August 2023 – Two Travelin' Chicas…

Living as Hard as we can…Two Travelin’ Chicas

It’s sometimes hard to slow down and take time to organize my thoughts. We have now been on the road for almost 4 months, not including our 2 years of vanlife. We have visited Ireland, Scotland, Portugal mainland from Sintra to the Algarve Coast, Madeira Island, San Miguel Island in the Azores, Germany, Austria and Spain. We are currently on our way to wrap up our Schengen EU Visa in Dubrovnik, Croatia. From there moving down into Montenegro for at least a month, which used to be Yugoslavia until 1991. From there who knows where?

It sometimes feels like we’ve been gone for so long, and at times I want it to just stop and go “home”, but where is that? My heart is filled with gladness, my mind filled with curiosity. There is just so much of the world to explore. I must admit, at times, we have to pass up some countries we’d love to explore due to many different reasons, both political and uneasy feelings about traveling there as two women. We are playing it on the side of caution when if we were younger, we might throw that same caution to the wind.

Does that mean that we are older and wiser? Life is more precious? Probably…

In the last 2 years, we have been taught a lesson in the value of living life as if it were your last day on earth. I tear up just thinking of family members lost too soon and those that lived out their lives to the fullest and just came to the end of life’s road, including my grandmother and our faithful corgi, Gandaulf. It is part of our motivation to do all we can while we are healthy and able to.

Another motivating force is the all encompassing world of climate change. Since we’ve been retired and living in the world as nomads, living with and off the land around us, we have seen the changes first hand. Coastal flooding, unbearable heat and harsh winters. Storms off the charts. It seems that every year we are breaking records of all types, rain, heat, hurricanes, snowfall, wild fires, ocean temps rising, and drought, to name a few. Perhaps it is the way the earth is trying to wipe us off like a festering tick sucking the life blood out of her? It is everywhere and my heart is saddened to think it may be too late to reverse. Perhaps it is just the way it is going to be and we all will pay dearly in the end. In the meantime, here we are off on another adventure to see all we can before it is gone. We are doing all we can to reduce our carbon footprint, but we are just a minuscule part.

Do you know?

Since the 26th of July, Chris and I have been house and pet sitting in Yator, Granada, Spain. It’s a sleepy little town with only one tiny cafe on the main street. The town is in an area called Camino Montenegro.

We agreed to do a pet/house sit for a German expat who owns a little farm up on the mountain outside of Yator. It’s a tiered farm with several raised gardens of all the normal vegetables, fruit trees, including pomegranate, apple, cherry, lime and figs. There’s a patch of just tomato plants and a vine garden of peas, beans, assorted squash, melons and cucumbers. There is also 30 or more olive trees, heavy with fruit, and two large Spanish Almond trees full of nuts.

Each morning we water all the trees and gardens, by hand, plus the ornamental plants on all three levels. In the cool morning air, hangs the scent of honeysuckle from the numerous honeysuckle vines covering the red dirt. Growing wild throughout the property are the herbs, rosemary and oregano, and the raised gardens have basil, parsley and chives. Basically, we have all the food we could ever need or want from the land. Watering of all these delicacys is done by gravity fed hoses at several stations throughout the property and takes about and hour and a half with both of us watering.

The water we drink comes from a spring located even further up the hill and 3 times a week we must turn on the feed to fill the water tank with fresh spring water. The tank is about 14 feet square by 14 feet deep. With the watering, showers and daily consumption, we take the tank down about 2 feet a day. The water is cold and clear and tastes delicious without the chemical additives in normal tap water.

One thing that has always been hard for us, since we’ve been in the road, has been getting vegetables into our diet. They are bulky and took up a lot of room when we lived in the van, and traveling around Europe for the last 3+ months, we’ve been at the mercy of the restaurants to get our veggies. Mostly we get potatoes or something that resembles squash, always over cooked or fried, and never fresh.

For the last 3 weeks, we have been eating fresh from the gardens, trying out new roasted veggies, beets, carrots and leeks. We’ve been making home-made salsa from the tomatoes we grow and the purchase of peppers and onions from women set up on street corners, selling the excess from their gardens, harvested that same day. Cooking meats with the herbs we grow and making delicious side dishes with the variety of squashes we grow. We’ve been making fresh salads with the lettuce, carrots and cucumbers we grow. It is very rewarding.

It is such a huge thing to know where our food is coming from, how fresh it is, that it is grown without chemicals and picked by our own hands. There’s something to be said for that, which never really crossed my mind until now.

Do you know where your food comes from? There are horrifying documentaries on how our food is grown, the process and effect of GMOs, fertilizers and other chemicals used to produce bigger yields and to keep the pests away. The impact we are having on the land, water and our bodies. I guess it took us slowing down here, putting in the effort and love it takes growing our own truly organic food, and being enlightened by these documentaries, to really understand and come to value this little humble farm.

Our next few months will be spent in Montenegro and perhaps Bosnia, both countries pride themselves on their clean food, clean air and clean water. I hope that we have learned a lesson and will begin to appreciate locally sourced food, grown with love, sweat and clean practices. Perhaps our carbon footprint will get even smaller which for us, is something we are proud of.

Austria…A Small Peek

Let me start by saying that Austria was never on our radar until one night, sitting in a Fado Bar in Portugal, I asked the couple adjacent to us where they were from. They couldn’t stop talking about their homeland Austria, with its beauty and diversity. Well, that got the ball rolling.

We arrived in Austria two weeks ago during which time we’ve ridden bikes along the Danube River, slept on a riverboat that followed, walked all over Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck, and paddled down the glacier-fed Inn River on a white water rafting trip in Haiming.

Our eyes have seen soaring, snow capped mountains of the Tyrollean Alps, the wide river Danube, tamed by lochs and diversion dams, hundreds of castles, monasteries, waterfalls and bridges that span great gorges. We’ve walked the cobbled stone streets of cities that date back to Roman times with fortresses built on high plateaus. We’ve heard the chorus of church bells that echo through the canyons and valleys. All have brought joy to our hearts.

Austria is a cultural melting pot as well. A place that holds the horrors of wars and the pride of triumph over aggression. Many homes perched high on the mountain sides have hand carved wooden facades. Statues skillfully carved and fountains honoring royalty, scholars and musicians, are skillfully etched in stone and bronze. Roman gods and goddesses and mythical beings tower over us mere mortals as we walk by. Story after story of uprise and defeat are engrained in the lives of the souls that live there. The hard working people and the pride each holds in their heart to be Austrian. The wonderful smiles and cheerful hellos make even the loneliest traveler feel at home.