Winter Camping in the Sardinian Mountains

Another year has passed but over here in the mountains things have stayed much the same. Nature is still in its seasonal slumber with seeds waiting patiently beneath the soil and few animals roaming the land for food. I'm not one to commit to new year's resolutions because in nature renewal starts in spring and we've been trying to honour the slower pace that our bodies are still used to during these short winter days whilst also enjoying the days getting longer again a few minutes at a time. If you're new here I'm Jessica and I travel full-time in my wooden campervan Frodo with my puppy Heidi, usually solo and for the last couple of weeks my partner Rissi has been joining us too. We've been living nomadically for almost three years now after getting fed up with working all day just to scrape by and selling everything in a tiny apartment for a life of simplicity and freedom. Join us for this next chapter in our adventures as we reconnect with nature and grow roots in the wild. Good morning we are back in the mountains here in Sardinia to escape all the celebrations and noise around the first of January and it's quite funny because we originally went to Sardinia to be somewhere warmer but we spent about 80% of our time in the mountains instead where it hasn't been very warm. No but it has been a lot warmer than it would be if we were still in the UK. Yeah that's true and we still get to be in the mountains so that's quite nice I guess. And mostly no rain. And mostly no rain we had like a week of rain and thunderstorms but now it's quite lovely actually and yeah we just found this national park and really fell in love with it so we've been spending most of our time here. We're mostly in the same spot for the week and we're parked near a river with some natural pools we saw on the map so we're going to go downhill and look at that after coffee and we're also hoping to climb Sardinia's highest mountain tomorrow on New Year's Day because that's nearby as well. We don't really know what the conditions will be like and whether we'll be able to actually summit it but we thought it would be a nice way to end our time here because it's Rissi's last week here. Yeah we've seen kind of mixed information on whether it's okay to do in winter or not some people say it's fine some people say you need specialist equipment but it's just an out and back I think so we can just like go some distance and turn around if it starts to feel sketchy. Yeah it's like 10 kilometers out and back but it can be quite snowy sometimes and you kind of go over three peaks and yeah we'll just see how it goes. So yeah we'll be here for a few days and then Rissi is leaving back to the UK to go back to university and I will be traveling onwards to Greece. I am a bit anxious about it because it's the furthest I've ever traveled by myself but yeah very excited at the same time and Rissi might be visiting me there for a week or so as well in February. This place is probably one of our favorites we ever parked at. While we're often spoiled with incredible views having a river with waterfalls and pools deep enough to dip in just a minute away from the van is a luxury we don't get every day and while the water is very cold this time of the year standing in the warm sun afterwards was honestly pure bliss. I'm going to have a bit of a new year reset in the van today I need to deep clean everything declutter a few things from my wardrobe and I need to fix a couple of leaks which we noticed the other day in the heavy thunderstorm and I'm also doing a digital declutter just going through my photos and files from the last year to free up space and another thing which I should have done way sooner is to wipe all of my personal data from the internet which I'm doing using incogni who are kindly sponsoring this video. I think a lot of us don't realize just how much of our personal data is out there from a full name, home address, phone number, email and even information about our relatives and it's not just leaked ones and forgotten about it's actively collected published and sold by data brokers and people search websites often without you ever knowing about it and the problem with that isn't just spam once that information is out there it can lead to much bigger issues like scams, identity theft, harassment and even people being able to track you down in real life and once that information is out there it's incredibly time consuming to manually remove it because it often just reappears and that's where incogni comes in. Incogni automatically tracks down and removes your personal data from hundreds of data broker websites on your behalf. You authorize it once and it keeps sending removal requests over time and if there's a specific site exposing your information you can use their customer removal feature and they'll handle that too. If you want to try incogni for yourself you can get 60% off the annual plan via my link incogni.com slash roots. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee and I'll also leave the link down in the video description. Thank you so much to incogni for sponsoring this video and helping me take back control of my data and now back to the video. For pretty much everything I do I like to use products that have less than five ingredients from the food I eat, my soaps for showering and the things I use for cleaning so that nothing harmful seeps into nature. For the most part I use vinegar with lemon extract and for the windows good old-fashioned alcohol with thyme essential oil. For me keeping my van tidy is the key to making this nomadic lifestyle stress-free. Shortly after moving into this van I started a habit which has honestly been a game changer for me. Every week usually on a Sunday I set a timer to two hours put an audio book on and clean the van until the timer has run out and because it takes a lot less than two hours to deep clean this tiny space I tend to then move on to tasks I have been procrastinating on like annoying little repair jobs, decluttering my wardrobe and reorganizing my camera drawer. I can't say that it's solved all of my life's problems but it certainly comes pretty close. I recently started learning traditional recipes from the areas I travel in because it's just a really lovely way to learn more about local cultures and history and today I'm making a gnocchi dish with fennel, mushrooms, tomatoes and fresh rosemary. Every time we're in Italy we're just amazed at how flavorful the fresh produce is. It makes even the simplest dishes taste absolutely delicious and we found that even the major supermarkets here have a really nice selection of organic and local produce so pretty much all the ingredients in this meal were grown here in Sardinia. We spent a quiet night in the mountains away from the fireworks and noise announcing the new calendar year and the next morning we drove higher up into the mountains until we saw snow up on the peaks. The first few hundred meters of the trail were a steep scramble up snowy rocks and it was so tough that we nearly gave up after reaching the first peak but it was a pretty clear day and the rest of the hike was mostly along a mountain ridge so we decided that we were going to try and make it to the highest peak. Heidi had the time of her life and we've rarely seen her this excited. She loves clambering over rocks and she also really loves snow so she was completely in her element here. These mountains are home to countless myths of wild men, half human, half animal, who roam the land clad in animal skins, living off berries and the occasional stolen goat, avoiding contact with humans. Some think that they're a race which evolved here in the mountains while others believe that they were simply men who, due to life circumstances, chose a life of solitude in the wilderness. Sardinians also believe that this area is haunted by wandering souls and many highland legends feature ghostly apparitions and nocturnal phantoms, many of which are thought to be the spirits of individuals who met a violent end in these hills. As soon as we reached the summer a big cloud descended on us so after a short break admiring the valleys drifting in and out of the clouds it was time to head back to the van. It was not an easy hike so we were really pleased with this achievement and it was the best start to the new year that we could have wished for, a year full of exciting plans and adventures. The days passed and life continued much as it had before. We swam in the river, watched the clouds, wandered across the mountain peaks, cooked good food when searching quiet corners of the woods for hidden waterfalls and just enjoyed each other's company. And while we don't really follow the modern new year and it's precious to be productive in the middle of winter, we feel that nonetheless 2026 is off to a pretty good start for us and we're looking forward to a year of slow days in nature, lots of new adventures and holding on tightly to each other no matter how many miles lie between us. Thank you so much for watching guys, we hope you enjoyed spending some time with all of us together here in the mountains and I'll see you again very soon. Until next time, take good care of yourselves. Bye!