Stuff is getting crossed off the ‘to do’ list and joining it’s mates on the ‘stuff Nic & Ady feel smug about having gotten sorted’ list.

Today we walked in the sunshine to the post office and got the car taxed. Fingers crossed all the panic buying of fuel has now ceased and we are able to drive over to collect the new car on Sunday and bring it back again. We also posted the letter cancelling the old car insurance. We’ve got a months insurance on the new vehicle, after which the car won’t be used on the mainland again and can go SORN and uninsured 🙂

Also on the list for today was a charity shop run (yes we really did still have some stuff left to give away) and a tip run (yes, we really did still have some stuff left to chuck out! Mostly old carpet). We spent the voucher I was given as a leaving present last year and came all around the UK with us unspent on a new airbed for Ady and I. Our camping mats which we have had for four years and have seen far more use than is fair to expect of a camping mat (many, many camping trips, being beds for the year in Willow and now beds for weeks here in our house) have finally given up. The kids are having double layer of the two camping mats which are okay for smaller lighter bodies when used together and we have a new air bed. I’m not a big air bed fan but it will suffice for the short time we have left sleeping on floors and then be a useful spare bed for the many guests we already have booking themselves to stay on Rum with us.

Also on the list were phonecalls and emails. We solved the dilemma of the chicken house by contacting Calmac ferries to discover that for about a tenner and a phonecall in advance they will take in the delivery of shed for us, bung it on the ferry and even give us a bit of a hand getting off on the other side. That is rather better than the several hundred quid we were being quote for a lorry to bring it over. We rang a local contact on Skye who is The Man for chickens and ducks and placed an order for ten hens, a cockerel, five ducks, a goose and a gander. Still to source a drake and some turkeys. Oh and cats, we want cats.

We reserved our bottled gas to run our cooker, fridge, heating and hot water in the static – just need to pay for that now. We got the vehicle permit sorted to bring our 4 wheel drive across along with our horse box on the ferry (cars are not allowed on the island without a permit).

We had another viewing on our house but it is smaller than they were looking for so it’s not let yet. Ever hopeful for that happening soon though, two viewings this week shows me the agent are doing their job in getting people here to look at it at least.

The list is getting smaller, the time is getting shorter, three weeks today we’ll be there!

We’ve got a Moving Date. We also have a Leaving Date, a Getting On The Ferry Date, a Static Arrives Today Date and various dates inbetween. That’s what happens when your old address and your new address are 600 miles and a ferry trip away from each other and your new address doesn’t technically exist yet.

This morning we spent about an hour with a calendar trying to piece together and work backwards and forward with dates. Having got the static booked for 25th April and needing to arrive before that does we have gone for 20th April which is a Friday and there is a lunchtime ferry crossing which is preferable for getting to the port without having to be up at stupid o clock. Once we’d done that and booked the ferry we started realising how much else we had to do.

So today has been spent finding places to stay on the way up, ringing the ferry port several times to check about various things including carrying petrol, delivery of large and heavy items like sheds. Various emails whizzed through cyberspace between us and Rum, us and suppliers of jerry cans and bottled gas and chicken sheds.

It’s all happening and in progress.

On the home front we had a viewing here yesterday but the feedback was that the house is lovely but the garden too small (they had 3 children). Dragon and Star disproved such theories by spending the entire day today playing out in the garden and loving every minute of it mind you. Late this afternoon we took a phonecall from the agent to ask if we’d be happy to let to someone with 2 cats and a small dog (we have a ‘pets by arrangement’ clause (or should that be claws?)) which we are, so fingers crossed that may result in a viewing in the next few days. It would be great to get the house let out before we leave.

At the weekend we swap our people carrier for a 4 wheel drive. I am looking forward to putting my Crofting car sticker in the window (I got it on my course but have been saving it specially!).

A friend, who is hoping to be having some amazing adventures in the not too distant future, asked for some top tips for wild camping.

Our experience of wild camping was six weeks, in a campervan, in Scotland. It was during September and October, but we saw the season turn fairly dramatically during that time from T shirt weather to snow.

