Again Serendipity

First we got the opportunity to stay in Doris flat while we are in Karlsruhe (and the flat is not far away from our sons‘ homes) and next my former company needed somebody urgently for an internal project which takes about 4 weeks (exactly the period we planned to stay in Germany). So, here I am, helping them with my expertice and experience, let my brain work again a little bit more and collect a bit of money for our next adventure. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Indeed: freaky and weird…

Thanks to life, to Doris (again & with big hugs from both of us) and also to Kay!

A VUCA world ?

If you think about your life, environment, climate issues or politics you easily may come to the conclusion that this world is a chaos.

V = volatile, U = uncertain, C = chaotic and A = ambivalent

That’s the only way our MIND can see it, interpret it.

Then just leave your home, go out, take a walk, look closely at nature, enjoy the open sky above you and suddenly you may realize how much bigger the world is than your little mind. How perfectly everything works together. From the very very small to the really huge. Plants, animals, rivers, forests or the night sky above us. There is an unfathomable intelligence behind all that. What a magic this whole creation called Earth is. It’s just our little mind that may call all this a chaos, a VUCA world. Our hearts, when wide open, curious and child-like feel the deeper sense and connectedness of everything, the immense gift of being alive.

And to realize that you don’ t need to travel far or go into a national park, it’s enough to just step out of the house and have a fresh and open look at the most ‘simple things’ just right in front of you. Wow …

So now it’s Bye Bye UK

… even if it’s not 31st October yet 😉 After nearly 3 months visiting England, Wales and Scotland we are now back on the European mainland heading towards Karlsruhe. Today there will be 5 countries we are driving through in one day, must be Europe ^^

So folks, whoever is interested in meeting us again, just send a message 😉

Good bye Northumberland

The last 2 weeks have been a very intense time for us. We had to face some health and personal problems, a crisis that also devastated all our plans we had already for the next 6 months. But like after a heavy storm, when the old plants and seeds all have been destroyed, someday the soil sparkles again with fresh energy and promises new beginnings. We don’t know what we will do the next months. Visiting our family and friends is the only plan we have left for now and then a lot of options … we will see 😉

We found even hills with blooming heather here 🙂

Holy Island

Northumberland has really lovely beaches, many castles and Lindisfarne, an Holy Island that’s even only sometimes an island (during high tide).

PS: This will be my last post for some time. Time for a blogging ‘break’. So long …

Amble – our next sit :)

What shall we say? Again we got a wonderful house & pet sit! This time in Amble in the very Northern part of England, not far away from the coast. Judith and Steve gave us a very warm and friendly welcome dinner yesterday and we enjoyed a nice chat with both. Dexter and Daisy are lovely dogs, Dexter likes it to be more on his own most of the time, Daisy prefers being near us and cuddled.

To top all this: wonderful sunshine today 🙂 So we went off to the beach with both of them. Seems as if we will also enjoy our last sit very much before we start our journey back to Karlsruhe on 22nd of September.

Farewell Scotland and hello again England!

Turned out to be quite tough for us to leave Scotland after nearly 2 months we have spent there, but we will be back in November!

Funny having one foot on the Scottish side and one on the English one 😉

Now it’s Northumberland waiting to be explored and new dogs & house waiting for a sit. We are excited what life will offer us next 🙂

Melrose Abbey, Sir Walter Scott’s home & a lot of flowers

Great day with many amazing impressions, especially Abbotsford, where the famous poet and writer Sir Walter Scott lived about 200 years ago, so inspiring, like feeling a time that passed long ago, but still can be imagined in his great house. And the gardens smelled sooo nice, when we sat on a bench, sunbathing, surrounded by all these colourful flowers 😀

St. Andrews

After saying good-bye to Julie and her lovely dogs, we are on the road to Northumberland where we will have our next sit in 2 days.

St. Andrews was luckily on our way and presented itself with beautiful sunshine weather.

Time is passing…

…so quickly, even in our life. Four weeks ago we started our sit near Forfar and it feels like yesterday.

While thinking about the past weeks I realized that day after day our unusual way of living got more and more usual for us. We developed routines for the daily work, taking care of three dogs feels like we had them since ever. We figured out in which supermarket we should best buy and which food we like and which not. We implemented ‚slow mornings‘ and it felt absolutly usual for us. So we could live another 4 weeks in exactly the same conditions or maybe even for years.

But we chose a life of continuing changes so there is a smile and a tear drop while leaving. Let’s explore the rest of our living path or with the words of Gene Roddenberry:

The final frontier. Our mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

So lucky us that we need to move. To another place, other animals, other surroundings. New routines, new rules. We indeed love our life and I‘m sure it keeps us young and we never get bored…

Unspoken, there are several things we will miss and for sure keep deeply in our hearts. Cuddely dogs waking us up with their wet tongues in the morning. Huge eyes watching us if it’s time for feeding. Demanding paws to get on the sofa. And all the great amenities of the house, the common ones like toilets and shower and the special ones like 70“ flatscreen tv and hot tube.

But we never know what we will explore next…

It’s all about time

After 9 months of travelling and having seen so many countries, beaches and cities, one always comes back to the really really important stuff … having the time to enjoy your day with doing nothing special at all. Just being. That’s definitely the most important part of our world drifting tour.

And having seen a lot of lovely and also not so lovely beaches with mostly very hot temperatures and more or less tourists on it, makes it easier to enjoy a beach walk here in Scotland: no swimming temperatures, about 14°C outside, a little bit cloudy and windy, but therefore you have a 2 miles beach nearly on your own. So peaceful and silent. Only the waves crushing softly on the shore. And you know you have a lot of time … time for all the details, time for being there with all your senses. And that’s much easier for us when it’s not so hot or crowded. And you also have the peace, not being driven to do some more important or cooler stuff, see something different or think about what you want to do next 😉

That’s what we love most! No more hurries like in former days. And nothing we have to see or do, no nasty bucket list that has to be ticked off or any special countries we must see before we die (doesn’t mean we’re done with travelling ^^) … just drift through our precious life time as peaceful, open and mindful as possible, cause it’s all about the time we have 😀

PS: Simultaneously to my post Andy wrote his post and we both didn’t know what the other one was doing and that we both wrote about time at the same time :))))

Beach treasures:

Sunshine! :)

Even if just for a short time, the sun turned everything into a completely different landscape, so off we went into the glens, enjoyed the fresh green and decent purple of the heather again 😀

These rainy days …

After so much lovely weather we have to face really hard times now: about 15°C, a lot of rain and grey skies the last days.

So, what to do?

First of all: Be happy that we don’t live in DumbleBee right now, with all this dampness and about 10°C this morning, wouldn’t feel cosy at all 😉

Second: Enjoying really slow mornings (no hurry to get outside, anyway) … having the first coffee in bed, after some time the second … and the dogs cuddle with us … until its time for some food for all of us at about 12 😉

As the dogs have no ambitions for going on a walk when it’s raining, we just leave the door open to the garden for them ….

So we have for example the following options to spend our day: reading or writing a book (guess who?), playing games on the iPad (guess who?), watching TV together and cuddling the dogs or relaxing in the hot tub, maybe with a nice glas of Gin on Ice 😀

So, after all, not that bad these rainy days 😉

Cloud Atlas

After a day full of rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, sunshine … such a dramatic cloudscape in the evening! Yep, these are moments, I miss my real camera 😉