2010: A Year of Discoveries

It is the 31st of December and, if everything goes according to plan, there should be no major events between now and next year. God knows we have managed to cram enough into this year to take these last few hours off!

I have decided to attempt a grand summary of 2010 by selecting one photo from each month that encapsulated the events and the feeling of the chosen month. I couldn't believe how incredibly difficult this was, as we have thousands of photos from the past year - photos that are poignant, hilarious, beautiful, tragic... choosing one photo per day would have been a better reflection of our journey! But, being the stubborn lady that I am, I must stick with my original plan.

So, here it is, folks. The crazy crazy year that was 2010, where I officially changed my name and then proceeded to discover more about myself than I could ever have foretold before embarking on this journey.

January

After just three weeks of married life, I left my husband behind to begin work on the house renovations, and I headed off to Europe with my choir. Singing is my thing, and this tour simply fantastic. It pushed me beyond my comfort-zone with my singing (when Teresa, my beloved fellow First Alto, was ill for around half of our concerts, thus leaving me to sing our part solo!)and allowed me to create life-long friendships both amongst my fellow choir members and with the great people we met along the way. I must admit, though, that it did feel a little strange when I realised that I had been away from Dunc for longer than I had been with him as a married couple.

I chose this picture for a number of reasons: Firstly, it has one of my best friends, Reece, in the picture, reminding me of the beautiful friends I have back home; Secondly, I remember my awe at visiting such a beautiful medieval castle shrouded in snow (a 'Eurogasm', as Reece calls it), which is interesting for me to look back on now that such an image is almost commonplace; Thirdly, I just simply like the composition. Sure, it could have been more centred, but I'm a flawed human being. :)

February

February was a very stressful month, though you certainly wouldn't know it from the picture of my sister and I above! Major problems with our flights back to Australia resulted in me starting work on the same day as the kids (I'm a high-school English teacher), with no knowledge of the programmes I was to teach, which texts I needed to begin first, even the locations of my desk and my classroom. This put me behind the eight-ball from the start, and I never really felt like I caught up again. At the same time, Dunc and I had less than eight weeks to finish renovations, pack, rent out our apartment and do all those little things that must be done before you leave somewhere semi-indefinitely. February, therefore, was a month of juggling, arguments, paint-flecks, bruises and headaches. On the plus-side, I am now an expert in grouting, and my efficiency in marking essays has increased dramatically.

I chose this picture because throughout February I was really struggling with the idea of leaving home. I realised that everything was great - I had a great new husband, a lovely house, a job that I adored, friends that I wouldn't trade for the world, and family that were so fun and loving and supportive. I began to worry about all the things that might go wrong, and when you are planning to cycle through Europe for a year, there sure are a lot of things that can go wrong. As such, every moment (though they were few and far between) that I got to spend with my friends or my family was incredibly special. Like this day at the beach with my Mum and my sister (poor Dad was stuck at work), where we left all our worries behind on the sand.

March

March was a continuation of all the stresses of February, though multiplied ten-fold. I quit my choir, quit my netball and beach volleyball teams, greatly reduced all socialising and cancelled a number of sunday-night dinners with my family. It was all systems go. I had to learn to be assertive and to simultaneously swallow my pride in my workplace, where I had to ask my Head-of-Department for help on a number of occasions, particularly after a horrendously chaotic hail-storm hit Perth just one week before our departure, destroying my sister's new car that I had borrowed for the day, and causing some damage to our almost-ready house. Dunc left Perth on the 29th of March, and I was to follow a few days later, the day after the school term finished.

The photo above was taken on the drive to Toodyay, a country town 85km from Perth, where Dunc's Dad and his partner, Connie, have a farm. We were able to store most of our things (though there wasn't much left besides my books , our wedding presents and Dunc's motorbike) in their enormous shed. This photo is such a typical Western Australian setting, and one that we viewed many times throughout March.

April

I tearfully left Perth on April 2, with nothing but a bunch of bicycle panniers filled with nothing that remotely resembled a life of comfort. First stop was Melbourne for the wedding of some great friends of ours, and then onto Germany, where we hid out in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse for a week with Duncan's host family from when he was on student exchange. Here, we had time to actually prepare for our future trip, instead of preparing everything to be left behind. It was astonishing how little preparation we had actually done, and in the end we realised that we would never truly feel ready, so we waited for a day where the temperature soared above twelve degrees, and we hit the road, travelling north along Weinstrasse, the Rhine and into the Westerwald region, where we had enormous amounts of fun with some friends I had made there in January on my choir tour.

