Space, moods and tombs

It’s 6.30am and Kelty and Taran are still asleep in our snug campervan.  We managed to get a reasonably early night after travelling from a wax museum in Ioannina (https://www.vrellis.gr/ep/contact.html) where a local history teacher Pavlos Vrellis devoted 13 years of his life singlehandedly creating lifesize waxwork scenes from 1950's schoolbook Greek history.  Lots of blood dripping faces and mean-eyed Ottomans you couldn’t help but feel that Pavlos was very angry about the Turks. Then a shopping trip to H & M where Taran chose a ‘smart outfit’ for the trip.  It was a lot of fun seeing him change in and out of various shapes and styles of clothes.  It was an unnecessary extravagance as it is unlikely he will wear in the heat on our trip but he felt very strongly about it and H & M hasn’t broken our budget and up until now he has been living in very worn and few t-shirts to avoid piles of washing.  I think I was also paying for the experience of seeing him for the first time taking care over his appearance.  Very sweet!  Picture below…

Kelty and Taran were on the top bed last night but all changed at 2am as Taran complained about Kelty snoring so he moved down to join me.  I’m now trying to make a coffee, chase an annoying fly that got stuck in here for the night while not waking up the boys. Moods are everything on this trip so the more sleep everyone gets the better the moods and the better the day ahead. But the desire for my morning coffee also takes a rather selfish precedent over letting them sleep so I attempt to make a coffee without waking them.  But it is not easy.  The coffee is outside so there is a noisy clunky door to open, the milk is under the laundry sack in the fridge which snaps loudly when opened, the mug is in a cupboard now full of noisy crackling bags of pasta and I have to practice more than a contortioning yoga position to get my hand near it to wrench it out but the idea of that first cup of coffee spurs me on.  In fact van organisation is more like an extreme yoga workout – stretching and twisting to get stuff into order.  Everything has its place.  I’m certainly going to get an A* in Space Management by July.

As well as the practical management side of van life, there is also the mental management.  Just because we are away in beautiful places, seeing and experiencing so much doesn’t mean it is always ‘amazing’.  We are the same people with all our same personalities with our good days and our bad days, days when we want to climb a mountain and days when we feel like doing nothing plus we are living in an extremely small space so you are very aware of all states of mind very quickly. But as a trio who are seldom apart we are learning to negotiate and navigate through each day and each mood as it is rare that we are feeling the same on the same day at the same time – but when we are it is ‘amazing’.  So when I am squishing the duvet again into a small corner cupboard, washing up in cold greasy water, showering in a muddy outdoor hut, looking for an elusive clean pair of socks, waking up hitting my head on the fridge I am learning to find this funny and not something that makes me want to get on the next plane home.  I’m learning to flip the mood switch if some annoyance is unnecessarily kicking in.

I write this sitting by a river somewhere in Northern Greece where we parked up last night (recommended by our new app Camp4night), Spotify is playing a ‘road trip compilation’, I’m surrounded by the smell of wild thyme, birds are singing, mountains are all around, the rain has gone and I can hear Taran totally engaged in a maths lesson with Kelty.  

Later on we went to visit one of the most important tombs in Greece where the remains and golden treasures of Philip II were found, the father of Alexander the Great. This was found in the 1970s and was still intact.  It is fascinating and just incredible to think how old these objects, bones, armour, pots, jewelry and buried belongings are.  The man who found them describes how overwhelmed he was when he entered the tomb.  

And there were shades of that for us.  History alive!