It’s interesting reading through the first blog entry after we got Nettle — particularly, the comparatively low cost of fuel (we pay $25 AUD per 100kms now, as opposed to $20 then), and our wildly optimistic assumptions about using laptops on our leisure battery!

We’ve come a really long way, and learned heaps about living in a motorhome. With the various minor hiccups we’ve encountered along the way, I feel like I’m getting familiar with many of Nettle’s different systems and feel increasingly confident about DIY-ism. The originally dreaded task of emptying the cassette is now effortless, and something I do without thinking now. We (or rather, I) also learned very quickly at the beginning about how to remain calm in the face of navigation hiccups — put aside the anxiety and just go with it!

Speaking of navigation hiccups and driving anxiety, I have to say, I’ve also become a dramatically better large-vehicle driver. After some insanely tiny tiny Italian streets, we’re rather calm about tight spaces now, and find ourselves chuckling about the “wussy” English drivers slowing to a crawl to pass us on laneways when I probably would’ve just happily barrelled through.

As we were discussing just the other day, it’s amazing how much Nettle’s just become our home. We were originally envisioning renting for a while, maybe over winter, to get a break from the tight living quarters — aside from rent-free house-sitting, now we wouldn’t dream of it! She’s our home, and what’s more, she’s homely! We love her dearly.

So, thanks for looking after us for a year, Nettle!

So, we set off from Bath to do the four-or-so hour drive back “home”, stopping via a hardware store where (we think) we successfully solved our bed-condensation issue, with a couple of cheap camping mats!

About half-way there, just before Plymouth, my iPhone’s GPS was behaving a bit oddly, as happens from time to time lately, so I rebooted it, and it never came back to life! As it’s our navigation system, I pulled over by the road, pulled out the laptop and tried to coax it back to life, with no success. As a last resort I pulled out my old iPhone, which I keep around for testing, and fired it up, to find its GPS wasn’t working any more! Eek!

Katherine was, in the meantime, rather calm about all this, and in the end her suggested approach — slumming it along with everyone else and following road signs — panned out. Who knew?

So we pulled up in now-familiar Threemilestone, Truro and got down to the rather lengthy business of catching up on our blog and photo-processing.

There was a happy ending to the iPhone hiccup too — I discovered Apple’s online service request facility, ordered a repair, and a box arrived the following day for me to post the sick iPhone off in; two days later, I had a brand new iPhone arrive at the door! Impressive customer service, there.

And now, back to programming!

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!

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.

We put on our wet weather gear, and headed out into the afternoon. Fairly quickly we were grateful that we’d left our bikes — the path we took climbed some rather significant slopes, so our ride would’ve been primarily bike-pushing. As it was, we ambled along the lane, bordered by fields with views out over the surrounding hills and valleys, took a turn along the public bridleway, met some curious Exmoor ponies along the way, and made our gradual way back to the nearby village and back along the main road home.

We loved the way the roots of this tree actually made up the boundary between fields:

We stayed one more night at the CL in Exmoor, then headed off down the little country lanes, towards Bath.

We’re headed up to Bath to visit some old friends of Katherine who are over from Australia for a few months of travel; we’ll see a couple of the sights with them while they’re here, and then get back to work!

Nettle remembered how to go splendidly, and we set off down the little country lane we’re so used to riding our bikes down while Noia the GPS navigator was getting her act together. The novelty was back (not that it ever truly disappears!) and it was great fun to be driving this enormous vehicle around. We drove up amongst gently rolling green hills with a patchwork of fields in many shades of green, and followed Noia’s directions towards our first destination: Tintagel (which we learned was “tin-TAA-gel”, not “TIN-tah-ghel”, and most certainly not “tin-taggle”), which was recommended to us by our good friends Tara and Tyler.

On our way there, we narrowly avoided getting stuck down an ever-narrowing road, but were luckily turned back by a friendly local, with assistance turning around from another local, who let us into her field to turn.

We made it there, parked in a sloping grassy field marked out as a car park, and wandered down a little pathway heading across some fields and signposted towards the cliffs and the castle, and requesting care as there were badger homes nearby that wanted protecting. There was a mother with her somewhat obnoxious-seeming ten-ish year old boy who was complaining loudly about something-or-other, and we shook our heads judgementally about “UK children”. Get off my lawn, you kids.

