A break from van life
It was a little odd to spend the next three hours driving to our rental apartment. It’s rare for us to stay out of Ruby and even rarer for us to stop from choice rather than a breakdown. Stephen’s rooms were so cheap to rent, that if we paused our Starlink service it would pay for the entire thing. I’m not sure what that says about the price of Starlink these days or the price of renting rooms in Paraguay. Perhaps a little of both. We hoped that the money we save in fuel costs, would help to pay for the parts that we needed. Two new CV joints cost around £100, and the same again to ship them here. No doubt, we’d need other things too.
Stephen was heading out that evening and due to Aimee hiding, we were rather late. Even though we were short on time, we headed to the supermarket to stock up on big heavy items. We got a load of drinks, a huge bag of cat food, several crates of beer and some big bags of flour. Once we had arrived, we didn’t plan on using the van much. Especially with the horrible noises coming from the rear suspension. After rushing around the supermarket, we bumped down the increasingly bad dirt road to his house. We managed to get there just in time to be handed over the room before he headed out. The one we had stayed in previously was already being rented, so we stayed in the middle of the three that he had. The one to the other side was currently empty so we had the bathroom and kitchen to ourselves.
His dogs were ecstatic to have us as company again, often sleeping on the doormat outside the room. Luckily, they had grown bored of chasing our cats and so now the girls were free to wander around the garden largely undisturbed. The only thing to disrupt the peace now was Lexi’s ongoing feud with his black cat. For the first few weeks, it chased her every time they got near each other. She would run up the nearest tree, it following behind. Then followed the catawauling, Lexi stuck up the top unable to come down as the other cat was below her. Both howling at each other. By the time we left, the shoe was on the other foot and now Lexi would seek it out and chase it off. It was a noisy business, but apart from a lot of howling and hair standing on end they never actually touched each other.
Our first night in the room was a quiet one. We unpacked a few basics as it was now dark and enjoyed spreading out on what felt like an enormous bed. It was still a bit hot and stuffy at night so we made the most of the air conditioning too. The cats were also enjoying the huge bed, while they were generally unconcerned with how much space they took up in our tiny one, this one easily had space for all four of us to be comfortable.
Not only was the bed a luxury, but we had unlimited electricity and water. There was also an oven and we got quite excited about the thought of doing some other kinds of cooking. Sometimes it’s a bit easy to get stuck into a rut of just making pasta because it’s easy. However when doing the washing up isn’t something you really think about and there’s a decent worktop as well as a full oven, things become a lot easier. I was determined to nail my sourdough bread, something I’ve never really got right this whole time. I started reading up on it a bit and trying to coax my over-fermented starter back from the brink of starvation. I hoped that if I spent some time getting it right now, I could keep it going once we were back on the road. While I was all about the bread, Lee wanted to make seitan (needs a lot of water) and also finally got round to making his scotch eggs again.
Before long the whiteboard was out and we made big plans of how we would use this time. We had videos to make, media to organise. Lee wanted to crack on with editing while I was determined to pull back the blog. It was years out of date and had become such an immeasurably large task that the thought of it made me panic somewhat and ignore it. Naturally, this compounded the problem but it was something that I did really like having. It’s the most thorough record of the entire trip and I didn’t want to give up. I had also decided to go back through our polarsteps and sort that. Large sections of the trip were completed untracked, others inaccurate. This too was an enormous job that required me finding the exact point we had stayed at for every single night of the trip that hadn’t been recorded. So far our trip is 2450 days, of which perhaps a quarter has been documented. Luckily the blogs in the past are there, as this was the only way to really go back in such detail and say, “Yes, I know that on the 22nd of May 2021 I camped for a night in the tiny village of Las Guacamayas in Mexico”.
We also had plans to get fit. Having just bought 50 cans of beer as well as about 5 litres of wine so that we wouldn't have to go to the shop for a long time, Lee declared he wasn’t going to drink for a week at least. When I laughed at him, he got annoyed and told me I wasn't being supportive. Possibly. But this isn’t the first time he’s said this and normally it lasts about 24hrs. So, me now being supportive said I'd stop too. We decided that while we had never managed to do dry January, dry May might be a thing and so just like that, we quit drinking. Lee started up doing his exercise app and even running around the garden.
