Coffee Break: What's the craic?
A moment of reverence for the divine experience of Bosnian coffee, plus a check-in.
An Overdue State Of The Nation
To start, it's not a surprise to me at all that it's almost exactly a year since I last wrote for the blog. I think by the end of 2021 I'd basically used up all my words and all writing, even for this blog we set up together, was just the last thing I wanted to do. That state of wordlessness certainly hasn't applied to conversation and having finally spent many precious hours face-to-face with loved ones in the last 10 months on the road, I realised that I'd probably used up my digital words for a time. Even the sight of my computer was very off-putting and I actively neglected the blog even with Simon's encouragement, exceptional administrative and photographic work day-to-day, and absolute patience in the face of my blog avoidance.
Now though, and in a spoiler-free turn of events, I'm happily on the opposite side of that previously closed door. My outlook on writing here and, writing in general, has started to shift and in the last two months I've felt a bit like writing again. It's nice (!) and I guess it reflects a dawning light after thinking for the last 12 months that I'd never want to write again.
The Travel Craic: Backpack City
To dust off the old keyboard, let me tell you briefly about the past little while. In the last four months, we've spent our time doing a mix of things:
Travelling to countries nearly entirely new to us;
Exploring these places slowly and doing our best to get to know them;
Working on different projects on the road (a little complicated to share here but things we're both thoroughly enjoying);
Meeting up with old and new loved ones in different places (planned, surprise, and spontaneous); and,
Planning our next moves for the remainder of this year and the first half of the new year.
We have many moments noted down to share and as the leaves turn in the Northern Hemisphere, it feels good to be getting stuck in to writing them down here.
Two Lane Lowdown (Like the On The J.Lo without the private yacht)
In closing, throughout this year on the road Simon and I have talked a heap about the blog. We don't have social media anymore and in the bigger picture of keeping up with people, telling stories and sharing about things here is our online postcard for staying connected. It also feels like it's our own thing where we're not at the mercy of algorithms or giving away our data. It feels as close as you can get to the one-to-one or one-to-a-few form that we both prefer. Having this site of our own is a way we can recap more about what we've been doing and how things are going in a real way that is anecdotal. I also forget things a lot and a written record is something we value, too.
Following lots of chatz, we've decided a few things about how we want to post moving forward. We're going to be working on the following style of posts to publish here:
Travel Recaps - Overviews of each place, more of what we've experienced, and how we planned and experienced the place
Postcards - Visual posts that capture more of each place
Resource Posts - To share more about all different random things that might be helpful (or not) and also just because I love a power ranking on all topics
Coffee Breaks - To disclose all the random things and recommendations, pitstop travel stories, and general chatter focused on all chaotic manner of topics
Please consider this post our first Coffee Break to share with you the craic of right now and to also say to you, how are you? What's the craic?
Raising a virtual coffee or tea to you or anything else you wish to cheers with us over. We're here for it and look forward to hearing from you, too.
All our love,
A&S xx
Ps, I am working on our next post, another Coffee Break that explains more fully the event that largely shaped the last four months. We've already colloquially spoken about it as 'the Toepocalypse', nevertheless for poetic sensibilities, the post coming for you is called, 'A Tale of Two Toenails'. Get ready!