Scottish law on wild camping is different to that elsewhere. We have friends who have traveled in other countries in campervans where all sorts of different considerations have to be made in terms of safety, security and ensuring you are not breaking any actual laws or codes.

Here is a list of the things that I would keep uppermost in mind when planning wild camping or touring based on our experiences:

• Whatever you think you will spent on petrol is less than you will actually spend on petrol. In the highlands petrol stations are few and far between and fuel is very expensive. Going up very steep hills takes far more petrol than you’d expect. We did not budget enough really but that was the case for our entire adventure and meant we had to hang about in places and eat more cheap food in order to keep the petrol tank going. If I was planning that in advance more I would probably research petrol station locations and plot them on a map, consider carrying fuel for top ups and anticipate spending more. All of that said it would have totally taken the fun out of playing Petrol Chicken which Ady and I got hours of edge of our seats thrills from!
• Ditto food. Supermarkets become like mirages in a desert – you start to hallucinate that you can see neon signs for a 24 hour Tesco and can almost taste sausage rolls and Fanta but then you realise that no, it’s just another car coming towards you with it’s headlights on and it being 100 miles and four hours since you last saw another vehicle you’d forgotten what they look like. We had grand plans to catch and hunt our food, maybe sample some roadkill, do a spot of fishing… in the end what we hunted for were places to buy it and what we pounced on were reduced to clear bargains. We still talk with wonder in our tone about the day Ady bought four carrier bags of food out of a Co Op ten minutes before closing time and we dined like kings for two days afterwards for the princely sum of £1.87. My advice here is learn 101 ways with flour and tinned goods. Some gems of meals for us included tinned steak which when topped with a suet and flour pastry lid made a very nice pie, served with tinned potatoes and tinned mixed vegetables it was a great meal. As was tuna fish cakes made with tinned tuna and instant mash potatoes. Our store cupboard included tinned meat, fish, potatoes, fruit and vegetables. Long life milk, tinned rice pudding. Dried foods include pasta, noodles, rice, flour, suet, yeast. We carried a selection of herbs and spices, stock cubes and tubes of tomato and garlic puree. We also had those part baked rolls that you can keep for months. When we could get fresh food we topped up dairy -fresh milk, butter, cheese and fruit and vegetables. It’s a toss up between ensuring you are not carrying so much stuff your weigh down the van but knowing you have sufficient food to eat well and cheaply if you’ve blown your food budget on petrol! Oh and emergency stashes of chocolate are essential. These must be kept topped up at all times.
• Route planning. We had a vague notion that we’d head up the east coast from Inverness (which was the starting point for our wild camping time), go across the north coast and then down the west coast ending at Mallaig. We bought a map, more or less plotted our route and timescales to get from our starting place to our finishing place and then researched all interesting looking places along the way. We had ideas of things we wanted to see – John O Groats, Falls of Shin (for salmon leaping), Applecross, Skye, Smoo Cave etc. If I had plenty of time I would probably have planned this more but then again part of the joy of that period was the sense of adventure and going where the road took us. We had a policy of definitely turning off in the direction of a brown sign if it looked interesting – that led us to Badbea village, a sheepskin rug making place, The Old Man of Storr. I think having an idea of where you are heading for every few days and then making your way there slowly with plenty of time to get distracted is the best idea. Allow more time than you’ll need and then if you find yourself pulling off the road frequently to walk on beaches and gaze at sunsets it doesn’t matter at all.
• On which subject ALWAYS pull off the road to walk on beaches and gaze at sunsets! We had a policy of pulling over as often as possible to make cups of tea and enjoy the view because we could!
• Plan in campsite stops, both into your budget and your route. Depending on your arrangement in your campervan and no matter how well set up you are for us having one night every ten days or so when we pulled off the road and into a campsite and could shower three times a day, plug everything in, empty stuff, fill stuff up and just touch base with civilisation again was great.