This picture was taken in Worms, our first night on the road. The first day was incredibly difficult for me, and I was well and truly asleep when Dunc took this photo at sunrise. This picture epitomises our trip: everything we own is in that picture. Also, I think this shot really shows not only the simplistic lifestyle, but the isolation that sometimes went along with it.

May

May was a month where we really had to begin to get used to our new lifestyle. We learnt a lot about each other at this time, and I had to learn to feel comfortable with not knowing where I would lay my head that night. We continued to travel north and eventually ended up in Nuefeld, near Dusiburg, with the lovely Fischer family, who had hosted me twice before on choir tours, and who felt like real family to me. There, after making an appearance on the front page of the local paper (thanks to Oma, across the road, and her journalist contacts!), we celebrated Geunter's birthday with the family and lived a life of luxury for a week. The day before we were to leave, I became dreadfully sick and stayed much longer in order to recuperate. Recover was slow, though, and in order to stick to our schedule we ended up catching a train 180km north to the Netherlands, meeting up with another old friend there before he went overseas.

The photo above is of Dunc standing on the Waddensee (Mud Sea), a particular part of the North Sea that stretches along the coast of The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Once we hit the coast at the end of May, I definitely felt a sense of achievement, having cycled nearly 800km. My butt, however, was still getting used to the idea.

June

June saw us cycling along the never-ending dykes of the North Sea Coast, gaining the much admired skill of being able to unequivocally distinguish between the stench of sheep, cow, horse and human manure. While the riding was flat, the winds were a real soul-destroyer, and the scenery left a little to be desired after many days of monotonous hayfever inducing fields. In Schleswig, Northern Germany, I had my first real breakdown, where the prospect of packing up our tent in the rain, putting on damp clothes, eating five-day old bread with stolen jam sachets and no cup of coffee (our gas ran out), then cycling another 90km and doing exactly the same, was enough to send me into the pits of despair. Luckily, further North we hit Denmark and my very excited distant relatives, who welcomed us open-armed into their incredible home on the banks of Veijle Fjord. One week of bike repairs, tent waterproofing, blog updating and delving into the Bargmann (my maiden name) family history left us feeling refreshed and ready to hit the road.

The photo above was a strange one to choose, as it doesn't show any of the beautiful Danish scenery. Instead, I chose to show the gravestone of my Great-Great-Great Grandfather and Grandmother. Dunc and I spent a week on a family treasure hunt, uncovering family history and taking replica photos of places that were photographed in the late 1940s and again in the early 1980s. This was one of the most rewarding times of the whole trip.

July

July has been, without a doubt, the hardest month to choose only one photo. So stuff it, I'm doing two.

The month began with my second (and my biggest) meltdown as we crossed over to Sweden. A number of times we had packed up the tent and started to ride out of town when I was hit with a wave of homesickness, anger, futility and desperation, finding myself cycling a few kilometers with tears streaming down my face before we turned back to stay another night. I was often ill, in pain, covered in bruises and sleeping badly, and Sweden marked the point in our journey where we had no bike routes anymore and had to make many more decisions on our own. Eventually, though, we managed to leave and decided to cross through the centre of the country, a place filled with untouched lakes and forests, where we could legally camp in the wild. Sweden remains our favourite country from our journeys, as each night we set up our tent next to a secluded lake, skinny-dipped in total solitude and explored the intense beauty of the country. Having successfully crossed from the west to the east coast (the photo above is of us having hit the east coast after two consecutive days of over 100km though highlands), we visited the holiday island of Gotland, only to discover that Australians shouldn't come to Europe in search for good beaches, and then fell in love with the beautiful Stockholm.

The photo above is not from Sweden at all, but is from our one week detour form our trip, where we flew from Stockholm to the Pyrenees for the Tour de France - another unforgettable experience. Here is a picture of me on Tourmalet, the highest peak of the tour, and a place we had never expected to be granted access to. Here we made great friends, found some Aussie flags in a rubbish bin and proceeded to have one of the most fun weeks of our lives - what the Tour is all about.

August

August saw us heading through the islands of Aaland and then onto Finland, where there are more lakes than land. Helsinki greeted us with open arms in the form of our first Couchsurfing experience with Jad and Mareka, two crazy travellers who were an immense amount of fun. We then jumped on a ferry and crossed the Baltic Sea to Tallinn, the picture-perfect capital of Estonia, where having the equivalent of a 20cent note in our wallets reminded us that we weren't in Scandinavia any more - eating and drinking galore! There we had our second of three Souchsurfing experiences in a great place where an American guy hosted six surfers at the one time, ensuring that we made some great friends while there. Estonia remains fixed forever in our minds because of the incredible hospitality of a family in a tiny tiny town (in fact, I think their house was the town), where we got terribly lost and, perhaps due to their exciement of actually meeting real Australians, we were invited to stay the weekend. What followed was a real insight to the Estonian history and way of life, and we know that this family, with their three little girls, will be friends with us forever.

