So…….now Tuesday, we are in Uberlingen, at Lake Konstanz (or Bodensee) in Southern Germany. Things have improved a bit in terms of our communication issues; maybe because we can’t communicate with anyone else, having barely any German between us and it’s nice to have someone to talk to when you’re far from home (as I write we have moved on to Germany)

It’s hot, and we aren’t really well equipped for heat. Neither of us likes heat very much, so I hope we will acclimatise before we get into southern Italy. But we are enjoying the trip. After Sedan we made our way towards the Rhinelands, toward a winery near Kandel that showed up on the Park for a Night app. The parking was literally in the winery yard behind the hostelry. It was quite charming and we had a lovely meal - a cheese dish for me and some cheesy noodles for Gareth. Delicious! Gareth had beer and I had their own Reisling which is apparently served diluted with water. Walking around the village next day I was struck by the lack of evidence of any children and wondered if we were in Hamelin, home of the Pied Piper who had maybe come back again to take away the children. Germany is, I know, suffering from being an ageing population and therefore very open to immigration and ‘new blood’. We noted a few storks nests perched atop barn roofs, and there were definitely stork chicks in them. Whether or not the storks are on strike as regards their role in generating new Germans, I can’t say. At any rate, the country seems to be well set up for the older generation and their motorhomes, which is an advantage for us, of course.

Next day (Monday) we set off for the Black Forest area (or Schwarzwald). Gareth decided he didn’t need my navigation ‘skills’ so fell for the charms of our lady satnav and asked her to take us to Baden-Baden. Not wishing to interfere I was impressed that Gareth seemed now confident about heading into another large town and I sat back to enjoy the ride. I should have shut up, though, when we got there, instead of rubbing in the fact that he’d messed up. It seems he’d imagined Baden-Baden to be a nice little town of wooden houses and cuckoo clocks. If he’d asked me I would have pointed out that the map showed it was a large town.

Anyway, we eventually stopped alongside a park, had a snack and tried to converse with an elderly man who seemed to think that if he talked to us long enough we’d eventually understand. I think he did try telling us how to get to a place we thought might have free overnight camping, but we ignored the instruction and headed instead for a place I identified on the map. After spending some time with his other pal, Google, Gareth could see that my plan was a good one. I didn’t gloat.

After a fabulous drive up into the Black Forest on the high route, Schwarzwaldhochstrasse, we found a delightful spot in a town called Schiltach. It had its own resident motorhomer ‘Mr Helpful’ whose wife disowned him every time he started up a very loud rambling conversation (in good English, however) but Schiltach is a gorgeous little town and the aire is very central and next to a river that the dogs had enormous fun splashing about in and keeping their beady spaniel eyes on the ducks. There is a down side, inevitably. A church, its spire prominent over the timber framed town and with a green hilly forest background, seems to think that everyone within hearing distance of its bells needs to be up and on their knees in the chapel, praying at 6.00 am!!! I’m a heathen in respect of church going so it didn’t go down too well, especially as the heat had meant we hadn’t slept until it was cool enough in the early hours.

Chatting in the morning to Eric (Mr Helpful) we learned that tourism in the Black Forest is not what it was. We saw some small ski slopes on the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse but we also saw numerous hotels, faded, closed and crumbling. Eric seemed most concerned that we partake of the joys of Schiltach and wondered whether he was on a commission from the local businesses. In the 60’s my grandparents travelled regularly through Europe, camping and later, caravanning. The Black Forest region was one of their favourites, but it seems everywhere has its day. The most poignant thing for me about the high road tour was it’s similarity with British Columbia and it felt just like the drive up to my son William’s place in Sun Peaks. I felt a real pang, missing him. It made me think fondly, too, of my sister and her family who also live in BC. I also worried about my grandson Reuben’s worries that he won’t remember me when I get home, so we took some photos at the top and will be sending them as post cards for the grandchildren.

