Aaargh…it’s so frustrating right now…

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An injury at Turtle and an insurance case which draws in lengths . An icecold bedroom every morning. The uncertainty about what will happen in our lives in a little while (there are less than 3 weeks to take-off now). A back-injury, a broken oil-heater, the ending of 4 years intense study. And a lot more….

Right now everything is pretty exhausting!

We won’t hide from the fact that we are excited. We are. Definately! In 3 weeks both of us have a totally empty calendar and the freedom to sit behind the wheels and drive whereever we want to. It’s our big dream that comes alive now, after more than a year.

And we get SO many positive announcements, help, donations and support – it’s fantastic! Close friends and old acquaintances, customers, clients and curious strangers shows up to our presentations. Radio and newspapers wants to follow us and we’re soon having a big goodbye-party with family and friends in a whole weekend.

But…

Right now everything feels sluggish and it is very difficult to find the motivation to get up in the morning these days.

Challenges are enough at the moment

Mettes everyday life is filled up with preparations for her final psychotherapist-exam, taking care of her parttime job as a replacement at Aalborg Municipalitys Healthcenter AND have the last, final therapies with her clients in her own bussiness. Oh well, and then move out from the office.

And me? Well, I only got half as much work as a potato-sorter (AKA “foodinspector”) as I was promised, since Denmark was hit by the wetest autumn in 16 years, and the potatoharvest and my work therefore had to be cancelled over and over again. Since it is temporary work, there’s only earnings the days, where I’m working.

When I managed to find an other temporary job, Turtle was injured and had to be send to workshop. It means that I can mainly work in bicycledistance, and that reduces my earning opportunities significantly. On top of that, I got a lumbago in left side of my back and suddenly turned in to a cribbled, helpless, 80-year-old man.
So relieving Mette from washing clothes, grocery shopping and cooking, so she can focuse on exam etc. suddenly turned in to Mette acting as a nursing assistant, while I can’t even move a plate or take a step without getting a pain all the way up through my back.

Pills and exercises for the back. We both hope, that Morten will soon be back on track.
Turtle is also damaged

And the thing about Turtle? Well, we were hit from behind a little month ago, and even though the driver of the other car acknowledged his fault at the accident site and we got all the insurance informations from him and reported it the same evening, we have now fought with him ever since to get the injuries covered, which is approximately 1.300 euros, because he won’t reply the inquiries from his own insurancecompany and (of course) they wont/can’t do anything without him. So even though he has a liability insurance, we’re stuck on the injury our selves, unless he answers the insurancecompanys inquiries. The lesson here: A liability insurance is worth nothing, if the guilty part is amoral enough not to answer when his insurancecompany contacts him. So we probably need to invest in an comprehensive insurance to Turtle, even though we didn’t think, it was really worth it on such an old car….

On top of that, we have experienced, that Turtles oil-heater (which is supposed to keep us warm at wintertime) can’t be repaired, and therefore has to be replaced. That is also an expense at approximately 1.300 euros.
And now when we’re already talking about injuries at Turtle, then one accident comes rarely alone, so of course there were also a muffler and a thermostat, that had to be repaired, now we were at it – luckily Mettes brother, who is a mechanic, could help us with this. But it also had to be coordinated, so all of the repaires could be fit in to the calendar.

The challenges with Turtle has also meant that the to latest presentations in Aabybro and Fjerritslev had to be done by public transport and a borrowed car (which also had to be coordinated). And since we would like to make some good presentations, we have a lot of props with us, which therefore also had to be towed back and forth. Not quite as easy as when we have just parked Turtle right outside(!) 🙂

Ouch! It doesn’t look like much, but it still cost around 1.300 euros to fix Turtles bumper, light and more.
Wintertime

And then it has become November…. It means that we don’t have running water in the allotment anymore, either in the faucet or in the toilet, so washing up or going to the toilet quickly becomes a bit more troublesome than what we’ve been used to. The toilet can’t help rinsing as many times as we have to pee during a day, but we found an easy solution; now both of us pee outside in the bush instead of using the toilet.
For drinking and cooking we have a 5 and a 10 liter water dunk, which is relatively quickly emptied and then it’s over to the church a few hundred meters away to replenish.

Fortunately, we can comfort ourselves in the fact that we have a well-functioning kitchen with fridge, oven and stove here in the allotment hut – or .. at least until that day a few months ago, where we made baked potatoes in the oven and suddenly, in the middle of cooking, it broke down and we haven’t been able to start it ever since. We haven’t had the energy to do something about it yet. We just got our little round Omnia oven to put on the gas stove, from Turtle and then we cook in it or in a pot/on a pan. Exactly what we do when we live in Turtle – now we just have a broken gas oven in addition, that we also need to fix before moving out of the allotment hut in just 3 weeks.

Our rescuer; the Omnia oven. A brilliant invention, that ensures that we can also get baked potatoes even when the oven is broken.

The fact that it became November also means that the cold increases and since we almost live in a house of cardboard, it is literally ice cold outside the duvet every morning (we have been below 0 degrees for the first time). We have a gas heater, but for safety reasons it does not run at night so in the morning, we should first turn it on and let it run for half an hour before it feels okay to go around in the living room/bedroom without clothes. And even then, all our clothes, the chairs we sit on and the cups we hold in our hands are ice cold! This makes it difficult to get out of the duvet in the mornings…..

It takes time to heat up the hut when this stove is our only source of heat.

Whether it’s the cold that has made its impact or it’s just fate trying to tell us something is not known for sure, but the fact is that Mette woke up on Tuesday morning with bladder infection! For the 20th time in her life or so. A swaying, cutting pain when she pee was the reality when she sat down with her pants down her ankles in her favorite “pee-bush”. Off the heck, I’m just saying!
If you’ve ever tried it, you know, just like Mette, how it burns in the nerves all the way to your fingertips when your urine leaves the body.
So who of us were the most pitiful, me with my lambago or Mette with her bladder infections, is almost impossible to determine – we were quite even.

Without a filter

When we mention this, it’s not to get any kind of sympathy, because we have put ourselves in this situation – and we will also be able to handle it.
But we have promised ourselves that we will also tell you about all the annoying, irreversible, stressful things in our everyday life, so our free life in a Bully where we travel around the world will not only appear as the pure glossy image. So here it is, without a filter; our everyday life right now.

There ARE bright spots, without a doubt, but in addition, it’s all a bit irritating and annoying right now…

But we’ll just have to deal with both the good and the bad things, look forward to our travel in 3 weeks, where (some of) theese annoying things ends and remember that life is full of coincidences, and that it’s a big and infinite raceway outside our own control 🙂

On Mette’s countdown calendar we can count how we slowly approach the first day with a blank calendar: 4th of December 2017.

/Morten.

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