Thinking back, looking forward...

Thinking back...

Whoosh! there goes another one. Goodbye 2018, hello 2019. So a moment to reflect on our travels and think about future plans, as well as wishing all our friends and fellow travellers 'bon voyage '.  The motorhome is in Malaga, we are at home looking forward to flying back to continue our journey in just over a week. For the first time in ten days or so there is just the two of us at home. It seems very quiet, I try to keep some statistics about our travels, but they become ever more perfunctory as the years roll by. Still, here's the running total updated with 2018's figures. It's important to get that done now. Seeing in the New Year with one eye on Big Ben while updating an Excel spreadsheet really would mark a new milestone in my inexorable march towards the curmudgeonly.

So, in the last twelve months months we've spent just over five of them wandering about. The most exciting part of this was undoubtedly the six weeks we spent in the Far East. We can't really count this as 'Heels for Dust' time as it was a mixture of city breaks and a road trip around New Zealand. This has to be the highlight of the year - in a world that can seem dark and depressing, New Zealand, the place, people and culture, gives you hope. We loved it. So, here's a picture of the pair of us in the Mount Cook National Park.

So, aside from the excitements of long haul, what have been our highlights of this year's moho travels?  Our top five:

1. A new van.

We never set out last January to swap vans. Had Spinney's been able to repair or replace Maisy's electrical block without the thing becoming a saga, then we probably would never have felt the need to make the change. The other factor was happening upon a replacement that ticked all our boxes at Oaktree Motorhomes. Generally dealing with any motortrade dealership is demoralising, but the entire staff at Oaktree Motorhomes buck that trend - straight, trustworthy, professional and friendly. So we made the leap.

It has proved to be a good move. Though we 'christened' the Burster we bought 'Bertie' in fact we seem to have dropped sentimentalising our mode of transport with a name, a good thing, I think, - anthropomorphism has to be one of our more questionable innate human characteristics.

Overall we are delighted with the new moho, it's much easier to drive - more like a car than a small truck, it's quicker, but considerably more fuel efficient, the interior is brighter and all-round visibility better,  the bathroom is bigger and the kitchen, though similar sized, has a more practical layout. All good, as Gill is wont to say. Indeed, when I asked her what was the best thing about this year's travels her immediate answer was 'the new fridge'. There speaks a cook.

2. A year of small plates.

The Spanish tradition of tapas menus seems to be catching on everywhere. This is great because it allows diners to sample a range of 'tasty morsels' rather than having to order a whole meal. Consequently skilled, imaginative cooking is escaping the confines of elite fine dining establishments and turning-up in market cafes, beach restaurants, urban bars and bakeries. Looking back, our top ten, 'in no particular order' to use Ms. Daley's catch-phrase.

i. Beef and ginger, street food, Chinatown, Singapore:

ii. Goats cheese and serrano ham pintxos, Bar Gorriti, San Sebastian

iii.  Patatas bravas, some place on Calle Laurel, Logrono, Rioja.

iv.  Roasted cauliflower salad, Atticus Finch, Rotorua.

v.  Brunch at Castros, Cuba St. Wellington, NZ.

vi.  Grilled fish, Snack Bar Pintorola, Sisimbra, Portugal.

vii. Cheese and spinach pie, The Green Room Cafe, Gore, NZ.

viii. The tuna lady, Olhao fish and vegetable market, Algarve.

ix.  Lunch, Cervecería Giralda Bar, Sevilla.

x. Tagliatelle a ragu Bolognese, Osteria Dell 'Orsa, Bologna


3. Communing with the ancestors

The more we travel the more fascinating prehistory becomes. The past year has found us stumbling across older cultures at opposite ends of the globe. The presumption that traditional tribal and hunter gatherer cultures are more primitive, less developed versions of the modern human is looking ever more shaky. Partly because both recent history and contemporary events indicate that our own culture has developed a proclivity for self destruction, either through nuclear war or environmental degradation. Also, our understanding of  early cultures has improved in the last couple of decades. Many early cultures were more sustainable than ours and Hobbes' idea that in the past, before institutionalised government,  people's lives were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" seems increasingly at odds with recent findings from forensic archaeology.

So these days we are more likely to head towards an archaeological museum than an art gallery. Three anthropological encounters stand out. The first was not museum based at all. You cannot travel from one end of New Zealand to the other without being confronted by the interaction between Maori culture, European settlement and the unique flora, fauna and topography of this fragment of the ancient continent of Zealandia. As we travelled I was reading Captain Cook's journals which provided a fascinating commentary on the hazards and contradictions provoked by the meeting between two startlingly different cultures.

Later in the Spring we headed for Corsica. The mountain villages of the interior preserved a traditional belief system well into the middle of the twentieth century. It was a great place to read Dorothy Carrington's 'The Dream-Hunters of Corsica'. A long time resident from the early 1950s, she learned to speak Corsican and was able to record the activities of the last practitioners of an ancient shamanistic method of prophecy - the village 'mazzeri'. So when we cycled up the valley of the Tavaru towards the island's famous pre-historic remains at Filitosa,  you sense not the magnitude of time past, but the continuity of past and present  - that our distant ancestors remain within touching distance, at least imaginatively.

