double letter in there? This too is boxed up on the other side of the world.

This is Something I’m Rather Rubbish at

Fixing things – I am the anti-handyman: slightly broken things degenerate before me. I don’t think I got that from my biological father because I have a little piece of paper that says he’s a mechanic so I’m blaming this one on you.

This is Something I did Today

Glued strips of a vintage sewing pattern to the edges of a deep-edged box canvas I’ve almost finished painting – I’m very happy with the results. By the way, it’s for a blogger friend whom I admire – so there’s a woman to get my list off to a start!

P.S. What would a letter be without a “P.S.”! I have an old newspaper laid out to protect the table while I’m painting (as you can see in the photo) and there’s this journalist I just noticed who’s kind of staring at me and he has your last name or some variation of it. Isn’t that weird?

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I found Padova, in a strange way, to be a bit like our home town of Melbourne in Australia. It doesn’t look like it at all but I found that Padova didn’t seem to have any grand tourist attractions to it’s name – just like Melbourne – but what it does have is a sense of “liveability”. It’s a nice city. It has pretty parts, it has a pleasant atmosphere and there seems be a lot going on. This was interesting to me as the longer we’ve spent in Italy the more I’ve come to feel that I wouldn’t want to live here. I’ve become very aware of the general lack of space – doors opening right up onto the road in towns, the “country” still being quite populated with at least a house or two always in view. To me, this has amounted to a general sense of crowdedness. This is something I love about travel and learning about other cultures – it shines a new light on our own country and culture. Intellectually I understood that Australia has a tiny population and is massive with wide, open spaces but I didn’t understand what that felt like until I felt what a large population in a small country feels like. It may have been because of our friends’ presence but Padova felt like one of the few places in Italy where I could live – I say “I” as Mike has felt there have been plenty of places that he would be happy staying put in.

It was absolutely wonderful spending time with locals and gleaning little insights we otherwise wouldn’t have gleaned. I love my coffee, I come from a city that has a well-known and respected coffee culture but I can’t for the life of me understand Italian coffee – the espresso. “Sip” and it’s gone! Andrea shed some light on it for me when he likened it to a small gourmet chocolate – it doesn’t last long but it’s a taste sensation for as long as it does.

We had a traditional “spritzer” – a cocktail – at “spritzer o’clock” – sometime in the evening before dinner – and watched the “fighetti” – comically fashionable Italian youth – strut and generally stand around looking rich and beautiful in “The Uniform” – the wardrobe that it seems all Italians have agreed to adopt. I asked Silvia, who expressed exasperation at “The Uniform”, where she does her shopping. Her answer – she doesn’t shop! She proceeded to point out her hole-ridden Doc Martins that were The Thing to have in the 90s!

Just as Andrea finished explaining to us what “fighetti” means, a very expensive looking car that barely came up to knee-level came to a screeching halt right in front of the busy cafe and a trendy young thing strutted out in The Uniform. Everyone in the vicinity turned and stared. Andrea turned back to us, shrugged, and announced, “fighetti”. We all cracked up as the guy sauntered off nonchalantly.

We talked for a while about the band they were in in their twenties, “K”. Turns out our new friends were quite the rock stars back in the day! Later that night at their apartment we watched a concert they played at to a massive audience, Silvia on guitar and Andrea the lead singer! That night we introduced the guys to some Aussie bands – Clare Bowditch and The Cat Empire. It was fun seeing Andrea rock out to a song about our home-town “The Crowd”.

We had a wonderful home-cooked meal with a couple of Andrea and Silvia’s lovely friends and the best strawberries I’ve ever tasted with nothing but a bit of water, lemon and sugar. After dinner we went to the “Gelateria da Bepi”, a gelateria with a very unconventional array of flavours, including basil, carrot, sweet potato, pepper, tomato, rosemary, sage, celery, pumpkin and salmon!

We discussed our plans for Sunday and couldn’t pass up the opportunity of visiting Venice with locals – both Silvia and Andrea went to university there, the lucky things!

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We started out by wandering yet another mediaeval town. My expectations were perhaps a mite high after hearing of it’s popularity and the reception I received at mentioning we were going there on Facebook. As with most major tourist attractions we’ve visited on the trip we were left wondering why this town out of all the mediaeval towns in Italy is so obscenely popular. Location, location, location – it’s within a day-trip from both Siena and Florence. As with any major tourist attraction the maxim “the act of observing changes that which is being observed” – or perhaps more to the point “tourism changes that which is toured” – was evident in San Gimignano. Luckily tourists are extremely easy creatures to be rid of – just walk in any direction they’re not going in, which is pretty much every direction bar one and then like magic you have the place to yourself. So we wandered the back streets a little bit.

It was a beautifully sunny day when we began our hike through the pastural landscape of olive groves and vineyards.

And we were feeling both youthful and vigorous

We came across an interesting, seemingly completely purposeless structure built into the ground that reminded me of something from a fantasy novel or the Amazon jungle.

