How much will I need to go travelling/wwoofing for a year?

I recently came across this blog, called Married with Luggage.  The couple in question have basically sold off almost everything they own (including their house) and are spending the next few years travelling the world.  I'm looking forward to reading a bit more of their blog but what has caught my eye at the beginning is the fact that they seem to go into the financial side of it quite a bit, which is particularly interesting for me.

I have, on and off, semi-calculated bits and pieces of how much I would need to finance taking a couple of years off work.  One big issue is that I don't intend to sell off everything I own so will need to find out costs of storing it (possibly trying to make a decision about where I might end up when I come back and putting it in storage there immediately).  Having just furnished an apartment, mostly with second-hand stuff, I am loath to have to let all of that go and have to start again after having been away for a couple of years.  On the other hand, I will need to carefully consider how much keeping it all in storage will cost, i.e. would it cost me more to keep it in storage than it would cost me to just buy new (to me) stuff when I get back.  And there are, of course, all of the resources I have been building up over the last few years such as reference books, glass jars and other preserving supplies.

As I am now too old to qualify for a year-long working visa in most countries (obviously not an issue in the EU but Canada, Australia and New Zealand are definitely out from this point of view), I will not be able to rely on working for a couple of months to finance the next few months.  So I have to try and figure out everything that will need paying for and have the money saved up in advance.  The main reason I am thinking of heading down under is that my sister is living there.  She is currently in New Zealand, which I am very interested in visiting but will need to move back to Australia in a couple of months due to work.  So I will have a place to stay but I think I'm restricted to six months visitor visa - I'm not checking into the details too much now as it all may have changed in a year or two anyway.  Many of the places I would like to go are within the EU or not far from it so financially, that should be a bit easier as I would, hopefully, be able to pick up occassional bits of work to keep cash flowing a little bit.  However, my feeling is that I need to at least have covered the cost of, well, what I'm leaving behind for the full period I head off for (I would love to be able to stretch it towards two years).  Plus at least the first part of actual travel money.  If I head down under that means a return flight paid for in advance.

Having found the blog mentioned above and read a few comments on some of there posts, it seems like there are lots and lots of blogs out there written by people who are travelling the world.  So that's a whole other genre of blogs to start getting to know in an attempt to inform myself about what I might be in for.  My trip will differ from many in that I mostly want to gain experience farming/homesteading rather than the more touristy aspects of travelling and it will be interesting to see if that is really true or if I will promptly find a whole load of blogs about people who are wwoofing for a year or more.  My list of what I would need to be paying for is not very long at the moment and needs some working on.  Please feel free to leave comments on any suggestions for things that will need to be added to this.

• Travel costs - return flight to/from Australia and/or New Zealand plus ...? 
• Pension cotss - I would like to have enough set aside to be able to continue making a small contribution every month to my pension plan.
• Phone - I will likely try to bring my Irish mobile phone with me and just top it up every once in a while.  Otherwise I'd be relying on call centre/internet cafe type places for communicating.
• Health insurance - in addition to ordinary health insurance while travelling, I will need to find out how to keep my new additional dental plan going, if that is even possible.  As with many of these types of plans, full benefits don't actually kick in until the fifth year (you get increasing amounts of coverage each year till then) and I would hate to lose whatever I've already built up in time and have to start over again.
• Travel insurance
• Storage costs

Nice day

Actually it was a kind of boring, kind of stressful day in work but this evening was nice. Choir practice and the guy who sits behind me became the first person to ask me if I had lost weight. I don't generally like people commenting on my looks too much but sometimes someone can say something simple in such a way that really does boost motivation for keeping going.

I also phoned a self-storage place today to try and get an idea of prices in Germany. At the moment a unit between 4 and 6 sqm cost about 100 euro a month to hire so that's 1,200 to start off my list of things to save for if I want to take a year off work. The price could easily change in the next three years but at least I have an idea. It's low enough that it makes more sense to put everything in storage rather than trying to sell everything and then needing to buy again when I come back I think.

I'd like to buy a map of the world to put up on my sitting room wall. I've meant to do this for a while but thinking of travelling gives me even more reason to get one. I don't think I'll go too far from home but I would like to try the following at least:

Germany (might ease myself into things by getting some wwoofing experience in a country and language I'm familiar with but use it as an opportunity to spend time in the Black Forest again)

France (if I decide to travel for a full year then I will try to spend half of that time in France, it's about bloody time I learned to speak it properly. Ideally I'd like to wwoof in areas I haven't been before at the beginning and then possibly somewhere near where my sister lives for a month or two).