So tonight we are in a large aire in Uberlingen. It’s nothing like as picturesque as Schiltach and isn’t the idyll of motorhoming sold in motorhome brochures. It’s another Park and Ride in fact. All services are provided very cheaply plus a free bus ticket. We are impressed by the motorhoming etiquette that exists. Everyone here is most respectful of each others’ space (a bay large enough for even the biggest motorhomes and for an awning. It’s a cheap, convenient and popular stop over and  tomorrow we head towards Austria, still dreaming of that camping idyll.

Post script: it’s now Wednesday evening (I think). We eventually managed to get lakeside in the cool of the morning. Unusually for us we were up by 6.30 and ready to find somewhere watery for the dogs and a pleasant green spot to have breakfast. It does seem, in this area at least, that motorhomes are pushed away from cluttering up the lakeside. We parked neatly where we could dunk the dogs in the water and take a short walk before it got too hot, but were then told, very nicely, by some council workmen that motorhomes in that area are “Verboten”. So off we went again. Stopping by a camping shop for some essential items like chairs and a table to go under the awning outside, we then set off determinedly to make some distance towards Naples. We travelled through Austria (inevitably now that we have outside furniture, it was raining!) through spectacular scenery and are now this evening camped in San Valentin in the Italian Alps. Thankfully it is cool so we might get a good nights sleep, once I’ve posted this of course.

Italy bound

 A cockerel this morning reminds me that we are in France, finally Italy bound. We’ve survived so far though we do have a few battle scars. In spite of the weeks of preparation, getting on the road was a bit of a scramble in the end and something we forgot to do was to find an app that would translate “Gareth-speak” to “Alison-speak” and vice versa! We’ve also been forced to bring with us one tooth abscess, a tummy bug and the remains of a yucky cold, plus the arthritic conditions we were already lumbered with, like Gareth’s crumbling hip.

But the adventure has begun. Wednesday got us to Canterbury, via the delightful M25 at rush hour (yes, we started out later than we intended). The torture of home time traffic isn’t something I would inflict on anyone and I marvelled at the minimal number of insanity breakouts in that cloggy flow, at least in so far as I could detect any. Goodness knows what the occupants of all those vehicles were going through while slow going traffic munched away at their living time.

Anyway, the one-of-only-three-in-the-country-aires in Canterbury (the Park and Ride on New Dover Road) was a most convenient night stop. We weren’t very clever in our choice of parking bay, though, as it was right next to the grey water and chemical toilet disposal. This became evident next morning as Motorhomes turned up next to us to defecate, some very muckily. There were some veteran vans parked up in better spots and we could sense their assessment of us as new on the scene in spite of our van being twelve years old. We are entering the Travellers’ world and it feels a bit as though we have run away to the circus. 

It was nice to stand around the vans chatting with others and absorbing their useful travelling tips and tales. We learned quite a lot that evening, including the fact that the info given on the net rarely reflects the truth on the ground. The £3.50 per night charge we were expecting to pay for the stop over turned out to be £7.00. Yes, that’s still very cheap, admittedly, but the channel crossings also suddenly were more expensive. We couldn’t get one before Friday morning anyway, which meant another day in Blighty (where does that nickname come from?). We (I mean Gareth) had picked out DFDS Dover to Dunkirk as the best crossing for the dogs, failing the Chunnel that is. DFDS provide on-deck kennels for dogs, so he thought, but then it turned out that they didn’t, and that there was an additional charge for dogs. We have two, remember.

So, costs were already running outside of our (Gareth’s) estimated budget. He has spent hours and hours, bless him, ‘burning the midnight oil’ researching, planning and budgeting this trip, including the best way to travel with dogs. Bess had a fit the night before we left, probably because she sensed something was imminent. She has had fits before and is a very stressy dog. We weren’t sure how she would cope with having to stay in the Hymer in the bowels of the ferry, left to her own devices with Pwdin, our nice-but-dim other little spaniel. We knew that Pwdin wouldn’t be a problem as she takes everything in her stride.

A day to kill around Canterbury was just as well in the end. It meant we could stock up on a few things and deal with our house purchase. Contracts were exchanged, insurances organised and instructions given to our selected letting agent to receive the keys on completion and start the process of getting us a tenant. Next day we became house owners while we were half way across the English Channel.