And so to autumn, a leisurely 3000 mile wander through France, Portugal and Spain - familiar territory. However, even familiar roads prompt unanticipated pleasures. The anthropological theme continued. I had taken James C Scott's 'Against the Grain' with me as reading matter. It's a short, stylish investigation of how recent developments in the scientific analysis of ancient remains and artefacts is challenging our notion of the 'birth of civilisation'. It's a thought provoking and entertaining read, full of startling assertions - such as dogs and pigs domesticated humans as much as we domesticated them, or the Great Wall of China was built as much to keep imperial subjects in as barbarians out!

Purely by accident we parked-up on an unprepossessing scrap of coast on the fringes of Malaga only to discover we were about three hundred metres from one of the most significant paleolithic sites in Europe. It can boast 400,000 years of continuous human habitation - that is 16,000 generations. It's not famous, as you whizz past the low cliffs on the coastal dual carriageway you would never know. We love travel; it is a cliche, but true, you never can tell what around the corner.

Say hi to your grandma....

4. Aleria and thereabouts

The few days we spent in and around Aleria on the west coast of Corsica sums up why we choose live half of our life in a box on wheels. 

Day One - you arrive saying, 'well it will do, it seems ok' - then discover the place is quietly marvellous... Mooching towards a perfect day

Day Two - the tiny archaeological museum tucked away in the middle of nowhere turns out to be the best we've found outside of Greece... Dancing for Dionysus

Day Three - Just us and Kalliste...A field in Corsica

5. Bubulcus and Bolatas

We end up staying overnight in all kinds of places, supermarket car-parks, quaysides, urban car parks, empty fields, and lots of campsites. We are happy if the sites are clean, quiet, with pitches big enough to accommodate the van, with a sanitary block that functions and is, well, sanitary. Lots of places don't even manage those minimum standards. We are pleased to be underwhelmed, rarely wholly satisfied and almost never delighted by the sites we stay in. One exception was Bubulcus and Bolatas, an eco-camp in a remote patch of ground near Evora in central Portugal. We would never have found it by ourselves - but our daughter Sarah and her partner Rob stayed there last spring and reckoned it would be good place to meet up live off-grid for a few days. It was great, magical even, we will never forget it.   Acorns and Butterflies - eco-camping, the real deal

Looking forwards..

Whatever happens, we are destined to travel less in 2019. A week tomorrow we fly back to Malaga driving up the coast towards Valencia, then towards central Spain, which is new territory for us, and homewards through France. Our tunnel crossing is booked for mid-March. We decided, ever cautious, it would be best to return well before Brexit day. Not that I want to be, we are very sad about the whole thing, but head must rule heart and who wants to risk getting stuck in some kind of cross-channel meltdown?

We hope in  May and June to do the Denmark/Sweden trip that we postponed this year. Matthew said he might join us for a week or so in and around Stockholm - which will be great. We carry his tent in the rear garage as a portable 'guest suite'

Summer tends to be UK time - a few months of 'speed gardening' before we depart south in the autumn. In 2019 we have different plans. Sinve last summer we have been dreaming-up a project to remodel the downstairs of the house. Now plans have been drawn, planning approved, builders and kitchen designers appointed. September and October are going to be chaotic - we can live at home while the old conservatory is demolished and a new dining room extension built. However, stage two involves taking out the wall between our present dining room and kitchen, laying a new oak floor through out the downstairs and installing a new 'minimalist white kitchen in an open plan space - 30' x 15' - with a dining area overlooking the garden. Our idea is to connect the internal and external space wth bifold doors and a glass gable. It should look spectacular. While it happens we will live in the van somewhere nearby and project manage. So - here's a few photos of now:

The conservatory - now 22 years old 

The same age as Laura, in fact - note pokey kitchen - very 80s our kids complain..

The dining room - a bit of a squeeze at Christmas

But after the building work:

The dining room extension with a glass gable replaces the old conservatory.

The present kitchen and dining room are merged into an open plan space.

With lots of glass- light oak floors throughout and a 'loft style' minimalist kitchen - room for all the family when they visit - and no more complaints about the '80s' decor.

Why are we doing this?  The cost could fund a lot of exciting long haul holidays. In truth, after almost a quarter of a century living here we had come to point of either moving or investing to refurbish where we live. I do wonder if the effect of living in a 7m box for months on end has made us crave for a more spacious living space at home. Absence too has made us grow fonder of our patch. When we first retired we were determined to move from our spot of Pennine gloom. After looking at lots of houses in many places we concluded that we actually liked where we were. Not the house particularly, it's a Wilcon bog-standard pokey 4 bed detatched built in the 1980s. However, though located near the town centre, the scrap of ancient woodland to the rear means the garden is always full of birds, the squirrels are endlessly entertaining and perhaps some day we will actually glimpse the badgers who sneak in during the night to dig up the lawn.

Our small patch of woodland - in summer. a wall of green.

So, instead of moving we decided to re-model our house and make it a bit more spacious. It looks like a great plan on paper. On the other hand, next autumn while living in a building site I can quite imagine us dreaming of the simplicities of being parked-up on an empty beach with a view of the Aegean. Anyway, 2019 promises to be as exciting as 2018 - not so intrepid, but equally challenging - in a good way.