JackieP
Free Member
So, I'm on the boat, leaving the comparative safety and ease of the Isle of Man and hitting the road once more. Destination, Heysham near Lancaster, onto to Fife in Scotland to meet up with family and friends for a couple of weeks and then all the way downhill to Portsmouth where I catch the boat to Spain on the 10th of October.
I've had a lovely summer, catching up with friends and family here. It's been eventful: I cooked eight hundred meals in three days for a local festival, I did my first ever a'cappella music set (and sang to three people and two children doing wheelies on bicycles. I became a vegan (no-one more surprised than me on that one), and, following a routine gastroscopy and endoscopy procedure was told I was dying and then told I was not. So yes, it's been interesting.
One of the wonderful things about being on home soil is access to unlimited clean water, internet, tools and friends who speak the same language as me. That time and those opportunities haven't been wasted. In the three months I've been back, I've repainted the outside of the van, fibre glassed the roof, fibre glassed and repainted the bumper that i managed to remove when I drove into the Steam Packet ticket booth in Liverpool after 8000kms trouble free driving elsewhere, added a 1500 watt inverter, painted the inside pink (yes really), added more fairy lights than they have in Blackpool, Painted and stencilled my lino floor, made myself a new bed out of a lump of memory foam with the help of an electric carving knife, made new bed covers and blankets and throws, added LED motion sensor strip lights in all the cupboards and coated all the metal underneath with some black paint described as a total solution but I call it the Devil's jizz. And finally, I repainted my step and added a new mat with some brand spanking new bottle tops to replace the ones worn down by years of scraping feet.
And I got a chance to spend time with my husband Bil who I separated from in the same way I met him, in love. We've still the best of pals and he's been a good friend to me while I've been here. We share another dog and a cat and it's been so good having them around - The cat even came to stay with me in the van for a while.
So it's been busy and frankly, on this four hour boat journey i'm glad of the rest. I think it's the first time I've sat down for this long for a while and it's this peace and quiet that's prompted me to write this. I've never written a forum 'blog' before but I'm going to try and write one now. It won't be frequent especially as time goes on as one of the things I leave behind on my journey is internet access of my phone. I love having while I've got it but I do so look forward to those months of living in perfect ignorance of what is going on in the rest of the world. I'll update it when I have wifi and when I have something interesting to say or maybe even if I don't have anything interesting to say.
My plan, vague as it is, is to travel down through Spain and enter Portugal further north than usual and slowly potter my way down south, spending a couple months around the Barrao area with some dear friends before heading off into Spain and on to Morocco. I've said before that I would do this - twice in fact - and it's never happened. Once I get into Portugal I never want to leave, but this time I am determined and part of the reason for me writing this is that I have some accountability to you lot to make sure I shift my ass and actually make it happen. It will be good for me to move outside where I'm comfortable - I know this - I"m just not very good at making it happen.
So that's it for now. A couple of hours to go sitting on my butt and then that steady uphill run into Scotland.
Till next time…