Italy (apart from one day in Venice I've never been)

Spain (possibly just for a long holiday rather than wwoofing - I would really like to see Granada and have never been to Barcelona or Madrid either (getting snowed in to Madrid airport for a day doesn't count))

New Zealand (if my sister is still living there and I haven't visited her before then)

Siberia (have always wanted to go there)

Of course this all makes it seems like I need to spend a lot of time learning languages in the next couple of years but I think I might just forget about Italian and Spanish other than picking up a phrase book before actually going there. I can say please and thank you, which are the important things. I did French in school and have done various evening courses over the years but never really got very far and just need to actually be living there and speaking it I think. I can manage if I'm on my own and absolutely have to and I need a few months of that really. And I suppose I could drag out the Russian books and start learning the alphabet again as well. Maybe I could actually open 1001 Russian Verbs this time round!

Plans

At the moment the pressure of debt is driving me a bit mad and, as these things often go, making me want to spend, spend, spend. It occurred to me today that if I have a goal in mind (other than the admittedly very nice but nonetheless somehow kind of intangible seeming goal of being debt free) perhaps it might make it easier for me to wrap my head around still needing to pay off my loan for another nearly two years. I was thinking six months or a year off work would be nice. So, for my 38th birthday (goodness gracious, I'm getting rather old!) I am aiming for having no debt and enough money saved to pay rent (or storage) for six months or a year and for me to go off and travel the world. Two years to clear loan and a little bit more than a year to save after that. In that time I will also work on losing weight and getting fit. Apart from all the other really good reasons for doing that, smaller clothes take up less space and if I'm going to be living out of a rucksack that is going to be very important. Of course I've told my sister I will try to save enough to go and visit her in New Zealand next year so will have to see if I manage that. I think if I had actually saved enough to go to New Zealand next year I'd be tempted to just keep it towards a much longer trip in a couple of years. But on the other hand sometimes you've just got to go for it and do things. Who knows if she'd even still be living there then.

I also feel hopelessly inadequate for the kind of life I want to be leading and am really feeling the pressure of not knowing how to do stuff. I'm learning all the time and have done so many things in the last few years that I wouldn't even have dreamed about doing beforehand that I know it can be done but I just feel like time is slipping by and I'm not really going where I want to be. So, if I had a long time to travel I would mostly do so by WWOOFing, I think. That way I could also get a bit more first-hand knowledge of lots of things I might not otherwise get to experience.

Mostly, a lot of the time, I just think I need a boyfriend. This boyfriend would of course be wonderfully talented and able to teach me lots of the things I want to do but wouldn't, obviously, ever make me feel like he was better than me just 'cos he could actually do all that stuff already and better than me.

Sigh. I wrote most of that about a week ago and most of it still applies although following the harvest thanks celebration I attended at the weekend I have allowed myself to feel proud of what I have achieved this summer (even if a good part of what I achieved was simply mistakes to learn from - I try to look on it from the point of view that I'd never have learned anything if I hadn't made mistakes). I know I still have so much to learn but although it is going more slowly than I feel like it should, it's going at about the level I can handle and that's okay.

I need to be very careful with money for the next couple of months though and really, really need to get my arse in gear and do my tax return. Which should take care of the credit card bill which has crept up on me again. I am also due to get a bonus in work in a couple of months time and have already decided that that money will go towards buying a proper cooker rather than into a savings account with a view to clearing my loan faster. I have a fixed rate loan so would be penalised for making extra payments off it and although I do want to start working on building up savings so that by the time I have the last six months of it to pay off, I will have enough to cover those payments already in savings, I also need to balance that desire with the other things which I need. And after having been hampered to a certain extent in this year's preserving efforts by the lack of a proper cooker, it has moved up the priorities list somewhat.

On a positive note, after a good start to weight watchers, I had a few weeks where I stayed the same and then was up and then didn't make it to class at all but I went back again yesterday and I was a bit more down than I had put up so overall I'm now 4.3 kilos (that's almost 9.5 lbs) down since 13 August. I've worn my jeans twice now (although they are uncomfortable after eating a big meal and the real test will be how well they fit after washing!) and need to put elastic into my work trousers because they are falling down and I only have one pair in the next size down and need something to keep me going until I get past that. If I need to I will buy a new pair of trousers but I'd rather try and wait another few weeks and be able to use something I already have. I've been enjoying making some soups this past week too, which I've been having for dinner when the evenings are a bit cooler but am still able to eat plenty of fresh tomatoes for lunch as well. It's a good food time of year.