Tintagel is, as the informational signage at the site proudly proclaims, the legendary site of King Arthur’s birth. Legendary is the key word here of course — it’s only because a monk named Geoffrey of Monmouth decided to make Tintagel the birthplace of Arthur while reinventing the story that it’s considered as such! The power of the story…

A short documentary playing at the entrance explained the several different forms the King Arthur legend has taken throughout the years, and how it had been “reinvented” periodically to suit the era.

We walked through the churchyard of an old church and towards the cliffs, getting our first proper glimpse of the coastline, and gasped — it was beautiful, and completely reminiscent of the Causeway Coast in Ireland! Bright green fields descending to a smoothly-rounded coast edge, crinkled in parts, and a rocky edge meeting the startlingly blue sea. The vision was completed by dramatically swirling white clouds across the blue sky. The path led along the cliffs, sided by tall grasses dotted with colourful flowers in yellow and purple.

We drew alongside the outcrop of land that Tintagel castle once stood on, rising precipitously from the blue water with jagged, rocky cliffs, and squatting roundly like a bar of soap. A bridge connected it to the mainland, with a zig-zagging path that led up and around the low ruins. After approaching the start of the bridge and noticing the hefty admission price, we balked and did an about-face, choosing to wander the surrounding coastline instead of going for a close-up look at the ruins. It was all very beautiful and what we now think of as “Ireland-esque”.

Bellies rumbling, we took the hedge-lined path teeming with butterflies towards the village, for a couple of pasties and tea/scones in (of course) King Arthur’s Bistro, beside King Arthur’s Bookshop and King Arthur’s Car Park. That guy has it all.

Hunger nicely satiated, we ambled up the street past some very charming rickety old stone cottages and the old post office, roof bulging and dipping whimsically along its length. Back to Nettle, grinning at the enthusiastic collie sprinting around the field, tongue lolling, we set off again towards Exmoor National Park.

After a brief stop-in at a supermarket to stock up on supplies (no flour-and-water pancakes for us, no!) we turned onto the lovely little country road that led to our destination through more patchwork fields, bordered by hedges full of those great purple flowers — the view out the window looked like a painting, perfectly aesthetically arranged. I jumped out and hung off Nettle’s roof to snap a few pictures, then we arrived at the CL that would be home for the next day while we did a little exploring of the national park.

This is a beautiful country!

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?

“”Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — 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.

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!

England! Ah, England.

Our first stop, via an unsuccessful initial attempt to book into a site for a few days, was the local big Tesco Extra supermarket. Words simply can’t express our excitement at the range of things we found in that cornucopia of plenty — one of the benefits of being in a multicultural society: There were bagels and muffins, chai tea, the great curry powder we’d missed, cider, coconut milk and Thai curry paste, peanut butter (even Vegemite, to our delight!), and most exciting of all, cheddar cheese. Good times.

Stocked up and excited about the meals to come, we found ourselves an available CL site (basically a field with the bare basic facilities for campers) in a tiny little village delightfully named “Wootton”. Our drive there involved wending our way along a little country lane past a vast bright yellow canola field, through cool, shady woods, past fields of deep green grass and sheep, with views over the gentle hills in all hues of green. What a beautiful country.

The CL (how we’ve missed these!) was a grassy field, beside a paddock of sheep and little adorable frolicking lambs. We parked with a view out our main window over the lambs — “lamb view”, many times better than TV or sea view — and watched them chase each other around, running and springing, as the ewes patiently abided the lambs’ aggressive lunges at their undercarriage for milk.

Our stay began at about a week or two, then rapidly lengthened to almost a month. While pondering our finances, and running some numbers, we initially thought that our finances were going to last only another 8 months! With that fearsome possibility, we decided it was as good a time as ever to stop travelling for a while, and focus on developing some products and getting a more steady income stream established. Then, I realised I’d not incorporated current earnings from app sales, after which it became clear we had enough money to last us three years. Certainly not breaking even and saving money yet, but that’s quite a substantial difference!

Despite that realisation, however, we’d become rather attached to the idea of stopping for a while and having a break from travelling. We get an equal amount of joy from creating as we do from travelling, and the thought of devoting all of our time to it was quite appealing.