• Our biggest stresses really were finding somewhere to empty our toilet and somewhere to fill up our drinking water. In Scotland there are public loos which almost always have drinking water in the sinks – unless it states it is not drinking water then it will be. We had three five litre plastic water bottles which I used to go and fill from the taps. Take a beaker as you won’t fit a five litre bottle under the tap! Ady would be emptying the loo while I was doing this. We never used chemicals in our loo and used loo paper that breaks down quickly so on a couple of occassions we dug a deep hole and buried the toilet contents instead. In an ideal world you’d barely have much to empty, in our world we had four people including two children and with the best will in the world you can only coordinate your toiletting with finding a public loo so much so you will end up carrying some crap (pardon the expression!) Make sure you have plenty of loo rolls and handwash and water containers.
• Cleaning us and our clothes was another challenge. A friend recommended carrying handwashing soap (the green bars), a lenth of washing line and some pegs. We never actually did it but you can string a clothes line between the two front windows by capturing the ends of the line in the windows and peg your pants on it to dry overnight. We had a plastic trug which we used for washing clothes and people. Boil a kettle and ensure you have plenty of flannels. Consider inside and outside clothing if the weather is wet or muddy or you are going to places where you may get grubby then you can just wear outdoor clothes for longer without having to wash them. Ady used baby wipes lots, the rest of us prefered flannels. I washed my hair in four different public loos, if the sinks had hot water I was in there with my beaker, shampoo and a flannel to dry my hair with. Pretend you are Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan in the handdryer scene – it adds glamour to what could otherwise feel like a bag lady experience. Talc is your friend.
• Have stuff to do inside. We had packs of cards, books, a couple of travel games, pen and paper, the radio. Dragon and Star still refer lots to the time spent wild camping as such a happy one when we all sat together and talked lots. Take binoculars, spotter books for identifying birds and other wildlife. Take a camera, watercolour paints or pencils and try and capture your surroundings as best you can with words, photographs, sketches or just drinking in your fill of the view and committing it to memory forever.
• Make best use of everything. We used to charge stuff up using an invertor that ran from the campervan cigarette lighter and charged our phones, kids DSs, cameras, my netbook. I ran the heater in the van and dried our pants and socks down by my feet on the big floor area in the footwell or put towels on the back worktop in the sunshine. We had small solar chargers which we moved around the van to keep charging too. Try and anticipate what your needs might be in advance and research some of the gadgets and gizmos available for this. If you will be without electricity then look at a small generator or power pack if you think you will struggle without it. Check out lighting options – for us the day we bought a really decent battery lantern was a life changing one as we went from 25 little led torches barely lighting the van at night to one big light illuminating everything. Consider things like shaving, electric toothbrushes and anything else you regularly plug in now and work out what you will use instead while traveling.
• Finding your space. For us the wild camping period was the most intense in many ways as we were all together all the time. We’d already been on the road for months so were used to being in one space together all day but still had other people diluting our company for chunks of each day while WWOOFing. We had very few times when we struggled with being in that small space but knowing it could be a potential issue ensured we had ideas to deal with it should it become an issue. It’s tough to flounce out of the room and slam a door on the way if there is just the one room and no doors! Being able to articulate your need to be left alone for a while, or working out ways to understand the needs of the other people with you was very important for us.
• Record it! Take pictures, blog it, mark your location every night on a map, write about it and if the kids don’t fancy writing their own diaries of the adventure then interview them and write it down for them / video them being interviewed. I promise they will thank you for doing so as the memory starts to dim of what you did each day.