Another night in the Park and Ride, albeit in a better spot, and in the morning we set off for Dover. I’m a landlubber and my usual nervousness about things like aeroplanes and ships kicked in as we got to the port. Projecting my fear onto the dogs, I started worrying and fussing about them and now realise that I have a default mother hen reaction to pets as I do with the grandchildren. Once you’ve been a mother having to marshal a posse of small lively children, you never get out of the habit. In any case we had to leave the dogs, so we gave them a selection of treats and then headed for the upper decks.

Sitting watching the world go by (or in this case, a huge expanse of water) inevitably leads to mental wanderings. Thinking about travels throughout my life it occurred to me that through my and my sisters’ childhoods, our parents, who had at that time never really travelled, allowed each of us some amazing travel opportunities. In my case, at the age of ten, I went on an educational cruise around Scandinavia on the ship Devonia; I still have the scrap book journal of it somewhere. In my late teens I spent three weeks in Germany with a youth group where I met the father of my sons, my now ex husband. My sisters also had amazing experiences afforded them and all three of us spent one summer holiday at a Quaker summer school. We watched the first moon landing there. They were all wonderful, unforgettable experiences, probably brought about through my mother’s quiet influence, it occurs to me now. Our academically gifted mother was keen to provide us with a rounded education and the sorts of cosmopolitan experiences that she herself had relinquished any prospect of in order to be with our more wayward father. His influence, on the other hand, was in providing us with a sense of the wild, both in nature and in thought (as long as those wild thoughts coincided with his own of course!)

I needn’t have worried about the dogs, by the way. They were happy to see us when we got back to the vehicle and seemed none the worse for their temporary abandonment. We landed and took off along the French/Belgian border, hit rain, had a repeat of the M25 experience around Lille and headed for where we intended a night stop. Inevitably things got tricky. 

After a few hairy moments like forgetting which side of the road we should be on and driving around in circles through little villages trying to locate somewhere indicated on an app, we abandoned that plan and ‘conferred’ on a new one. This is where the Gareth/Alison translator app would have been handy. I can’t fault his efforts to equip us with a range of technical aids but operating between four phones, an iPad, a Mac, a SatNav, a book of European maps, a ‘Budget Guide to Europe’ and the ACSI camping guide has challenged my non-techy linear brain. And a brain still foggy with virus wasn’t helping. Needless to say, our first night camped, finally, in a little aire in Cateau-Cambresis was not the most convivial.

This morning, Saturday, we resolved to be better prepared. And we were until we found ourselves stuck up a narrow cul de sac in the middle of Charlevilles-Mezieres, Gareth red in the face as he tried reversing all the way out again. Our souvenir of that little excursion could be a collection of traffic transgression tickets when we get home! 

Anyway, we eventually found, through good old Google (none of these fancy apps) a nice municipal camp site in the Ardennes town of Sedan. The sun came out and we took a nice little walk into the old town, had a few beers and a pizza before returning to watch the sunset from the van. This trip isn’t being particularly Headless (see previous blogs) so far, except in the ‘headless chicken’ meaning of the term, but it’s been a nice evening and tomorrow is another day.

Finding my way

In one of my previous blog posts I described Headlessness. It is something that has changed my life. This is a quiet time at the moment; for me anyway. Gareth is fully engaged in preparing the Hymer for our soon-to-be-happening trip to Italy. For my part I have been on a magical mystery tour of ideas. Judy’s U3A group, Youniverse, has opened lots of new doors and opportunities for learning. I am meeting lots of new and interesting people, all of whom, like me, now have sufficient time (and life experience) to seek answers to those big questions: “What’s it all about?”, “Why am I here?”, “What’s my purpose?”, “Who am I?”

If you watched the Royal Wedding you may have listened to the sermon. It hit me like a bolt of lightening when I watched it on iPlayer. What the minister was saying about Love and its power to heal everything is the message that is coming through loud and clear in all of my readings and associations. Someone/something is trying to get through to me! (If I turn on the radio now and “All we need is love”……. Well! That would seal it!)