The decision carried ramifications for our previously planned schedule — three months in the UK, then back to Europe — so, we did a little re-thinking of our plans. In theory, at least, time isn’t a particularly important factor; as far as we know, even when our 2 year UK visa expires, we still have the Schengen visa available for 3 months out of every 6, and the remaining three months can hopefully be spent in the UK on a tourist visa, or perhaps even in an eastern-European country. So, we fairly relaxedly decided to postpone our prior plans and spend a bit longer in the UK.

We set up shop in Wootton, working at our laptops from about 10 or 11 in the morning to around midnight. I was steadily redesigning the interface for my new app, developing a beautiful vintage appearance with Katherine’s guidance. Along the way, we realised just how much work the non-programming aspects of the project really are — the social networking, research, assorted PR and marketing activities. The likelihood of taking the time to do it properly, and ever actually releasing a product seemed slim, so along the way, Katherine decided to lend a hand, devoting the time she’d been spending on setting up her art business to helping me get Cartographer released. I was really touched by the faith that she put in my work and the generosity in giving up that valuable time. I love that girl!

Aside from “working”, we had a bunch of errands to complete. Our bed, badly prone to condensation, had developed a veritable forest of black mould which had rotted away some of the base — we were sleeping in the “guest bedroom” in the meantime. So, over the course of about two or three weeks, we found a carpenter who was happy to cut a new piece of plywood to size, sourced an appropriately sized piece of ply (not an easy task, given that the standard sheet size was too small!), dismantled the bed and delivered the new plywood and the old base as a template, found an upholsterer and sourced some vinyl to replace the covering, transported the newly cut base to the upholsterer and painstakingly reassembled the beautiful new creation. A vast amount of work, but we’re very pleased with the result — and are taking new measures to make sure we never have to do that again! One side-effect of the process was that it took us a long time to trust that the bed wouldn’t collapse under us, after seeing how it was constructed — just 25-or-so screws around the outside. The edges of the base don’t even rest on the frame — they’re screwed onto it from underneath! Ignorance was bliss, there!

Along the way we also took Nettle in to have her wheel alignment fixed up (which ultimately made no difference to her gentle rightward drift — she just likes to go right, is all), fix our leaky tire, and spent a truly vast amount of money on some entirely insignificant minutiae (very, very slightly wobbly headlight, and something about a fog light on the wrong side) getting Nettle’s MOT (the annual registration/checkup) done for the year. Whew. Oh, and I finally got a haircut!

We paid a visit to the rather charming town of Canterbury, and spent a while wandering its streets shopping (his and hers: I got my first hands-on with an iPad, which I was rather besotted by, and Katherine found some much-needed shoes). I got some cool pictures of the Cathedral and the Christ Church gate, and the Old Weavers’ House, dated 1500 AD!

So, we wrote code, designed interfaces and got the marketing ball rolling. The lambs played and napped out the window; we attempted to assist every now and then when one of them got a head stuck in the fence. At around the same time every day, they’d all start making a huge racket (we called it “baa o’clock”), and sure enough, a minute later a car would pull up and the farmer would bring some pellets, wrestle a sheep or two to give it an immunisation, and bring a little black-faced lamb out for its daily bottle, which it would attack with glee. The local pheasant, who we named Monsieur Squark-and-Flap after his routine and his rather uppity bearing, would roam around and, well, squark and flap. Grey squirrels and rabbits were our other entertainment while the work continued.

It’s a good life.

• Sterling Power Products: What is the best battery to use for an auxiliary charging system? Very well-argued discussion on leisure batteries, cutting through the marketing-speak
• GPS POI Data Directory – Free POI Files – GPS POI Data Many, many quality POI databases for a wide variety of things, including camping and LPG filling stations. Requires a small ($10 or thereabouts) registration fee to download.
• Touring and Tenting -> Download Manager -> Mapping Aids -> italian sosta’s poi’s for sat nav’s A very good POI database for Italian sostas
• Links and Downloads Manager – MFC Google Earth Campsite Finder – My Favourite Campsite Camping POI databases for UK/Europe
• PoiGPS – Punti di Interesse per Navigatori Satellitari – Downloads Site with many Italian POI databases, including aree attrezzate, camping and camper service facilities.

