Cornwall

I was making plans with a friend who’s coming over to Europe recently and told her of our plans to be in the Alps this autumn and that she should join us. I cautiously added that our plans have a tendency to change without notice and beyond all recognition, usually within a couple of weeks of having made them. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later our plans saw us staying in the UK for 9 months, which has more recently threatened to become a year! Our recent shift in priorities to slower travel and making A Tasty Pixel a viable business has turned our “slow travel” into “molasses-like ooze” travel.

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?

Penne, forever Penne

Parked in Chieti the morning after the procession, we spent a long time trying to find a place to spend a few days, cheap with electricity and in an area with 3G. This turned out to be a bit tricky and frustrating (especially as our electrical power dwindled away — looks like our 118 amp hour leisure battery is dying already!), but we got there in the end, and found an agriturismo in the nearby town of Penne.

The drive there was delightful — kinda like driving through a painting, along roads lined with bright green grass, new flowers and trees, amongst rolling emerald hills, beautiful little hill towns perched on the slopes. It felt very spring-like and warm.

When we arrived at the agriturismo, we were very pleased: It was beautiful, and we were perched right amongst that beautiful scenery. The owners were quite friendly (although our meagre Italian had only the basics of communication covered), and we had 3G. Perfect.

We were originally planning to stay for four days. That turned into five, then into a week, and then about ten days. I worked heaps on Cartographer, my upcoming iPhone app which is coming along very nicely. Katherine started an online drawing course. Oh, and she cut my hair, an exercise that ended up taking all afternoon (we were both a bit sunburnt by the end, by sitting outside!). It’s a big improvement, although there’s a bit more to do — hopefully it’ll get faster! So, another creative skill acquired!

We’ve both been interested in HDR photography, and made the plunge, buying a $100 piece of software for HDR processing called Photomatix. I spent a day or two playing, coming up with some very fun results (some of which were included in the last entry on Chieti). I was reminded of the “bevel” effect of old, applying it to everything until it became extremely tacky. The “painterly”, surrealistic look of the resulting photos appeal greatly to both our aesthetics, but I suspect it probably will go out of fashion sooner or later. Until then though, we’ll enjoy the grunge look, and afterwards will benefit from the more realistic processing that is pure HDR (without the “detail enhancement” that gives it that cool look).

Katherine totally impressed me by drawing up some sketches for Cartographer’s icon which are absolutely brilliant. I don’t get much enjoyment from that process, given that I’m hopeless at drawing and graphic design in general, and just find myself getting frustrated. What Katherine came up with was easily as good or better than a result I would’ve expected from hiring a pro designer, so I was thrilled. What a team!

Our ventures outside Nettle were made interesting by the rambunctious presence of two enormous German shepherds who weren’t aware they were no longer puppies. It really is a little intimidating hearing the galloping of two monsters closing rapidly behind you, then teeth closing ‘playfully’ around your hand!

The night before our planned departure, we dined at the restaurant, where they served home-cooked meals made of entirely organic local produce. We went at the same time as a friendly Swiss-German couple who had arrived for the night in their motorhome. Dinner was delicious, lots of little successive courses — antipasti to start (I even tried the salami — it’s a bit of a big thing around here), then a simple tomato pasta. Our host demonstrated the pasta making process, bringing out a device that looked a bit like one of those many-stringed Indian instruments, that the pasta dough is pressed through with a rolling pin. Then, tasty little pastry-covered tart things with mushroom, followed by stuffed zucchini, I think, with lots of cheese; salad on the side of little slices of beef, then finally a very tasty ice-cream desert with little bits of meringue.

We were all set to go after about ten days — to do the Cascate Della Volpara walk from Umito, then a driving tour around Monti Sibillini — until on the day of our departure, on a whim we checked the weather report and discovered a rather bleak outlook with rain and snow on its way. Oh, dear!

A little agonising later, and we decided to wait it out here. A little sheepishly, I explained to our hosts that we’d be staying a bit longer.

On the morning of our next departure, I happened to stumble across a webcam in a town near where we were headed for the walk, and found it in snow! I was expecting the snow level to be higher, but as it was, we couldn’t risk driving on a slippery road in Nettle! More agonising, and we decided there was nothing for it but to abort our plans and head onwards. The only thing was, we hadn’t done the necessary travel research, so — another night in Penne. I felt quite silly explaining again why we weren’t leaving, but they were very understanding and laughed along with me as I explained in memorised Italian spewed out of Google Translator.

Katherine near killed herself fighting against oddly slow internet and a sluggish laptop, researching our next moves, while I alternated with reading through our Lonely Planet guide and working on Cartographer. So, finally, we finished it all off today and finally made it up the driveway and onwards!

New territory!

Our drive took us along winding roads through spectacularly beautiful landscapes: More emerald hills dotted with villas and olive trees, along roads lined with birch trees (or were they beech? ash?), some of which seemed to think it was autumn and were a lovely golden colour (we hoped it’d catch on).

As evening crept towards us, we started looking out for a place to park for the night, and after not finding anything along our route, turned down a side road, and drove down it for ten or fifteen minutes — we found a few lousy options, but decided to press on in the hopes of finding something better. After another twenty minutes or so, Katherine spotted a sign pointing to a lake — always promising — and we followed it and found a spot by the road overlooking a rather impressive dam wall. We hung around on the couch for a while, resting after the long drive, then Katherine set about cooking dinner while I caught up on some blogging.

It’s good to be on the move again!