No, I didn’t turn on the radio, but it is true that I am on some sort of journey. The journey probably began during the time when Gareth and I lost all four parents, as well as a close aunt of mine, in a very short space of a time. They went down like dominoes. I don’t know whether it’s a privilege to have seen death at close hand, but there’s nothing like seeing that last breath leave and the stillness that follows. Of course, a peaceful death isn’t everyone’s fate and listening to bereaved, heart-breaking accounts of the Grenfell Tower disaster last night raises more huge questions. 

So, where am I on this little soul search of mine? Well, I am certain that there’s more to life than meets the eye, and the directive “Be excellent to each other” (from the film “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”) means exactly what the Royal Wedding minister was saying (worth another listen, I reckon). The imperative appears to be that our egos are an obstacle in being excellent to each other. To be truly selfless is a real challenge, for me anyway. I know that there are selfless souls doing excellent work in the world and without them we would all be in purgatory. I must try to be more like them.

In terms of how things/I have changed as a result of my meanderings, synchronicity is a real feature! I have experienced synchronicity at other times in my life and I am realising that the more aware I am of it the more frequently it occurs. Ok, you scientists, if you’re reading this (and you’ve probably ditched it by now) we can debate it if you like. My father was a Philosopher of Science and nothing in his work precludes the things I am discovering.

Numinosity is also a feature that is occurring more frequently but I’m not going to fall into the trap of giving its source a name; there are so many possibles, and I don’t want to be labelled as belonging to any religion.  

So that’s where I am. Amongst the books I’ve read recently are the”Tao Te Ching”, “The Child Within Us Lives” by William Samuel, “The Swan in the Evening” by Rosamond Lehmann, and I regularly return to Douglas Harding’s book “On Having No Head - Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”. Each is a very differently presented view of the same thing; knowledge of being part of a universal consciousness, and how to live accordingly.

My next blog is likely to be about our very down-to-earth journey in the Hymer, telling you about my navigationally challenged efforts to find our way around and the inevitable fall-outs, dogs, weather, campsite shocks and delights, etc., but I have wondered whether I should use Hymer to promote my evangelical message of Love to the World by painting “Love and Peace” on Gareth’s nice shiny bodywork (the camper’s bodywork I mean) with big daisies and a smile. Somehow I don’t think the captain would be impressed.

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Losing my head

Losing my head

If you’re following my blog, you’ll know that I haven’t written a blog for a while. We are having a ‘lean’ non-travelling month, catching up on life’s maintenance chores and preparing for our forthcoming trip to Italy at the end of the month. Gareth is trying to learn Italian, I am revising my French, the van is getting Gareth’s detailed attention in terms of servicing, and our house purchase looks like going ahead this time (fingers crossed).

Being grounded for a bit has enabled me to pick up with some of the groups I joined through U3A Swansea (that’s University of the Third Age). My interests being always philosophical, these groups are inevitably reading and discussion groups. The group I’ve been a member of longest is Youniverse, influenced in the main by the work of Douglas Harding and a way of being called The Headless Way. So, I’ve been doing soul work and it was going well until yesterday.

My family believe that I am a natural hippy and our current lifestyle may, to some extent, confirm that I am. I am a peace lover - nothing special about that, of course, and I do innately believe that “Love is All You Need” and in the face of the sins of the world I am working on being more Zen about it all. If you’ve read my previous posts you will know that I’ve been making an effort to live more ethically in terms of such things as plastic and overconsumption. I am trying to live in a belief that the tree hugger part of me will help set an example and in some albeit minuscule way, help to save our planet. And then I read some of Slavoj Zizek’s work and find my green liberalism ridiculed. It’s curious how my ‘faith’ is being challenged every day and in many ways. Take this little conundrum (small and inconsequential, you might think):

Gareth, in preparing the camper for our Italy trip, has been learning about its mechanics, in case it breaks down and so that we can avoid expensive repair bills. There are apparently functions built into the system that set off an alert and stops the vehicle until it has been professionally examined. These functions seem to be part of the emissions restrictions required at manufacture. On-line, drivers consistently say that these functions can easily be over-ridden when the alert comes on, and that most often all that is needed is a hard driving interval to clear any soot that has built up in the system, so avoiding the expensive, and mostly unnecessary diagnostics and servicing. Sounds great, but I’m thinking “what about that soot?” But…..that’s me!