The nearby hillsides became, if not less precipitous, more grassy, with little brown huts sprinkled liberally around. We wound our way down a couple of switchbacks in the road and through a beautiful pass lined with pine trees, nearby rocky peaks wreathed in cloud. The road wound along the hillside above a deep valley, a bright blue river snaking through it. We stopped briefly at a supermarket we came across to stock up on supplies.

The road continued to wind through the mountains, affording us some rather spectacular views of misty/snowy peaks. At one point, the road passed by a shallow and crystal-clear lake of brilliant blue. The mountains gradually decreased in size, and very suddenly we were on a motorway, and Noia the navigator was displaying the welcome screen for Germany!

Motorway driving is rarely anything but tedium, and today was no different; we drove until we’d had enough, and on a hunch I pointed Noia towards a green patch on the map that displayed a parking symbol within. Sure enough, we’d found a very pretty forest, interspersed with green fields, and a little parking area for walkers. We pulled up, and took the opportunity to take a walk in the intensely green woods — the stuff of fairy-tales.

For the next day, we’d identified part of a driving tour of the Mosel Valey that sounded promising, to the west and very near to our route. We headed that way, towards the Rhone-side town of Bingen am Rhein, arriving relatively late in the day.

After the success of the last night’s camp, I targeted Noia at a road in a large green patch beside the town, little realising at the time that the road in question was barely a footpath through the woods. So, we turned down this little road that got smaller and smaller, to our consternation, and had a slightly worrisome yet relatively pleasant drive through the woods, feeling a little sheepish as we drove past walkers on the track above. (Katherine: Mike handled this with remarkable poise)

We came out beside a little pub, and decided to pull up in the nearby car-park (also the car park for walkers) for the night. With Katherine’s high hopes for a schnitzel, we visited the pub, but found the restaurant closed. Still, we found a seat in the dimly-lit lounge, various animal heads hanging grotesquely from the walls — all seemed very “German pub”-esque — and had a few beers (Veltins, which the barman recommended and which we enjoyed immensely).

Rather desperate to fill up with water, the next morning we set out along the Rhone hoping to spot a caravan park or similar that we could drop into. Sure enough, Katherine spotted one a little distance down the road, and we negotiated our way under the railway line that ran alongside the river, along the narrow little lane, bordered by bright green rows of vines beside the river, and pulled in. The woman in charge was very friendly and happy for us to use the facilities; she was bustling about on various errands as we filled up, and kept making rather endearing “I’m run off my feet” huffy sighs with lots of exclamations in German, to which I grinned and nodded sympathetically.

While Katherine was filling the tank, she heard a hissing, and realised that the front left tyre was leaking air from the valve — just like what happened to us in Arezzo! Uh-oh. I poked at the valve until the hissing stopped, and we deemed it drivable, for now, as the pressure seemed to be relatively normal still. Hoping to find a tyre service facility like last time, we drove for a little while keeping our eyes open, but the one possibility was shut, whereupon we realised it was Sunday. I checked and topped-up the tire pressure at a petrol station, and we hit the motorway, hoping that it would last us until we could get it fixed.

When we decided to pick a town randomly to visit for lunch, the steering felt suddenly very odd, and sure enough, the tyre was down again. We pulled into a petrol station and decided it was time to put the spare tyre on. It’d been a while and my memory was fuzzy (I work with computers, not cars!), but Nettle’s manual, albeit in German, seemed to have all I needed. Out came the jack, and I wrestled the slipping handle until the wheel was sufficiently off the ground, and started on the wheel nuts (probably should’ve done that the other way around, but oh, well). I remembered something about European threads being the opposite to ours — probably the same phenomenon that makes water swirl the opposite way down drains, I guess — and the manual confirmed that clockwise was the way to undo them, so I laboured away, trying everything I could think of to loosen them. No luck, and I was scratching my head wondering what to do next, when a friendly German voice behind us announced the arrival of our saviours for the day. He was a mechanic, amazingly, and his wife spoke English, so we were in excellent hands — apparently, as she told Katherine, he rescues people like this quite frequently. Our benefactors took command, and I held my foot on the brake while he undid the nuts — anti-clockwise, of course — by jumping on the spanner’s handle. Within a couple of minutes, the new wheel was on, and we were good to go. We thanked them profusely. How lucky we are. (Katherine: We had a giggle at Mike’s masculinity taking a bit of a hit, especially given the super buffness of the mechanic in question. He still gets man points for getting the wheel off the ground though. I had an “I’ve watched too much Dexter moment” when I quietly wondered to myself if this guy has a “dark passenger” which he satiates by going around playing the good samaritan but actually sabotaging vehicles and sending their startled drivers to an untimely – and untraceable – death). We went and had a couple of schnitzels at a nearby pub. We were amused in the pub to see a race on the TV, and then realised that it was happening just around the corner, at the Nürburgring. Cool! We felt unreasonably chuffed at having had beer and chicken schnitzel in Germany. Our German experience is complete – at least this time around. (Katherine again: obviously our tire didn’t fall off sending us to an untimely startled death. Sorry for my uncharitable thoughts good Samaritan German guy).