In summary I would take the same approach to wild camping as I would for anything else – work out in advance what you are wanting to get from the experience and then work hard to ensure you do. If there are very specific places you want to see then plot your route accordingly. If you are wanting to see particular wildlife or other such experiences then research the best places to spot them and make sure you have plenty of time. If you are hoping for a chilled out relaxing time, pottering along with no rushed feeling and the option of changing plans to see what happens along the way then cover the basics such as ensuring you have enough food and fuel and turn the satnav off and toss a coin every time you get to a junction to see whether you should go left or right.

Isn’t it funny how a little TV show with just four seasons back in the seventies inspired so many people and is still talked of decades later 🙂

Camped in our house with just sleeping bags and one of those little portable TVs with built in video player for company we’re watching a lot of episodes of The Good Life at the moment. It keeps us focussed, amuses us and provides inspiration for our future life.

I can’t wait to brew some peapod burgandy but have yet to decide whether I can pull of Barbara in her dungarees or Margo in her pantsuit best.

A neighbour called round yesterday to catch up with us having noticed we were back after our travels – he was thrilled to hear of our plans and told me how he has his VW campervan lined up to go off travelling in as soon as he retires next year. I told him if he gets as far as Rum he should just get off the boat and call our names loudly – with just 30 people someone is sure to point him in the right direction to find us! He asked if we were either stinking rich or just didn’t like people much when he heard what we were doing, so I explained a bit about our planned low living costs and aims for self sufficiency. He straight away asked ‘oh like on The Good Life?’

We’re spending time with friends this week, like everywhere in the UK we’ve been enjoying unseasonably warm and sunny days for the last couple of weeks and today was spent sitting in friends’ gardens while the children played and the sun shone. I don’t want to live in Sussex any more and we are all very keen to get heading up and across the water but it has been lovely to see the beauty of where we live again and to be making the most of these last days and weeks living here. I guess when life is good The Good Life is wherever you happen to be.

or so… not a weather forecast, a hopeful countdown to arrival 🙂

This week we have:

• Had carpet / flooring fitted in various rooms of our house in preparation for it being rented out again.
• Spent time with family and friends and arranged to head off gallivanting round other family and friends houses in the southern section of the country for the next couple of weeks.
• Totally finished going through our belongings and categorising them / packing them up / sending them to the tip / donating them to charity / giving stuff to friends. We are utterly declutterly, I can’t believe we’re not cluttered.
• Been to London IN A CAR! I know, madness, driving in the capital. We sat in traffic and discussed the Millennium Dome (it will always be that to me, regardless of it now being named after a mobile phone network!) and been all nostalgic to Dragon and Star about how Ady and I visited there, participated in time capsule Y2K stuff, bemoaned the fact that the Blackwall tunnels walls are infact not black at all (close to it, thanks to traffic pollution but not black!) We liked the contrast of driving through London one month before we hope to be driving on Rum. 
• Attended Ecobuild which was interesting, if slightly reeling with greenwash and an over indulgence of plastic tat. The stalls were many and whilst it is hugely heartening to see a huge exhibition centre filled with people selling solar panels, biomass boilers, wind turbines and rainwater harvesting systems it is slightly disheartening to have the stalls manned by leggy blondes giving away glossy brochures and plastic promotional items none of which can be recycled… I’m still processing my feelings on it all really but I suspect my eventual conclusion will be that perhaps I was not the target audience for it. We did talk to some great people representing some great products though and are hopeful of building further contacts as a result.

Spring is fully in the air, tomorrow the clocks go forward and we have all the best of the year ahead of us, I can’t wait to get digging, planting, feel the sun on my bare arms, watch the childrens’ hair go from dark blonde to white blonde again and have somewhere real to refer to when I say ‘let’s go home’.

Is it really such an elusive emotion or state of being?

I’ve found happy in the last few days in various places;

