New Year’s resolution

I need to blog more. This year I’ve been to:

1. Paris (🇫🇷) for New Year’s celebrations, followed by a trip to Italy to see Milan (🇮🇹), Bologne (🇮🇹), and Venice (🇮🇹) before returning to Paris and from there to home
2. Zürich (🇨🇭)
3. Several towns and cities in the Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions of France, including Nantes (🇫🇷) and Angers (🇫🇷), as the main caregiver for my mother who was also on that trip
4. Confuzzled, Birmingham (🇬🇧)
5. A 1080 km cycle along the Rhine, taking me through (amongst other places) Hoek van Holland (🇳🇱), Rotterdam (🇳🇱), Randwijk (🇳🇱), Duisburg (🇩🇪), Köln (🇩🇪), Kestert (🇩🇪), Worms (🇩🇪), Hochstadt (🇩🇪), Lichtenau (🇩🇪), Village-Neuf (🇫🇷), and Basel (🇨🇭), before making a rapid series of Rhine crossings both ways, taking a few wrong turns, going up the worst possible not-a-mountain Swiss hill I could’ve chosen and being picked up by my friend from Zürich to hang out at his place and take a day trip to try (and fail) to reach the source of the Rhine near Andermatt (🇨🇭)
6. California (🇺🇸), based mainly in Davis, including a multi-day road trip along the I-80 to Salt Lake City (Utah), returning via Reno (Nevada), camping one night more than expected in an unincorporated village near Redding whose name I can’t remember because the Carr Fire had literally begun a few hours before it diverted us to a much longer route to the next stop — McKinleyville — and a few days after that visiting Eureka as we returned to Davis, having a few day trips to Sacramento, and then seeing the Pacific coast of San Francisco
7. Berlin (🇩🇪), because I’ve moved here to escape from the UK
8. Cambridge (🇬🇧) (where I used to live) and Portchester (🇬🇧) (near family and old friends, and it has a castle)
9. The Mediterranean coast of Spain, in particular the Orihuela Costa (🇪🇸), Cartagena (🇪🇸), and El Castell de Guadalest (🇪🇸)
10. Helsinki (🇫🇮), where I was for New Year’s, but I didn’t have anyone around for the celebrations this time, and my flight home the next day was too early in the morning to be worth going out alone.

I need to finish off my original series of blog posts on the topic of travelling around Europe for a month on an Interrail pass just before the Brexit referendum vote before I do these in any detail.

 

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A quiet Monday

We haven’t actually travelled anywhere yet.
Or to clarify, the journey we created this blog to document is on an awkward hold.

As I write, I am sitting near Ben in the living room of his mum’s place in Portsmouth. I got here on the 29th of December, after spending a month with my family in Davis, California.

I quit my job as a UNISON organiser back in November, and have little external to show for it.

I was burnt out. You could call me a professional loafer now if you wanted. It’d be accurate. I’m running on savings from my time spent working there, and they are running thin.

I have tons of goals:
– Complete my coaching diploma with the Coaching Academy. I enrolled in it 4 years ago, while working in a call centre. I got the tuition paid off, but I never did the actual work. The time has come, and I’m on it.
– Enrol in and complete the Forrest Yoga teacher training which is taking place in Peterborough in July/August of this year. I can’t afford it, though. So I struck a deal with my family, that they’d pay for it if I complete the next goal:
– Lose 16kg by May 15th, and keep it off until Christmas. This one, I am working on through alternate day fasting, which seems a healthy and relatively painless way to get reliable results. I’m on my second fast day currently, and leaning heavily on a great Facebook community I found.
– do the 7 minute workout every day until I have the strength and guts to do the Military Fitness that is run by Ethos, the hot yoga sports studio of my choice, and then start doing that (and maintain the 7m workout…) so far Ben and I have done 2 days, but haven’t yet completed it for today.

What’s novel and rather embarrassing is that none of these goals is focused on service or contribution (though the certificates will help with that later). My focus on contribution in the past is why I’ve gone and burnt myself out.

So what of the travel that is this blog’s raison d’etre? I keep my faith that it will happen. We’ve signed up on workaway.info and although we indicated immediate availability, we haven’t really looked over the past few days. Ben wants to go back to Cambridge to laser cut a table for his mum’s birthday present and get our affairs in order. I need to find a part time remote job, because the cost of workaway may be minimal but I still need funds for travel etc.

I worry that we are in “failure to launch” mode, as Ben is nervous of the travelling and he tends to procrastinate on things that make him nervous. I hope he won’t mind me saying that. I’m procrastinating too, because, money. And because I have all these other goals I’m trying to kickstart for now. I will blog on those until we finally hit the road.

Until next time,
Sadie