So, with a fair bit of time lost, we decided to just hit the autobahn again, and skip the driving tour this time — how exciting, the prospect of having a “next time”! We crossed over the border into the Netherlands, to our surprise, as we don’t tend to do much map-gazing lately — navigation is more Noia’s realm now, as she’s been so great, we trust her to get us where we want to go. Within a few hours, we passed into Belgium. Belgium!

We headed into the city of Hasselt, where a friend, Kris, lives, who I’d met a year or so before through a WordPress theme I wrote. We’d arranged to pay a visit, so we found a park at a spot Kris had recommended, in the car park of a sports oval already populated with a few campers, reassuringly, and set out on foot to find him.

About twenty minutes later, we set out on foot the right way, as I sheepishly realised I’d directed us in precisely the wrong direction… twice. We walked along a busy, noisy road (Ah yes… This is why we’re not big city fans!), then towards the quieter town’s centre. We made our way under the train station and found Kris’s street on the other side, with lots of imposing brick houses lining the road. We greeted Kris (I experimented on him with some Dutch — “goede middag”), and he invited us in for a moment before we all ventured out into the evening. Kris took us on a walk around the inner streets of the town, and showed us a few of the sights (greeted a few very punk-band-esque friends of his that we encountered along the way), then we dropped in on the local Irish pub briefly — quite funny hearing Irish accents here. We asked for a recommendation from the bartender for a Belgium beer to try and ended up with an interesting beverage that tasted a bit like honey… and beer. We wandered through Hasselt (via the best veggie burger I think I’ve ever had), through the city’s impressive park, while we talked companionably. I was amazed with the depth of Kris’s knowledge of his town, and the amount of awareness and involvement he has in its community and local politics — a local council member in the making, there.

We decided to spend the night in Hasselt, and spent the next morning with a couple of errands — laundry, a little shopping; Katherine was excited to find a well-stocked art supplies shop and basically moved in for a while.

Then we hit the road again, and headed onwards; we left Belgium and entered France, finally ending up in Dunkerque. We stayed the night at the huge and rather fancy municipal caravan park, in preparation for our departure on the ferry the next day, to Dover. Quite fun to be speaking French again.

So with some wistful thoughts, and looking forward to coming back to spend some time getting to know Andrea, Silvia and their friends better, we set off northward. As, it turned out, into something resembling the apocalypse. Dark, intimidating clouds loomed in front of us as we approached, with some excitement, the first foothills of the Dolomites (the Italian Alps). The sky reminded us of the skyscape one sees in tornado movies, writhing menacingly as they curled off the mountains.

It added a fantastic ambiance to the scene as we followed the road into a narrow river valley between two steep-sided mountains, and dusk closed in around us. Then, the rain started, and it meant business: We slowed to a crawl as the downpour reduced visibility to almost zero – “I… guess the road’s out there somewhere”. The hail threatened to crack the windscreen, it came down so hard. Wow!

It eventually abated and we sped up again, heading out into a suddenly lighter day, like winding back the clock a few hours. We got an SMS from Andrea – “What the…Are you ok?”; “I’ve just seen the end of the world from my bike, that was exciting and wet”. We just hope he only saw it, rather than actually experienced it on a bike — that sounds not so dissimilar to drowning!