Yesterday evening, after a beautiful May Bank Holiday Monday, sun shining, warm, the beach colourfully peopled and the smells of BBQ’s mingling with a light sea mist, we took a walk out to one of the spots where you can sit and watch the sun go down and take in the sweep of the bay in all of its breathtaking beauty. On the highest point, from where the view is the most expansive, a ‘disposable’ bbq sat, still hot, with a burger on it, still in plastic and turning slowly to rubber and the debris of a not-too-wholesome picnic scattered around and abandoned. My question to the Universe at that point was “ARE YOU TAKING THE P..S?!” We gave up on our walk and spent the rest of our evening rattled and angry with the whole of humanity. Our mood wasn’t improved any either, when someone drove up late to one of the neighbouring caravans and was clearly oblivious to how his noise interrupted our sleep.

These are small things and they say not to sweat the small stuff. War, famine, disaster and destruction are much bigger things to be concerned about, but what hope is there if we can’t be kind to our fellows in the little ways? I really have some work to do if I am to rise above the things that are happening around us, the big and the small.

And now I hear that Donald Trump is being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!!!

Have a good day, folks!

Thinking time

I was Headless today. Gathered together in Judy’s house we explored The Headless Way. It is a practice developed by Douglas Harding that enables us to see, not as we have become accustomed to seeing, in a tunnel-visioned, self-conscious way, but from ‘behind’ as it were, from a great No-thingness that accommodates all; everything that is, has been and will be. The opening up of perspective and the sense of connection achieved through the practices is incredibly joyful, reassuring and peace-providing. The ‘movement’ (for want of a better word) isn't a cult, a religion or a mystique, but a most common sense way to see something which, once seen, is so obvious - we are not merely our finite human body, and to all intents and purposes, from an experiential point of view we are headless. We ARE the universe (Judy designates her U3A course - ‘Youniverse’)

Touristy forestry and Facebook

I'm here again. A visit to Sherwood Forest yesterday has me thinking; my mind drifting around stuff like legend, history and change. The little bit of England that can still be called Sherwood Forest is a recreation area. The Forestry Commission have kindly provided huge car parks and nicely laid out pathways that enable you to wander about among the trees on foot or bike. There are facilities, playgrounds and a ‘Go Ape’ installation as well as an area of woodland holiday bungalows for rent. The pine trees stand tall and majestic compared with the young mixed woodland I described in my blog yesterday but the magic we felt at that little woodland was absent in this legendary Nottinghamshire forest. I half expected the Forestry staff to be dressed up as Robin Hood and his Merry Men (and woman), being that the place is so utterly urbanised and touristyfied. Big concerts are on the agenda for summer there, including UB40  (only for 40 year olds???)

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the creation of recreation areas that are accessible to all. The little Cotswold woodland is a private garden, accessible only by invitation. It's magical connection with the Rollright stones, the ancient hill path and surroundings is lovingly guarded by a wealthy couple and their artistic helpers. If they were to provide car parking, toilets, bins, wheelchair accessible pathways, signage, a cafe and a playground the magic would be destroyed, to my mind anyway. And why is that? 

Last night we listened to some of the US Congress questioning of Mark Zukerberg’s Facebook operation and its failure to protect personal data. Facebook is undeniably an amazing phenomenon along with the rest of social media in this Information Age. Its whole development seems like magic to me. And its magic isn't actually so different from that Neolithic magic I felt at Neolithic Echoes. The ancients gathered together just as we do now on Facebook and created big stony edifices for the purpose. Today we commune with people in cyberspace and our stony edifices are the huge computer data banks in different places around the world. The big questions posed by the Facebook phenomenon, apparently, are whether, how and what to regulate. Clearly there have been some dubious goings on, but one thing is for sure - the imposition of regulation that will make it safe for law abiding users will kill its magic. The ancient, scary, dangerous Sherwood Forest that was home to peasants, wanderers, outcasts, minstrels and vagabonds as well as free thinkers and social reformers has been cut down to a tameable size and made safe. Facebook looks like going the same way.

