Hello dear friends.

I’ve been trying to savour experiences lately and grasp little opportunities for adventure. Going carless (no, not careless autocorrect) at the beginning of last year helped, as our adventures became centred around trains and bikes like when we were overseas. Hiring a GoGet is a really exciting treat, now we appreciate the speed of four wheels. Those 170 life changing days on foreign soil have been hard to shake, ordinary days seemed like pale cardboard cutouts when we were grounded again. Perhaps I’m only truly appreciative of the pleasures of ‘grounded’ now, years later, writing this standing in my full garden bathed in morning sun, with just a hint of the bite 34 degrees will bring.

The Yurt Alpine Retreat

A recent gift of a night in a yurt in the King Valley was a visceral return to my year of travelling. I lay in an exotically draped bed infused with incense, door open on blue skies and a vista dropping onto treed valleys with mountains beyond. It was new Mexico, it was Utah, Arizona, Boulder and Lake Tahoe. Ah wide open spaces how I missed you. A delicious slideshow of experience called up in a moment of expansion.

So, with a clear head, free of the dull buzz of worry and to do lists, I had time and energy to dabble in watercolours again. Although painting a banana was perhaps an incongruous choice, mountain landscapes would be too overwhelming to render. Hooray for the everyday juxtaposed against the divine. That is the essence of the place. An exotic Mongolian yurt alpine retreat adjacent to a tin shed outhouse with a poem, in a style best described as “Aussie bush humour” on the door. Vineyards sparkling in the afternoon light, grown wild and neglected as the farmers aged. Slightly spooky, wandering through the endless rows at dusk stumbling upon nettles and thistles and old bones. What a full body tingling experience! The exotic only 3 hours from home, what a thrill.

Where do you find the spark of adventure close to home?