We drove on through the mountains, following the autostrada, while Katherine read out a heartwarming email we’d just received from Andrea, which mirrored our own excitement and gratefulness at having met. Warm fuzzies well established, we grinned out at the beautiful world around us and marvelled at our blessings.

We drove past vast fields of vines, and found a convenient lay-by off a relatively quiet road to park for the night, beside a wide, slow river and overlooked by a high rocky cliff topped with dense green forest, a little steam hurling itself into the air above us.

The next day we set out on foot to explore this exciting new world, and followed the river while we admired the rocky mountains surrounding us, every remotely-horizontal surface festooned with rich green plant life. It was sunny and warm and we were feeling good!

We drove onward and upwards as the scenery changed further. Lots of bright green fields of vines and increasingly amazing mountains, topped with snow (I’ll never get tired of snow-capped mountains. That’s the stuff, right there.). Very quickly, we noticed that the road signs all had Germanic names, and soon after we were amazed to notice the marked difference in architecture. Suddenly the roofs of houses and other buildings were sharply angled, and the village churches had pointy, colourful steeples. Roofs were no longer orange-coloured, but a deep brown, and much more deep wooden hues were apparent.

We were in another country! But, a glance at the map showed us we were wrong — it was going to be two more days of driving before we were out of Italy. We mused to ourselves that whoever had been tasked to draw the country boundaries had probably been bumped or slipped, and the border skewed south accidentally. They probably just hoped no-one would notice. We noticed, imaginary map guy! I was baffled further when Nettle’s lunchtime came (she’s a thirsty girl sometimes!) and I filled up at a petrol station, and the attendant spoke German! Okay, that’s fine — I threw in a “Danke!” for good measure.

A long but enjoyable drive led us eventually into a little town climbing the side of a hill — not entirely deliberately, but one of Noia’s more quirky routes – she likes it scenic. (Noia is our anthropomorphised Navigon GPS navigator app, short for “paranoia” and named for her inordinately cautious disposition; “beware” every time I go a fraction over the speed limit, or when she thinks the limit is less than it really is; “In 500 metres, take the second exit from the roundabout; beware”, “beware: traffic control”). It got a tad narrow, but we made it through with no drama, and discovered to our delight a car park on the other side that seemed a reasonable place to stop for the day — we were certainly ready for it. There was even a great view of the surrounding hillside.

We wandered back on foot the way we’d come, with the hopes of visiting a little supermarket we’d passed. It turned out to be closed, but we walked around the town anyway, intrigued by its…Austrian-ness!

Back at Nettle, we were investigating the most level and out-of-the-way place to stop for the night, when we discovered a sign prohibiting overnight parking! Oh, how we wished we could’ve un-seen that sign, but the cat was out of the bag, and our hopes of settling in for the evening were temporarily dashed. Lesson learned: Don’t look around too much!

So, dusk rapidly approaching, we set off again, following the road that zig-zagged up a long, gentle sloping mountainside dotted with wind turbines and delightful little brooks lined with flowers. Before long, Katherine spotted a park labelled “Camper”, to our delight, and I executed a speedy across-road 6 point turn, and we pulled in — it was a roadside café car park, kind enough to offer a place for campers to stop for the night. We made sure the café folks were happy with us being there (and scored a couple of pairs of warm woolen slippers, which totally look like bear feet), and happily stopped for the night, with a view out over the long grassy downhill slope we’d climbed, and surrounding snowy and misty mountains.

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.

Whilst crossing the lagoon on the train and watching the surreal city approach, I got laughed at for eagerly pulling out Google Earth on the iPhone for an additional birds-eye view and showing it to Katherine — “How cool does this look!” — evoking the response that it also looked pretty cool out the window (she said bemusedly that I was missing it because I had my head buried in my iPhone). Andrea laughed knowingly, saying that he does exactly the same thing. We emerged from the train station onto the bustling streets of Venice. Andrea and Silvia took us up and over Ponte degri Scalzi, the bridge crossing the main canal, and proceeded to lead us through a warren of tiny streets, frequently crossing picturesque little bridges over narrow canals lined with boats.

It was very difficult to visualise the city as the collection of little islands that it is — it seemed decidedly more like a solid landmass interspersed by canals! As Katherine answered when asked later that night what she thought of Venice, “I thought there’d be more water”. It was quite cool to think that we were crossing between islands when we passed over those little bridges though. Katherine later remarked on the unusual quantity of graffiti (something I blithely failed to notice), noting that perhaps tagging a place so astronomically famous is quite the ego trip!