As the day wore on, the sun that had originally made the day so cheerful, sapped us of our will to go on when it continued uninterrupted by shade and unrelieved by a breeze the whole day long. Like seemingly everything else in Nettle, our water bladder had fallen victim to mould, which had left us with one small bottle of water between the two of us. Of course, we could have bought another water bottle in San Gimignano but every now and then we seem to make these inexplicably stupid decisions, which in hindsight leave us questioning our mental capacities. I think we thought we’d find places to fill up along the way. I’ve definitely come to associate Italy as a place abundant in water fountains, which is great if you’re in a town and not hiking through the countryside where they don’t tend to build public facilities. After running out of water somewhere near the half-way mark of our hike we decided to walk a little bit out of our way to get to the nearest town. We asked the first person we saw for some l’acqua – a middle-aged man picking olives out the front of a property. Of course, he happily obliged. However, it still wasn’t enough water for the two of us and we decided to beef it up with some electrolytes (we didn’t bring enough water but we did bring a full first aid kit) and ration out what was left.

We noticed the following strange phenomenon and wondered if the “anti-light” would show up in a photograph or whether it was just our confused brains telling us the rays of light are dark:

Nope, not an illusion. Anti-light, baby.

We walked back to the point from which we’d diverted from the Lonely Planet directions and took the trail they described (“Buona passaggio“, from a well-wishing olive-picker we passed). Only it wasn’t the trail as it was a dead-end. So we took the only other trail that matched that description, which was also a dead end. We went back and walked along the road a bit further and came to the only other road it could have been. It didn’t match the description in the Lonely Planet guide at all but sure enough that was the one they meant. It turned out to be a short-cut to the very place we had just walked to get water. Having successfully added a few kilometres onto our hike by walking in circles we set off in the right direction for the first time in a good long while.

Stumbling and half-limping, zombie-like, we trudged the rest of the way along the decidedly un-scenic highway back to Nettle. One of our dreams for our travels in Europe is to hike the Alps. Given that we just had our asses kicked by the gentle, rolling hills of Tuscany I think we might have a bit of work to do.

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We’ve been travelling through Europe for seven months now and have developed a sort of astronomically high standard when it comes to things to see and do. Mediaeval hill-top towns with charming, impossibly narrow cobbled streets that would have once had me salivating are now generally met with a lacklustre “it’s nice but we’ve seen better”. Ditto for churches and castles. We went to Assisi and didn’t step foot into a church. When we saw photos of the Siena Duomo, however, the newly found HDR photographers in us couldn’t wait to photograph it and it didn’t disappoint.

One of the first things we noticed about this gothic masterpiece was the cacophony of detail in the facade. We’ve both often wondered at the practicality of such lavish detail that is going to be viewed from a great distance. A sculpture that may have taken months to complete may never be focused on for itself but will just blend into the rest!

We wandered the town before entering the Duomo in order to avoid a school group that was just about to go in. I didn’t find the town itself particularly captivating – there was none of the grandeur of Rome, the beauty of Florence or the charm of tiny villages but the piazza was rather impressive in its vastness.

We spent hours in the Duomo being generally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of photogenic goodness and not wanting to miss a great shot. Truly, we would have had lacklustre photos if not for our new found HDR skills given the bright spots of light coming in through the windows and the lamps with the rest being in shadow. Tripods weren’t allowed even if we had one so my shoulder and both of us holding our breath was the next best thing.

I love that those dudes above look like they’re at a rock concert, fist-pumping the air.

Another thing that’s easy to overdose on during an extended jaunt through Europe is religious themed art, especially in Italy. One of the highlights of the Siena Duomo for me was the library which had massive illuminated vellum hymn books on display. To my delight they were filled with creatures and floral designs that could easily slot into a pop surrealism painting today. This guy put me strongly in mind of an X-Men cartoon:

Awesome afro.

By far my favourite little guys were these dolphin-like creatures that I could totally see in a Greg “Craola” Simkins painting – they’ve even got his trademark pearls!

I felt such a powerful sense of kindred-spiritness through this vast span of time with the whimsical soul who conjured up these bizarre creatures. It’s the first time that I felt I could really relate to a specific person from another time period and it made me reel a little bit at the… I don’t know, interconnectedness of it all, I suppose. You can’t get much more modern than pop surrealism in the art world. Like the Impressionists and the Salon, pop surrealism artists are still largely unaccepted by mainstream galleries: That’s how new it is. Yet, here’s some dude illuminating hymn books with these imaginary slightly creepy creatures almost 600 years ago that could be published in the funkadelic Hi-Fructose magazine today. This to me, was much more interesting than seeing an umpteenth Madonna and baby Jesus.

After spending some time pouring over the books Mike asked me if I’d looked up yet.

Thank goodness for zoom lenses and digital SLRs because it turned out there were more creepy creature goodies all the way up there getting lost in the “more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-ness”.

We probably could have stayed and spent another hour or two photographing the cathedral but we were racing daylight so we headed off at peak hour, as usual, for our home for the night – a sosta in the delightfully named town of Poggibonsi.

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