There are big plans for this blog!

We might be back in Canada, but I still have big plans for this blog. I think that the best is yet to come, and here is why!

Editing photos and blogging while on the road is not the easiest thing. I still have 120 days of unedited photos and about twice as many blog posts to go. I’ve kept some of the biggest photo days for the end, and big days mean that we were doing / seeing something amazing. You won’t want to miss these! Here is what to keep an eye out for:

- Indonesia: Rice terraces and white beaches.
- Laos: Monks, temples, waterfalls, rice farming.
- India: Rivers, cows, temples, camel rides, the Taj Mahal, Tibetan flags.
- Turkey: The Hagia Sophia, Cappadocia, wild flowers, Pamukkale.
- Bulgaria: Sofia.
- Bosnia: Nature, war, architecture.
- Croatia: Walled city.
- Greece: Mountain-top churches, ancient ruins.
- Zimbabwe & Tanzania: Luxurious safaris, the big 5.
- Argentina: Big cities, wine, glaciers, waterfalls and mountains. We went there 3 times!
- Chile: Pisco sours, surf beaches, fjords, the W, penguins.
- Uruguay: Old Colonia.
- Paraguay: Jesuit ruins.
- Colombia: Stunning Cartagena, beaches, jungle and sunsets.
- Panama: Jungle, beaches, poison dart frogs.
- Costa Rica: Beaches and jungle.

A little “how to” for fellow travelers and those planning a big vacation. There will be some great stuff in there, from budgeting to travels truths nobody tells you about. We’ll also include trip tallies, top fives and other fun reads.

Once our trip is actually over, we will be moving to Kelowna in British Colombia. I will try to blog about starting our new life on a more day-to-day basis, so that these updates are more current.

With all of these great things coming soon on the blog, you won’t want to miss a post. With a combination of back-dated and day-to-day posts going up at the same time, the simplest way to keep up with everything will be by following one of these easy options.

Keeping up-to-date with blog posts

As you might know, I am far behind in both blog posts and photo editing. I want my blog posts to have pictures to illustrate the stories of the day, but editing pictures take time. Then, there is the issue of internet: uploading pictures in foreign countries also can take a long time, and finding internet itself can be a challenge. When the stars align, I try to post as much as possible.

To keep blog posts in order, I have been backdating my posts. This mean that what happened on say, today, will appear on the blog with today’s date, even if it might be posted months from now. While this works great in some respects, it doesn’t work too well in others. The issue is mainly that I have been blogging certain posts sooner than others, and so things have been getting blogged out of order (yet with the correct date). The result: it becomes really confusing for readers of my blog to see if there are any new posts by just showing up on the blog’s main page.

There are solutions though to easily keep track of new posts, current or back dated:

• You can subscribe to the blog’s feed via a feed reader. I use Google Reader and I love it: it allows me to easily track and read all of the blogs that I follow in one spot. Otherwise:
• You can subscribe to the blog and receive blog posts via email using the “Follow Me” feature on the right-hand sidebar on the blog.
• If you are a WordPress user, you can subscribe to the blog via WordPress using the “Follow” button on the toolbar at the top of the blog’s page.
• Lastly, I share some blog posts on Facebook, as long as they are noteworthy.

I encourage you to pick a solution that works best for you, and this way you won’t miss a post.

Fun with shadows | Home

Making rice wine | Home

Travis got this idea from Lucky Peach and really wanted to give this a try. One would think that making rice wine would be difficult, but really it is super easy.

- Cook rice (sticky rice is best).
- Add crushed yeast ball.
- Wait a few days.
- Drink.

That’s it!

It doesn’t give off a lot of wine and there is a lot of rice leftover to strain out, but it’s a pretty cool little project. I would show you photos of the final result, but Travis drank it all before I got home from work. He said that he was expecting it to be harsh, but it was actually smooth and fragrant. Who knew! He recommends drinking it after 3-4 days of it sitting in a warm place.

Making pizza | Home

I was lucky enough to receive a beautiful KitchenAid for Christmas, but hadn’t used it yet. I decided that the best way to break it in was to try my hand at making pizza dough. So, I picked a recipe, got all of the ingredients, and got started.

