We haven’t been out very much and the featured photo is from Lucerne when we climbed a hill in the city.
Now that we are settled back in London we don’t really feel like we are travelling. In fact, we’ve hardly been out in the last three days. It’s a big advantage of the home exchanges that you don’t feel like you are wasting money by not going out all the time. Having been to this apartment in Croydon a few times we almost feel like it is a second home. Here in England we know what food to buy and how the public transport works. We’ve been on day trips to many places in the near vicinity.
We have gone home early from a couple of trips, once in China when it got very cold indeed and Stephen had a head cold and couldn’t go out, and from the Czech Republic when he had a seizure.
Otherwise, we are quite used to being away for two or three months at a time. We have a home base for the majority of the time, such as when Stephen was teaching in China or now when we have home exchanges, or the caravan/motorhome which is like a home in that you can always sleep in your own bed and have your own fridge and kitchen wherever you are. None of this living out of a suitcase for weeks, which was the downside on our trip over to Europe. Still, for that trip we packed as lightly as we could, leaving a lot of our stuff here in the apartment at Croydon. I didn’t even take the laptop.
My camera bag for the 3.5 months is packed with one smallish camera with a ‘travel zoom’ and a small extra lens for low light shooting, plus the GoPro. This is good for me as I usually take at least two cameras.
I’ve been using the iPhone for a lot of the photography as my small, compact camera. The downside of that is that I put it into landscape mode for photos most of the time and my iPad and laptop automatically correct if I hold it the wrong way up. But in the blog, photos are sometimes upside down. And I’m not actually sure which way up it should go. It’s difficult to check when my software automatically shows it the right way up.
We’ve tried to think of special highlights from our Europe trip, but there are so many that it feels like most of the places we went to were special, or had special moments, such as a meal at a restaurant, or a particular place we went to. So glad we have the blog to jog our memories.
Something else we have noticed as consistent wherever we have been. We’ve seen a lot of the countryside when travelling on trains in Europe and it was consistently green and lush, despite the very hot July we’ve just experienced. There are wildflowers as well. This is so different to Australian summer where it is so dry and parched in the farmlands, even in Western Australia when we don’t have a drought.