2 Years of Constant Travel

July 19th is a major milestone for us; this is the day we left home and became traveling nomads. I was looking back at last year’s anniversary postcard to help me write this one. Much is similar (the new status quo), but a lot has changed too. This year I can no longer brag that we have not lost a sock. We have lost one (it is somewhere in that campervan). But also the socks we brought from the US are wearing thin and I have lost several to holes. We are going to need to find an alternate source for socks besides Costco. No fear, they have socks here (wherever “here” happens to be). I also claimed Last year “No camping and no overnights in train or bus stations, or airports.”  Can’t say that anymore. We have camped now: regular sleeping bag camping and also 35 days in the motor home (with a 7 day break in an AirB&B in the middle, so 28 days/nights in the campervan). And we made one overnight flight from England to Brisbane, Australia with a late night stopover I will have to call an overnight in an airport. 26 hours plus losing a calendar day, there must have been two overnights in there somewhere.

We covered some miles (kilometres) and ticked off a lot of countries in the first half of the year, much less so since the wrench in the mechanism called Covid. We have flown a lot more this year. We’ve experienced once or twice the phenomenon of chasing the sunset and getting to see the same sunset occur more than once. Very cool! You may have noticed I am obsessed with the sunrise and sunset these days. We have also broken with our rule of avoiding driving as much as possible. Mostly a Covid factor and also the nature of New Zealand, we need a car (or caravan). 

Transportation: 54,933 km of travel by way of ferries, bus, plane, a few trains, car, caravan, camel (that’s a stretch, we took a camel ride that ended where it started about a half hour later). Bike, kayak and hiked (this is true, there was some point to point moving assisted by a tour operator).

Countries visited: Only 8, and that’s counting England and Scotland separately. Four were returns for house sitting. Some new cities in there, but return countries. At least 38 cities, without counting the tours we took that visited a different city every day. We took a 5-day one in  Scotland, 6 days in Tasmania, 8 days in Australia, and a 22 day in New Zealand. 

Last July 19 we were in Montenegro, Then Spain: Barcelona, Valencia, Seville (meeting friends the Woods/Meyer family). Then Edinborough, jumping off on a 3 week Scottish isle tour that included a long stop in Islay for Mark’s peaty whisky. Then house sit in Oxfordshire, Then a month house sit in Greece, a stop over in Morocco (to gather some days out of the Schengen) and back to our Andalucian villa house sit (a return for us)  for a month, Then unexpectedly back to Oxfordshire to take care of the Thatched Barn and those wonderful pets again. From there we flew to Australia, prompted by a house sit that turned into two. We took fabulous tours around most of the Middle and Eastern quadrants of Australia, including Tasmania, before taking a month-long diversion to New Zealand which is now 5 months and counting. Our rushed 22 day tour ended just before the pandemic took off. And we stayed. So here in New Zealand we have had the equivalent of four different vacations: the adventure tour; sitting in one beautiful place for 7 weeks of lockdown; 35 day campervan trip. And now we are continuing to travel air B&B to air B&B, to all the tourist spots and lots of locally known, but off the international tourist track, locations on the South island. When we leave here, we will have experienced all four seasons in New Zealand. Whew!

Housesits:

• Peggy (bull Mastif) and Tommy (choc lab), George, Ravi and Henry (cats) in Oxfordshire. We spent 6 weeks with them over two stints.
• 6 cats in Salamina Greece. 7 by the time we left, we adopted one: LG (little Girl), Cuckoo, Slick, Dingo, Kleftra – means theif, Miss Priss, and Troubles (the little one we adapted)
• Inca and Indy (lurchers), El Cid, Luqua, and Zephyr (horses) and an outdoor working cat named Shakespeare. This house is starting to feel like home. We have been there twice with more planned. We’ve made friends there. And found doctors, dentist and hair stylist we like.
• Hurley an American Bull dog who liked to lick cane toads. In Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia.
• Sarge (pointer) and Hunter (Labrador) in Melbourne Australia

We made lifelong friends, both human and animal, through all these house sits. It remains our favorite part of this journey. 

The biggest challenges of this trip are the mundane tasks. Buying things: both food and other needs. Names of things and the way people live are different, so there is a language barrier sometimes you do not expect. Zucchinis are courgettes, Baking powder is non existent because flour comes self-rising (I think that means it contains baking soda already). We try to eat what the locals eat; trying to make do with what we can source for american style food is harder. Here we are eating a lot of green shell mussels. 

Sizing of clothes and shoes. Dollar conversions. All makes for brain teasers. We keep up with our routine medical stuff. Mammograms in Europe are so much more involved. Basically a cat scan and ultra sound. And we found a fantastic dentist in Spain. And I manage to get my prescriptions filled. All good. We are finally comfortable with celsius. And I finally know how much deli meat I can expect for 200 gms or a kilo of shellfish. 

We are still going strong. Still not tired of this lifestyle. We are getting pretty good at it too. We are still not tired of each other. Still healthy. There have been setbacks for sure. Covid is a big one. But we have been more lucky than not. Being in NZ when the pandemic took off is definitely the top of the lucky heap. We have not been accident free. There was the car one of us put in a ditch. And we put regular gas in the diesel campervan. I haven’t mentioned that one before. It cost us a bunch. But no one got hurt. Except the minor incident when one of us touched the electric fence, jumped, yelled and spooked the horse, that ran into and spooked the other horse I was working under. I landed on my back with a big thud; that hurt for a few days. Could have been a lot worse; the horses were fine.

Where will we go from here and what the future will hold? Covid 19 has definitely thrown a wrench in our lifestyle. But we are not going to let it get us down. We were always germaphobes and I always liked my personal space.  Now, we don’t have to apologize for it. We do think twice about the public transportation. New Zealand is sheltered from the rest of the world, so we may not have the grip on reality the rest of the world is experiencing. No masks here, no covid. We are looking ahead to leave NZ in mid September. We have rescheduled with the homeowners in Europe where we had committed to house sit, but covid canned everyone’s travel. We have tentative commitments for Portugal for 2 weeks and Spain for 2 months. 

After that, who knows. Maybe a trip back to the states for Christmas?