• hanging out washing on the line in the sunshine knowing it will dry and come in smelling sweeter and feeling softer that it ever would hung over radiators or having been tumble dried in a laundrette.
• being snuggled up with both Dragon and Star shortly after waking in the morning. I can’t see further than the end of my sleeping bag yet because I’ve not put my contact lenses in and my bladder is complaining about needing a wee but nothing compares to the giggles and cuddles from both my babies before the day has yet to properly begin.
• a cd I left in a cd player which we’d given to friends was discovered and returned to us. It was one I made for our Bye Then party last year before we went off WWOOFing. The playlist contains songs by artists with Wonder or Wander in their names, or in the lyrics or titles of the songs. An ecclectic mix with Elvis, Wonderstuff, Mike Flowers Pops, Oasis, Status Quo, Simply Red and many other all side by side. We’ve listened to it several times in the car since and it makes me smile with memories of both creating the disc in the first place and of the actual party.
• I’ve done baking! Bread and rolls, snickerdoodles, cookies, flapjacks. Sugary snacks for my family made with my own fair hands. I’ve had flour streaked cheeks and felt the rush of hot air in my face as I open the oven door. 
• I had  a lovely conversation with Star about memories and childhood and how making dreams come true is very important indeed.
• A moment when I realised I am sharing my life with precisely the right people when all four of shared the same sense of annoyance over some people making presumptions and silly remarks. I also enjoyed the reactions of a handful of friends to the same thing.
• A friend ringing the same day I’d decided to ring her and arrange to visit with her usual supernatural instinct – she all but rang to ask ‘when are you coming then?’ as though I’d already asked the question.
• Talking, talking and talking. I love talking (I may have mentioned this before). I love chewing the fat, setting the world to rights, discussing, debating, comparing ideas and thoughts and thrashing things out. It makes me feel alive like nothing else. I’ve done loads of it this last week – with friends, with new people I’d never met before, with people manning stands selling solar panels, with more friends, with Ady, Dragon and Star. It’s been a good talking week.

In the past I’ve been accused (quite rightfully) of placing very high levels of importance on happy, of letting money slip through my fingers, of making silly decisions, of being rash. All true, guilty as charged. 

My default state is happy anyway, I’m not a worrier by nature and I look on the lighter, brighter side of life. But I refuse to subscribe to waiting and seeing, to saving for the future, to doing something I don’t enjoy in the hopes that it pay off at some later stage. What if it doesn’t?

So maybe this blogpost title should not be chasing happy, it should be ‘Finding Happy’. I think that might just be what happiness really is, the ability to look and see it in all the small places. Happy doesn’t come with a map or a guidebook, I think maybe the place to look for it is in the mirror.

of being so very efficient in our first week back is that we have all but finished crossing off everything from our job lists. Our garage and the spare room at my parents is ready with the boxes of things we are taking to Rum. Everything else has been disposed of accordingly.

We have carpet being fitted on Friday and the letting agent coming round on Monday to take photos and start marketing the property for let.

The downside is filling our days again.

So we have made lots of arrangements to spend time with family and friends – we had a meal at one friend on Saturday night, another with family to celebrate Mothers Day on Sunday. Lunch with friends today, a party with more friends on Thursday and a catch up with family on Saturday. We have several stays with southern friends booked for the next couple of weeks and our diary is filling up quickly.

I have enjoyed baking bread and this afternoon made cookies and cakes too – we are off to London for the day tomorrow to Ecobuild where we’re hoping to make some contacts and get some ideas for green building and alternative energy to put into practise once we are building our own home. It will be good to take a packed lunch with us of home baked goodies to keep us going.

On the downside it feels very odd to have no animals to look after other than Star’s pet hamster Humphrey (the most well travelled hamster I know, he’s been to Scotland with us and travelled everywhere we’ve been since he joined our family at Christmas) and no crops in or seeds germinating.

Since we arrived back in Sussex. It has been crazily busy and it feels like we need a holiday despite the fact we’ve not officially worked for over a year!

It’s been lovely to have use of a kitchen this week and I’ve baked bread and made dinners from scratch. The washing machine (which will soon become a distant luxurious memory again, we’ll not have access to such technology on our croft!) has been working overtime as we have dug all our clothes out from storage, worked out what we’re taking with us and washed and dried them all ready to pack for moving. Spring has sprung sufficiently to be drying clothes on the washing line which is always a marker of warmer days.

Today we bought a box of grass seed to repair the lawn where our bantams used to live and we booked the carpet fitter to come round next week. New flooring inside and out!

We have rearranged the static delivery for a couple of weeks later and I’ve been contacting friends to make arrangements to get together with people and take advantage of our slightly longer stay down here before we move for good. I popped into the library (where I used to work) to use the printer today so caught up with some ex colleagues too which is always nice. Star said rather loudly ‘it’s not as organised in here as it used to be when you worked here’ which fortunately made the people who overheard laugh rather than take offence. I’m not sure it was true anyway but I certainly wouldn’t have made that much difference in my 11 hours a week!