The next day it was time to make pizza, and this is when I realized that the dough was a complete disaster. It was dough, but it felt like it had nothing holding it together. As soon as I tried stretching the dough out, it just ran away from me, into a paper thin mess. The recipe I tried was Heidi’s “best pizza dough recipe” and it is an incomplete recipe. It turns out that a crucial step is missing: the activating of the yeast. I went back and read the instructions again, hoping that the mess up was mine, but sadly it was not. Basically this is a “cold fermentation” recipe, and you add the yeast to the flour without activating it first. If this isn’t a mistake, I have no idea how it is supposed to work, because basically the yeast just remaining in it’s little balls and never incorporated with the ingredients as it should of had. Needless to say, I won’t be trying this recipe again…

And the cooked pizzas? They were not really all that great… even with the tasty topping. On the upside though, I got to use the KitchenAid!

A muddy hike | Home

After we went out looking for land the weather really cleared up, and we had beautiful sunny skies. Not wanting to be inside, we took Shiso on a walk. After hanging out in the muddy dog park, we went up Knox Mountain again, but this time we actually did the entire “Paul’s Tomb” hike. We did not find his tomb, but rather, a nice little quiet beach. It was an easy hike, quiet with lake scenery and ended with a beautiful sunset. What a perfect end to a great day!

Land looking | Home

When we decided to move to Kelowna, the goal was use it as a base to find out where we eventually wanted to live, and to purchase some land. Travis and I feel very strongly about having our own land, to farm and raise food on. We not only want to become more self-sufficient, but also to learn some of those very important life skills that our ancestor knew so well. There is so much to learn, and I am so excited to start learning.

First thing first though: we need land. Our goal is to purchase something soon, so we needed to start shopping. The Okanagan is a vast region, renowned for it’s great weather and fertile soil. The thing is though, most of the best spots are taken up by wineries and orchards, and we will need to be a little further off the beaten path in order to keep the cost down. We don’t know where we would want to move to, but we decided to look around Kelowna first.

Fast track to today. This morning we met up with a local realtor who specializes in larger plots of land, and we drove around Kelowna’s countryside looking at different options on the market. I have to say, this was a reality shock. We knew that the region was expensive, but we had not realized just how much.

- Every plot of land we saw was above $300,000. On average, a more realistic cost for a 10 acre plot is about $400,000, or more if you want something nicer.
- British Columbia requires those purchasing land only (land without a house or something you can live in) to pay 50% down at the time of purchase. This is a serious complication.

Now to complicate matters even more, every lot of land we saw was at altitude. Kelowna is already about 1000 ft up – these were at about 4000 ft up. This means that while in Kelowna there is no snow and we are starting to see the beginnings of spring, every plot of land was snowed in. Further to this, the altitude effects the growing zone: we would be getting a zone 4 at best, and would not be able to grow any of the things that attracted us to the region.

Lastly, most of the plots we saw were pretty much uneven and on solid rock. There wasn’t much soil or good growing areas. For example, this property bellow had a great view, but part of the land was straight up and continued above the cliff, where we would never be able to get to.

The last plot of land we saw was our favorite. I had seen it advertised all summer long and it really spoke to me. It has a lot of good things going for it: it is a Christmas tree farm, it has a stream running through the property, it has flat plateaus, you cannot see the road of the neighbors, it is located across the street from thousand of acres of Crown land, and it has a cabin on the property.

The cons: the cabin is infested with rats and needs major TLC, and they are asking $399,000 for the property. Top this off with the zone limitations, it just feels like we would be doing a lot of compromises in order to get land. Really, as much as we may want land, it doesn’t any sense to pay so much for it. The point of all of this is to be more independent, not completely mortgaged out and indebted for the rest of our lives.

Speaking about this with our realtor, we realized that to live here we would need to start looking much further away from the town and cities in order to be able to afford land. But even then, how much would that cost us? And with neither of us having jobs we can do from home, and the economy not being so great around here, how realistic is this?