Photos

Finally reclaimed camera and recharged it so can let you see some photos of the place I was in Germany.

These are the steps leading from the stone house I was staying in up to the hut they lived in. Steep enough, one of these steps was more than halfway up to my knee.

This is the path from the top of those steps over to their hut (red building)

Okay, bear with me, not so good with this whole photo thing. This one is the view from outside the stone house - the town looks serene enough from there but the sound really was something else.

Here we have part of the path up to the toilet - this is the part which steps were built into the day I was there. When I arrived, it was just steep - if you look at the plants beside where the steps are you can get an idea of the gradient.

This is the most of the rest of the path taken from up at the toilet. I thought I was getting a good shot of how the path sloped from left to right as well as up/down but it hasn't really come out that well and just looks like a crooked photo. The tree trunk on the left, I assume is probably fairly upright so that gives an idea.

At left the toilet.
At right, the view from said toilet.

And not forgetting the pile of wood which I carried a lot of down from the entrance to the hut and then spent a few hours pulling nails out of. It looks like such a small pile but it didn't feel like it.

And finally, the shower, for those of you interested in how that worked. The sun is shining right through so you can't really see the hose and nozzle but I think you can see the bag okay.

Misadventures in WWOOFing - ah, it wasn't that bad really

Am back in Ireland now for over a week and wishing I was somewhere else. After such a long holiday (17 days if you include the weekends - haven't had a holiday that long for 15 years) I thought I'd be full of energy and get right back in to the swing of things but I'm really struggling. I'm going down to Clare for the Irish Seedsavers Apple Day this Sunday so maybe getting out of Dublin again for the day will help.

So, to the WWOOFing, basically the whole farm thing didn't really work out. For a start it wasn't a farm, it was two 21-year-old students who live in a hut on the side of a hill overlooking the town they go to college in (and it was really loud, even just the noise levels from the town were very stressy). And then I'd say I probably have a bigger garden than they did and they'd harvested all their herbs weeks ago so bang went my thoughts of maybe learning a bit about that side of things. They were just looking for help with building and renovations. While I accept that that is part and parcel of what needs to be done on a farm and also that I'm at fault because I didn't ask ahead of time what exactly their setup is and what I'd be doing (didn't want to put myself off really) I do think they should have volunteered some more information and give me an idea of what I'd be doing and what to expect. Like for example the fact that it's nearly an hour's walk uphill to get there and there's no access by car. That there was no running water or electricity. Composting toilet was on a platform above a four meter deep hole (good from the point of view of safety that they covered the hole over but nonetheless a bit scary to use) and at the top of a very steep trail. I’m all in favour of composting toilets but they also told me I only needed to use it for..em..number twos and that if I needed to pee I could just do it anywhere so long as it wasn’t too close to the house. Not terribly hygienic. And a bit wasteful to be honest - I’d have preferred to be given a bucket to pee in and asked to add it to the compost every day, at least then it’s not going to waste. And I wasn't too keen on the pet rats either to be honest.

I arrived at the train station to be met by this very young guy with a bike and he said we'd be cycling for about 10 minutes and then we'd have to walk and it'd take maybe 20 minutes and then expressed surprise that I had a big bag with me (and I was so proud of myself that I only had one bag with me, a rucksack and not the big giant type!). I explained to him that I'd injured my foot a year ago and had gotten very out of condition but he didn't seem too bothered. Finally made it up there (it probably does only take a very fit person about 20 minutes, but for me it was twice that). Anyway, all that walking uphill and down on the first day more or less did my foot in again so I worked for the half day I arrived and full day the next day (carrying wood down the hill to outside their hut, spent hours pulling nails out of it and also spent a few hours sawing trees into logs so yer man could build steps into some of the steeper trails - all the time thinking "so much for three to four hours work in return for learning about farming and a quiet country holiday"!) and all the time pretty scared because all of the trails around the place were so narrow and steep (have I mentioned before I'm not too good with heights? I didn't even have walking sticks with me, which while not practical to use while hauling wood, would at least have given me a measure of security sometimes). I have some photos but my brother has run off with my camera again so will post them at a later stage.