The picture above is one of my favourites from the whole trip - taken the evening after we left our Estonian family. Here, we set up camp in a deserted campground, where the owner (again extremely excited to meet Australians) upgraded us from our dismal tent to the luxurious lake-side log cabin, complete with furs, taxidermy and wood-fired sauna. This picture (see if you can spot dunc) reminds me of the hospitality and open nature of these beautiful people.

September

September saw us continuing semi-blindly through the Baltic states, making plans only the day before or over breakfast. A couple of excessively dangerous moments (one where we saw our lives flash before our eyes four separate times in ten minutes) saw us take a couple of buses along windy, thin, high speed roads. We headed to Riga, in Latvia, and then almost immediately discovered that there was a weekend festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, that weekend. So we hot-footed it over and finally experienced a festival. From there, we continued south through Soviet parks and through forests filled with mushroom-pickers, where we clocked up 4000km of pedal power, all the while skirting the Belorussian border. Crossing the border to Poland, we soon found that, although we had left a bunch of very poor countries, the Baltic population seemed happy and proud, as opposed to the Polish people, who by nature seemed suspicious and distinctly unfriendly. As such, sadly, the last three weeks of our tour were probably our collective low point.

October

October: Six months and one day after I had left Perth, we had reached the end of our bike tour. Cycling under the Brandenburg gate at 4767km, I felt a great sense of both pride (seriously - ME! I did it! Who would've thunk it?) and relief (we didn't DIE!) and was thus incredibly happy to move on to the next phase of our journey. Dunc, however, was not so happy. This man loved every second of our journey (well, almost. All except when I was going too slow or whining about something or other) and wasn't ready to give it up, but knew that there had to be some compromise. Happy wife, happy life, right? As such, besides the three days where the Fischers drive the 600km over to spend the weekend with us, Berlin was not a happy place and we left early to head to Magdeburg, where I had my last choir contact. There, Basti and Franzi pulled my man out of his slump, reminded us what real fun is all about, and allowed us the time to figure out what to do next. We popped our bikes in their garage, bought backpacks and headed down to Dresden on the train. Dresden, Prague and Vienna followed, true backpacker/train style (except for Vienna where we were invited to stay with a friend from Perth) before we hit travel burnout and were desperate to start looking for a place to be for a while.

November

We found a house! After hanging out with our good friends in Zurich, Dunc fell in love with Switzerland and we both agreed that this country was the place we wanted to stay. For a year. so we embarked on a property hunt and found a beautiful, small apartment in boll, a small village outside of Bern. The tiny studio apartment, with our own bed, bathroom and a real kitchen all to ourselves, is true luxury. Throw in a jaw-dropping view of the Alps out our window (above) and you have two very happy campers. Thus, November was filled with resting, recuperating, Dunc studying for interviews and me making a start on my novel. Heavenly. To make matters even better, my fantastic friend, Dave, came to visit for a week, which was great encouragement for us to get out there and experience the world around us again.

December

The last month has been a flurry of Christmas shopping, writing (me) and studying (dunc). We headed back up to my family in Denmark for Christmas and got to experience all the fun of a white Scandinavian Christmas. Singing Danish carols, eating pickled herring and drinking Aquavit, walks down to the frozen beach, learning how to make paper decorations for the tree... our Danish Christmas was everything we could have hoped for. As a special Christmas present, Santa telephoned and offered Dunc and incredibly good job offer, so that we spent a solid couple of days dancing around in disbelief, fantasising about all the possibilities this will open up for us.

And so, 2010 has obviously been one hell of a year, and there will never be another year like it. 2011 brings with it the opportunity to live in a country where we can truly integrate (or at least attempt to) and learn about another culture, where hopefully I will write a book and where, by this time next year, I can hopefully write this kind of an update in German! Here's hoping!

So, let me raise my glass (okay, it's a coffee mug...) to the year that was.

Cheers! (Australia)

Prost! (Germany)

Proost! (The Netherlands)

Skål! (Denmark)

Skål! (Sweden)

Kippis! (Finland)

Terviseks! (Estonia)

Priekā! (Latvia)

į sveikatą!(Lithuania)

Na zdrowie(Poland)

Na zdravi! (Czech Republic)

Prost! (Austria)

Prost /Santé / Salute! (Switzerland)