And so we took the ferry to Estonia. It was very smooth sailing, boarding and unboarding were fast and the cabin was very comfortable. We played a card game in the bar, went to bed and were awoken by the PA announcing our arrival in Paldiski, in the north-east of Estonia. We slowly make our way to...
Whoops, another big stretch of days. Let me try to summarize.
We had left Håltebyn and my brother behind, to head directly to Karlstad, a city on the north side of the giant Vänern lake. Here we met up with M, a friend of Federica's, who was coming from Stockholm by train. We had some fika there...
And so we made our way to the little hamlet Håltebyn, north of Årjäng. This is where my brother has been living since about four years, on the farm started by his girlfriends family. Now it's run by all of them together. It's a rather unique story: the inlaws bought an old farm with the land and hav...
We make our way unto the ferry in the morning, where in 9 hours it takes us from Germany to Malmö, in Sweden. This ferry is a world of difference with the one that took us from Greece to Italy: it's well organized, clear sign, friendly staff, runs on time, clean, lot's of public seating space. Once...
Kind of a lot of days this time, let me think what happened.
We arrived to my parents in Ouderkerk on Thursday after an exhausting drive. Dinner was just being served outside in the garden, so we got in right on time. For the next days we didn't do much, mostly we hung around the kitchen table alt...
We take it easy in the days in Pegli. Not in small part because of the heat: the temperature is well into the 30s with high humidity and even in the mornings and evenings it's barely cooler. A lot of time is spent hanging around the kitchen table, where Federica's mom often suggests there is somethi...
We're getting a bit bored of Senigallia now. We had an halfhearted attempt at going out, where we entertained ourselves by observing the local teenagers being awkward and listening to a band play by the beach. And we spend an afternoon taking a train into the city Ancona, which is unexpectedly prett...
The ferry to Ancona (about east side of Italy, about halfway up) was chaos. It started with us hanging out on the beach, still outside Igoumenitsa, when we got a text that are very was delayed: instead of departing 21:30 it would leave 02:15, so after midnight. Okay, we were already waiting, so we j...
There has still been lot's to do here in Kalloni. We picked some more blueberries, boiled walnuts of a kind in a 1m by 1m bin to make a sweet (didn't get to try it yet), starting digging a flat camping pitch down the hill (real back breaking work) and painted the old barrels around the terrace (deco...
TL;DR: We are still on the farm in Kalloni.
It's been over two weeks now and we're still here. And we're still having a good time. We've continued similar work as the last update: we picked some more blueberries (lots are ready now), did gardening, dug an extension to the garden, collected a lot o...
It has now been well over a week that we're staying with and working for "In the Heart of the Bees" and we're enjoying it a lot! Writing this I had to count the days because it feels like we've been her for ages already.
A couple of weeks ago before we got to Lefkada we talked about what more we...
We decide to stay a bit longer on this campsite by the beach, if only such that we have time to clean the van. We also quickly find out the grey (dirty) water tanks has overflow, so cleaning takes a lot of extra time as we need to empty out most of the kitchen... Fortunately we're in the right clima...
We visit the pretty harbor town Sarandë, where we had planned to take a ferry to Corfu. However, upon learning that taking us and our camper one way is already €210, so we give up on the plan. We console ourselves with pastries and a desert from a little bakery. Instead we drive into Greece, until t...
We relax in the morning, doing nothing. After lunch we bravely get on our bikes to bike the half hour into the city of Shkoder. Amidst the cars on the main road we get a good feel for the massively chaotic traffic, but we get a good of the city too. This Albanian city definitely feels the furthest a...
After a quiet morning on the site we drive on, this time heading west, to the coast by the city of Kotor. On the way we have a brief stop in Podgorica (the capital). It's an odd city, with an extremely square layout for a somewhat American feel but with a very shabby old center.
Not really paying...
Time to move again, now into Montenegro. I feel I should admit that until a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to pin this country a map. By now Federica was feeling better, but now both of us have caught a cold.
Today's drive is probably the pretties yet. We cross that lands that seem...
We leave Croatia behind driving northeast, into Bosnia. We get a little nervous when we're waved to the side at the border crossing, the agent wants to look inside our van. He glances in and remarks, heavily accented, "did you make it yourself? nice mobile apartment". And we're waved through. We vis...
We took some cappuccino in the farm's restaurant, served by the nonna who was already making the tortellini for the day. And we drove on the Croatia, past the city of Trieste and through about 10 minutes of Slovenia. We stayed the night on a well equipped campsite, in the town of Buzet. On the hos...
To take a break from hiking we spent the next day around the little towns below Modena. These were cute but not very interesting. We visited a natural park featuring odd mud volcanoes and took a siesta in an empty parking lot. Then we let ourselves be majorly impressed (/s) by a ceramics museum in a...
The time had come to say goodbye to Pegli and continue the journey. Packed with homemade lunches and pasta we squirmed back into local traffic with the van. Heading: Modena. But we didn't need to arrive there yet, our garage appointment is not until Monday. So we'll spend some time on the way.
We...
You can probably guess how we spent the time at the house of Federica's parents: we had breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Oh, and gelato. We did go for strolls around Pegli and Federica went running and I tried some mountain biking in the hills.
And we did have to do some work: the AC in the car...
After a couple of days at my parents learning how to use a sewing machine (and how hard it is to sew something properly) we finished the curtains we wanted to add. Now it was time to start our trip properly!
We wanted to start easy: after my mom's advice we headed to the Betuwe, to Leerdam. We par...
We bought our van in April 2024, and have been building on it continuously in weekends and the odd working day evening since then. Although we were progressing, we weren't progressing fast. And we wanted to leave in spring to able to enjoy most of the summer traveling. So in January I started workin...