So, I told them I wasn't going to stay any longer, mainly because I didn't want my foot to get even worse and partly because, as one friend said to me the other night, "when you're in your thirties, you not as bothered about just saying you've had enough". They didn't seem bothered and when I said I felt he'd probably get work done just as quickly without me agreed. All in all a disappointing experience but I think I will try again and next time make sure to be very careful to find out what's in store for me.

And what does one do when standing in a train station in Germany and not needing to go home for another 12 days? It went something like this -

Me to train station person: when are the trains to Lübeck-Travemünde? There are three stations there? I'll check which one and be back in a second.

Runs to telephone to ring friend: H., did you move into your apartment at the weekened? (H. only moved up there in June and had been living in a guesthouse while looking for a place to live)

H: Yes, I did.

Me: Okay, if I come tonight will you have a place for me to stay?

H: Oh. It would be my greatest pleasure to see you.

Me: Okay, which station is it? Thanks, see you later.

Runs back to counter: It's the Hafen station. Great, train leaves in two minutes? On my way.

Made it onto the platform with about half a minute to spare, got onto train (the holiday ended up costing me quite a bit more than planned but was worth every cent) and just about six hours later walked into the restaurant on the Baltic Coast where H. was working. Great to see him again and I stayed there for a week. There are not many people you could just turn up like that and be sure of a welcome and I am very lucky to have a friend like that. I had to hang around until midnight as he had to work until then but by nine it wasn’t too busy so at least he was able to come out and sit with me for a while. And to cook for me - I was really hungry although I offended his cook’s sensibilities by asking for a Bauernfruhstuck, which is basically fried potatoes with ham and eggs - to me the ultimate in comfort food after a long, tiring day. To him, an insult to be asked to cook it. Ah well.

I stayed with him for a week, although he was working from 9 every morning and usually until about 10.30 at night. Still I had a good time, sleeping late, pottering around, going to the market to buy loads of nice food, cooking for myself (or going to the restaurant to let him cook dinner for me), drinking lots of different teas, listening to the radio (found a good classical station among other things and there were loads of programs about Pavarotti on which I really enjoyed), going to the cinema, I found a wool shop and spent loads of time knitting. I made him a lovely scarf to wear when it starts to get colder there but forgot to take a photo of it. I also went to Lübeck one day and to Hamburg another day. Wasn’t too keen on Lübeck but Hamburg is lovely. I’m very tempted now to try and move back to Germany but I’m trying to wait and see if that’s just a post-holiday feeling or if it will last a bit longer.

So, after all that I went back down to Frankfurt and spent the last four or five days with my friend there who I had stayed with at the beginning of the holiday. I had a fantastic holiday and think things worked out well in the end because I would never normally have taken two weeks off and just spent them visiting friends and chilling out. I think that amount of time sort of makes you feel obliged to “do” things but it was exactly what I needed.

One Local Summer - Week 10

Still no photos as I still haven't managed to retrieve my camera from little bro. However, I did finally manage to roast that chicken and it's delicious. Pulled the rest of the meat off the bones today and am making stock with the carcass, which is also a good excuse to use up the last few veg in my fridge before going away. I'm off to Germany to WWOOF for two weeks. Heading over on Friday and will be singing on Saturday in Limburg with choir - we're singing Dream of Girontius again with the German choir who came over to Dublin in May for a performance of it here. Have the rest of the weekend to spend with friends and then on Monday will be heading off into the unknown to spend two weeks on a farm with people I've never met before. I'm trying not to think about it too much as I think I'll just get nervous. I know it's going to be physically challenging as well as I'm so unfit but I'm planning to bring much gusto with me and hope that helps.

So, to my local meal this evening. Cold roast chicken with fresh garden peas and chutney.

Chicken - from Coolanowle (60 miles)
Green tomato and lemon chutney - McNally's Farm (30 miles)
Peas - from my back garden. Yum.

Is this the last week of OLS? I can't remember. However, I expect that I'll be eating a fair amount of local in Germany - it'll be interesting to see what kind of a set-up it turns out to be. As far as I could tell from the description they grow mostly herbs. I'm hoping the onion harvest is already underway though because I remember Zwiebelkuchen (onion cake) from around this time of year with great fondness but can't quite remember if it was a bit earlier or later than this.

I'm not sure how much I'll be posting until after my return - bis zum nächsten Mal!