What a conundrum. I like being safe but I don't want the magic of Wild to disappear. I'm no pioneer like those who braved the oceans trusting that they wouldn't fall off the edge of the world, or our astronauts, or our inventors who have pushed the boundaries of the world for the rest of us to move forward in. But, I don't want to live in a world so regulated and safe that no wild places or spaces remain, physical, intellectual or spiritual.

So that was my little thought for today. I'll now get on with my safe little life and make some tea. 

Cotswolds, Neolithic and magic

We're in the Cotswolds, on our second motorhome adventure. Dreary weather at home, a set of new van wheels waiting for us to collect from Chesterfield and the opportunity of visiting the Stokies (Stoke-on-Trent family) takes us off again. Typically, the weather forecast is ‘uncertain’ about where in the country we might find sunshine and now that we're in Middle England the sun has apparently come out at home! 

Cotswolds - chocolate box villages (where did that reference come from), fine country clothing, sedate hill walking and expensive quality tourist shopping is my assessment of it so far. Yesterday we came across a shop selling nothing but brushes; all kinds of brushes. There were clothes brushes, floor brushes, hair brushes, nail brushes, shaving brushes, vegetable brushes, fruit brushes and mushroom brushes. There were strange shaped brushes for dusting the rare books in your library (yeah!), brushes for waiters to take the crumbs of your damask tablecloth and beautifully soft little babies’ hairbrushes; everything made from natural wood and different types of bristle. I think it was The Oxford Brush company in Burford. I spent ages in there but came away with nothing. As usual, I couldn't make up my mind what to spend any meagre budget on.

In Chipping Campden we came across a shop specialising in cutlery and table ornaments! A visit to the Sunday craft fair though revealed the usual Womens Guild type of thing - knitted baby clothes, aprons and oven cloths, jams, chutneys, homemade jewellery and a bit of glasswork. Some things are the same everywhere.

I wrote that yesterday. This morning we woke up in Derbyshire. Rain meant that Cotswold meandering wasn't as attractive so we got some miles under the tyres instead. Before we left, though, we stopped by the Rollright Stones near Chipping Norton. It's a Neolithic site and there is magic there. We came across an adjacent woodland where wood cutters were busy and interesting structures were being assembled using the cuttings and the brash. A country lady, whose name turned out to be Claire, invited us in to the private wood and told us what was happening. Bought some twenty years ago to preserve its importance as an ancient and sacred site, she and her husband had planted hundreds of trees of different species and the project now includes lovely stick and brash structures as part of the woodland management, ecological support and aesthetic appeal. We chatted with the woodcutter artist and left there feeling we had tapped into the ancient and continuing magic of that lovely place. The project is called Neolithic Echoes and there is a website for it.

It's still raining. Waking up this morning I half expected to find ourselves afloat, in a Hymer ark rather than a camper van. It's heartening to know that Richard, Libby and the children have had a week of sunshine in Portugal and Owen, Jess and the children are enjoying sunshine at our caravan. It's the last week of the boys’ Easter holiday so a bit of sunshine for them is a gift that should get them away from TV and iPad games!

One of the books I am currently reading is “Being Mortal - Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gawande. I'd not heard of it until it was mentioned in a discussion of end of life care on a radio programme. Maybe my interest has something to do with my advancing years but it is nevertheless a very good account of the issues we face nowadays with an ageing population. I don't really want to contemplate how I might end this life I've been given, but this book seems to suggest I should give it a bit more thought. I could get morbid here and tell you all my thoughts about how I might spare my loved ones the trauma of dealing with my dying time but it's Tuesday (good enough reason not to get too morbid 😉). But, there’s nothing like retirement and having time on your hands to make you think about what life is all about, what we're supposed to do with it and what we'll leave behind. 

Talking about purpose (was I?) - the plastics thing. I was soldiering on with the challenge while we were at home in the caravan but now we're on the road again it is MUCH more difficult. I haven't given up completely though, I promise.

Saying of the week - “Pessimism is a waste of time!” Lol!