Boondock Puffins

The first day on the road always feels like the biggest adventure – everything is new and exciting and you have to keep telling yourself that you’re actually ON the trip you’ve been planning. This was certainly us today.

The morning started with Tom making a new record of the amount of time he’ll be bullied into yoga for… a whole 2 minutes and 30 seconds! We are both aware that sitting on the bike for such long stretches over the coming weeks makes our bodies pretty uncomfortable at times and the best way to combat this, as much as Tom doesn’t enjoy admitting it, is by regular stretching. So we’ll start small on this aim and go from there!

Keeping active while travelling on the bike and camping is probably one of the hardest things about motorbike travels. For this trip, we have made an aim to take our running shoes so that we can still make sure that we explore the local areas. So we started out with a run in the forest along the bridle ways – it was a really beautiful area that we’d managed to find.

Our insanely cheap campsite seemed to have only one shower in a weird block that we had to fight for with the local rugby team, but besides it was worth it to feel clean and ready to face packing up.

While we’ve packed up our stuff many, many times, the first pack up of a trip is always a test to see quite where you’re going to put things this time. Despite having a fairly set system, and there are always things that have to go in certain places, there is also the game of Tetris that happens at the end of packing up to fit in little things that seem to have multiplied while travelling.

First time packing up everything on the road was a little nerve wracking to see that everything fitted back in but it was good to get it all sorted.

Onwards to new places!

“Complet” (French for “full”) was the word of the day – more campsites than we thought were booked up. Admittedly, it’s mid August so peak school holidays, but when did everyone start camping?!

The first campsite just looked a bit rubbish, then the next 3 were full. Finally ended up at a great little site run by a lovely French man called Maurice. €7 per person, and we can camp anywhere.

Met up with Tom’s family – one brother and parents… all packed up into the Mazdarati.

Things we were reminded of today:

A Frisbee = excellent addition to the campsite fun.

Yoga with family in a campsite is a sure way to attract odd looks.

John’s mini braai is worth the faff of dragging it camping, and combined with Hazel’s ability to make vegetables on any camping equipment taste great, we had an awesome dinner.

Now we are enjoying the time before bed with Tom sorting the settings on the camera that John had “lost” for a year (in actual fact, he’d left it plugged in to charge in the cupboard and forgotten about it), Hazel knitting, John recovering from falling off a chair that had been close to breaking for a long time, and Sean writing in his notebook.

It’s Sean’s birthday tomorrow! We’ve been trying to come up with things that are good about moving into the second half of your twenties… any good suggestions?!