Everyday life on the road
Traveling everyday still feels exciting. Your backyard changes every day. In the morning you wake up with an everchanging view. There are new challenges to be mastered daily. Problems of all kinds need to be solved. One challenge for us: On the one hand, we want to see as much as possible from Europe. On the other hand, we want to gain more knowledge about filming and talk to many different people about their ideas and opinions about the EU. Even thought we did not start this journey with the intention to spend a one-year vacation, every one of us has his and her own ideas about what they want to integrate in their everyday life on the road.
Tim likes to enjoy nature’s beauty by sitting at a peaceful spot in beautiful surroundings. Other times, he does yoga, plays frisbee with me or soccer with Felix or is flying the drone to take amazing shots. Felix could be defined as a hobby photographer who enjoys walking around with the camera to find spots with the best perspective. Further, he likes climbing up hills to have great views, is pottering in the van or calls friends for a little chat. I like to go for runs in the morning to enjoy the rising sun and the fresh air in peace and silence. Plus, I like doing yoga with Tim, hiking up hills with Felix or writing blog posts to keep our friends and families updated.
That’s a lot, as you can see. There’s that question popping up to us that needs to be discussed (discussing, a hobby the three of us share): How to combine all our needs and wishes?
A routine. As the days start to get shorter and shorter since we are driving into the winter season, we decided to get up at 8am every morning. There’s not too much to do for us as soon as it’s dark and cold outside. So, we are getting up at a decent time to use the hours of natural light, to have enough time for traveling around, meeting people, getting to know all our filming equipment better and to pursue our hobbies.
Breakfast time, lunch, coffee and cookies, dinner. Highlights of the day (as you can read here, we are big fans of food) – a routine even set in here. Between meals, the rest of our life takes place, for example discussing our life and solving the big problems of the world.
Part of that routine forms our goal of at least getting one interview for our documentary on camera per week. If we are not running into people randomly (which happened, you can read about how we met Nick here), we ring random people’s doorbell, start a conversation and eventually lead them to our project. It works perfectly fine – read about a great example with welcoming Bridget here.
We tried this routine for almost a week now – not too long, I know – but so far, it’s working out well. It feels nice to have an everyday mixture of vacation- and routine-life feelings. Plus, you get a lot of things done and every one of us has the chance to spend some time individually. Taking some time for yourself is an important thing, I guess, since we are already spending so much time together.
Furthermore, we realized that we underestimated the time you need for regular everyday stuff. Including cooking, washing dishes and washing ourselves. About the last one you can read more here. Plus, tasks like refilling our water tank, get rid of our waste water, refuel and find a place to stay overnight and for the rest of the day, take their time as well. As far as we can judge, we’d say we found a solution to this challenge. We are now living with an everyday routine – far away from boredom or stress.
Us in Cornwall.