I on the other hand didn’t make it that far. I had been feeling increasingly worse and decided it was probably because of a long overdue B12 injection. When I got to the point I could barely move, Lee walked into town and got me one. For the next week, things picked up. I even downloaded a running coach on my new fancy smartwatch. Then, it all slowly went downhill again. Prompting a load of blood tests and me not doing an awful lot apart from slowly ploughing my way through blog drafts and Polar Steps. At least these things didn’t require moving and so I spent a lot of time in bed. While I wasn't feeling great, I did still manage to walk into town a few times a week. We stocked up on the essentials from the supermarket and got in some exercise as a lot of the time we were both just glued to laptops.
I had expected to feel better, giving up alcohol. Everyone seems to talk about how great it is. How they sleep better, how they feel great. I just felt horrible most of the time. I got the worst acne I’ve probably ever got in my life and I certainly didn’t feel like I was experiencing any upsides from stopping. Still, it was saving us a lot of money and even if I didn't see it, it must be better for me. Of course, maybe I'd have felt better if it hadn’t been having a load of other problems. Blood tests revealed I was anaemic and my thyroid was also too low, alongside the B12, it was no surprise I was feeling crap. Luckily at least I had somewhere to relax while I sorted myself out. There was no Ruby stress, no bad nights sleep and no need to do anything if I didn’t feel up to it.
The first month was nearly over before we knew it and of course we hadn’t done nearly as much as we thought we would have. I had finished polar steps and started updating our website. Lee had annihilated the youtube channel. We had got round to trying to make seitan, not with the best results. I was glad we had decided to stop for two months, one would definitely not have been enough and I suspect two won’t be either.
While we were saving money by staying still and also by giving up booze, we still were not exactly financially well off. We had both been looking for jobs with very little success. I had kind of assumed it wouldn’t be hard to get something online teaching English, but I was wrong. Every platform over-subscribed and not hiring. With this not being an option, we decided we’d try to make some money at the local German market. This is held every two weeks in the town and so when the next one was on we went in with Stephen to speak to the organiser, Benno. He seemed to think it was fine if we sold some stuff, we thought we’d make some chutney, but he wanted us to check with another organiser, Anita first. While we were there we assessed the competition and also bumped into possibly the only other English person amongst the all the Germans. Lukas was here selling pesto and seemed to be doing ok. We knew it wouldn’t be a huge amount, but maybe it would help pay for the new CV joints.
Eventually, we managed to get through to Anita and we were confirmed for the next three markets. As we had decided to do the one coming up at the end of the week we didn’t have much time. We headed into Villarica the next day to pick up some cheaper vegetables at the market. On the way we stopped off to see Bjorn and Alessandra. They had now left Stefen's and were housesitting on the other side of town. We had a coffee together and even better, Bjorn had a present for me. The long awaited shock absorber, brought here by friendly truckers all the way from Chile!
Once we arrived in Villarica, we found the local market and bought an enormous amount of apples, potatoes and onions as well as the other things we needed to make three different flavours. We decided on Onion & Whiskey, Spiced Tomato and Pear & Apple. The only thing we didn’t have was jars. We didn’t think it’d be hard to find them but apparently it was very hard. We managed to get 40 last minute from the health food shop and picked them up with only 24 hours to go. We spent most of that time making enormous pots of chutney and getting them ready to sell. We didn’t get to bed till 1am that night but we had 35 ready to sell for the next day.
I was pretty tired the next morning and we got there early as it was the first time we had done it. It turned out to be completely unnecessary and we also only sold 8 jars. We needed to sell 23 to break even and so it hadn’t been a great success. Apparently that had been a quiet day according to the other stall holders. At least our product was shelf stable, so we packed up and hoped for better luck next time. The stall next to us gave us a free bag of grapefruit, so at least we’d got something good out of it!
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