1. Not over the top - A Fundamental Change of Lifestyle !

 

St Caths from the back of the wildflower meadow

Well, the day the removal men came could have got off to a more auspicious start, it began raining at just about the same time that the ambulance arrived.   Neither of us fortunately.  Having moved one piece into the van, one of the removal men collapsed in a heap having ‘done his back in’.   Poor fella was in agony and Heather ended up calling the ambulance after the local docs surgery could only suggest an appointment in three hours or “drive him to A & E”.  The ambulance paramedics gave him gas and air and whisked him off to hospital while we had to wait for the cavalry to arrive and take over the loading.  We’d given away most of our furniture and so were having personal effects and “essential useful things” (my words) or “mostly junk” (Heather’s words) moved into store while we enjoy our alternative lifestyle choice of travelling full time.  So we are officially homeless.  The travelling will generally be in our motorhome for the UK and Europe and with our backpacks and local transport everywhere else.  It is of course only a mid-life crisis if we live to a hundred and forty. 

The drama for our day didn’t end there though.  The removal company boss and Dave, who had clearly been dragged back from retirement, and dragged a long way by the look of him, loaded the rest of our stuff and overheated the clutch twice trying to get the van out of our drive.  This meant that my plan of leaving an estimated ten minutes or so before the van and getting to the store to check things out just before they arrived was optimistic.  I didn’t see the clutch fun and games and spent over two hours in an empty store waiting for my useful things to arrive.  So having got up at 5.30am, I got home at 7.30pm-ish where our lovely daughter Louise cooked us dinner on our last night at the house.  We spent the night on the drive in our van, ready for final sorting and cleaning before leaving this wonderful place for the last time.

We’re both going to miss the house and the fantastic open views over southern Dorset - and of course the wildflower meadow, which this year has hundreds of common spotted orchids in bloom, 

four green-winged orchids just finished and a single greater butterfly orchid in peak bloom as we leave.  The meadow is covered in Yellow Rattle which is a partial parasite on grasses, stunting their growth and providing a shorter sward for the flowers to flourish.  Basically, Yellow Rattle does most of the work.  When we bought the place, our meadow was an improved grassland field which

to those of you who don’t know about these things means that it was just uniform green grass and nothing else, having been dosed with herbicide and fertiliser for years.  It produced nine of those large round bales of hay a year when we started.  As we leave it produces about two and a half bales.  Now it is a proper wildflower meadow.  However, we’re leaving by choice rather than being forced out by age or infirmity and we’ll never be sitting in a pair of rocking chairs saying “you remember that idea we had for selling up and travelling, we really should have tried that shouldn’t we ?”  I know this is not

an option or desire for many, many people but we’re going to give it a try.  The length of time we expect to do this travelling for is not determined because it will not be by plan but circumstance or deciding that we have had enough.  I ought to say here that we’re not completely off our rockers and there is a contingency plan set up.  We bought a house in Poole overlooking the harbour several years ago which is let out now but is where we intend to settle when the itchy feet slow down.

We had been telling people that when we finally left St Catherines we would get to the end of our drive and toss a coin to decide whether to turn left or right.  As we were headed for a first few days about forty miles away in The New Forest it didn’t matter, either way would do.

As it turned out the first task in our free and easy, no responsibility life was to get a second smaller store and move stuff.  The estimated size store we had been told we needed was just about enough to get everything in but nothing else. Certainly not what we wanted, which was to access the contents and change what we had with us from time to time.  Now, with two stores arranged for access, all boxes categorised, labelled and photographed, we’re set !

So, the adventures begin.



Three shots from our bedroom balcony at St Caths - different times..... different dates.....