A big trade in Venice was in exotic carnival masks — there were lots of little shops selling them, representing a variety of Commedia dell’arte characters. These had Katherine feeling inspired, especially when she spotted the unpainted plaster ones you can buy and decorate yourself.

As we walked, Andrea pointed out one of the university buildings nestled amongst the narrow streets and canals, and introduced us to a great Italian word that we haven’t really been able to find an English version of: Simpatico, which Andrea and Silvia described as meaning something like funny, friendly; basically a word describing someone who’s good company, of pleasant character and who puts one in the mood they’re in just by being with them. (Admittedly, if said about a woman however, it means she has a nice personality but isn’t much to look at, as in “she has a great personality, but…“). It seemed apt, being introduced to the word by those two simpatici.

Andrea was explaining the verb ‘andare’ to me (to go), and a guy passed us and made a friendly comment to Andrea in Italian — something about giving the Americans language lessons and “Americani non parlano Italiano”. We stopped to talk for a moment; he asked us where we were from (actually, Australia!), and our conversation moved from there. and it turned out that Ben was an American who’d just kinda settled in Venice for a few months and had landed some sort of architect internship there – not a bad gig! He looked entirely Italian, and his Italian seemed pretty solid, so I was surprised when he switched to English to talk to all four of us. He was a friendly sort, and brainstormed with us about what to show his visiting mother later that day, given that Andrea and Silvia were being tour guides for the day, as well. When we parted ways with Ben, Andrea turned to us and explained “he is simpatico”.

Andrea grabbed simpatico Ben’s contact details, and we pressed on to Piazza San Marco, one of the main tourist draws of Venice. It was funny, our first visit there with Andrea and Silvia with the pressing hoards of other visitors had us almost entirely unaware of the square’s charms — it was difficult to appreciate the basilica with most of it covered with scaffolding, and the press of people left little breathing-room to look around.

Poor Silvia was feeling pretty drained by this point — our plans to have locals show us around had inadvertently resulted in us dragging a pregnant woman around Venice — sorry Silvia! With Silvia desperately in need of sustenance and a rest we sat down by the water and talked for a while, then pressed on and stopped for lunch at a little pizza cafe way off the beaten track (which made it consequently quite tasty, and very cheap!).

Some more ambling around back-streets and we came across a gelato shop — Andrea and Silvia had two rounds, so I suppose that must be high praise indeed. They laughed at our restraint (only one helping, pah!). We discovered later that the gelateria was listed in our travel guide: Quite a validation for Lonely Planet recommendations right there!

We jumped back on the train and made our way to Andrea and Silvia’s, in Padova. All four of us napped on the journey back (after plodding our way around most of Venice!), although not before Andrea and Silvia had to endure the apparently maddeningly inane chatter of two Italian women in the seats near us; the one benefit to not speaking Italian! We hung around on the couch for a while, and I pulled up an impressive recording on YouTube of Andrea and Silvia’s old band, “K”, playing a gig to a huge crowd.

Paolo and Vivian (Vivienne? Forgive me if I’m wrong on the names, Paolovigo!) had kindly invited us around for dinner, so the four of us joined them at “the cube”, their very Nordic-styled, gleaming house, along with Zage and his partner, and Paolo’s brother Robert and his girlfriend Alice. We chatted with Alice for a while, who spoke excellent English, and then gathered around as Paola and Vivian served up some absolutely awesome home-made pizza. We were startled when out came the shredded horse-meat — really, guys?

At the end of a really enjoyable evening with our new simpatici friends, Andrea and Silvia drove us back to “Monsangeles” (an in-joke name for Monselice that they couldn’t actually remember the origins of!). On the way we introduced them to one more favourite Aussie band, Powderfinger, which went down very well. We said a warm farewell, and promised that we would be back to pester them again — for longer, next time, and hopefully in Italian! Andrea gave us some Italian comic books to practise with – that’s how he learnt English! We’ve got no excuse now.

We’re really excited to have met them — for sure, they’re ‘our people’ — and we can’t wait to be back.