Saying Goodbye

It has been raining nearly every day this summer in Norway and while that's definitely left me feeling a bit lower at times, it's also given me a deep appreciation for the hours when it's dry and the moments when the sun almost peeks out from behind the clouds. There are waterfalls at every turn here, mountain trails at the end of every road, and cool air where the rest of Europe has been hit by heatwave after heatwave. And I've been asking myself the whole time whether I could live here. In many ways I could happily stay in Norway for the rest of my life, but there's been a small nagging feeling, a question whether there are other places left to see. And I've fallen in love with a lot of places on my travels, but not many have touched me deeply enough that I can picture myself staying. And that's what's made this so difficult to figure out. I think it might be time for me to leave Norway. And I'm very resistant to the idea because I'm so in love with this country and I want to stay for as long as possible. However, as you guys know, I am currently looking for a home and it's very much a decision between Italy and Norway for me. So I want to experience all the possible weather extremes in both countries to see if I could deal with it year round. So far I have experienced the coldest and wettest summer in quite a few years in Norway, whereas all of Central Europe has been struggling with a very, very long heatwave. And the area that I'm considering in Italy, it's been more than 30 degrees there for the last month or so. So I kind of want to drive down there and see what it's like, you know, and whether I could deal with that kind of heat. I know a lot of you guys said in the comments under my last video that you think we should move to Italy because winters in Norway are very long, cold and dark. But I'm from Poland and during my childhood we often had winters with meters of snow and temperatures up to minus 15 degrees. So I'm no stranger to cold and long winters. And I also used to live in Scotland where daylight hours are actually quite similar to southern Norway around the property that we're looking at. I didn't used to enjoy winters in the UK so much because there's not a lot of snow there, which is my favourite thing about winter. I used to always look forward to winter as a child because we used to get so much snow. And my highlight of the year so far this year was camping in the snow in the Dolomites in May. So living in a place that gets a lot of snow is honestly really appealing to me. And then the other factor is that my main motivation for buying land is that I want to be self-sufficient. I want to grow my own food and live off the land. And when you live in Norway and you get fed up with the long dark winters you can go away for a couple of months without it really impacting your life so much. Whereas in Italy I can't really leave in the summer because it's growing season, I'm going to be busy in my garden. So if I struggle with the heat waves a lot then that's going to be something I'm going to have to deal with every year. Whereas in Norway it doesn't really matter if I go away in the winter you know. So this week I'm going to start making my way back to southern Europe and look at a few more properties in the Italian mountains and potentially also Spain. I really like northern Spain and especially the Pyrenees. I really don't want to go back because I just really prefer the temperatures here over 30 plus degrees. Although I do kind of feel like I've been missing out on summer here in Norway but I know it's the responsible thing to do to see how I cope with the heat, how Heidi copes with the heat because her well-being and happiness is also a big factor in the property surge. So yeah that's going to be us this week. I've been feeling a bit stressed the last few weeks if I'm completely honest with you guys because Rissi and I fell in love with this Italian property a few months ago and we had provisionally agreed on a price with the owner and the last conversation we had we were discussing owner financing because in Italy you can't get a mortgage on a house that's not liveable and therefore a lot of people go down the owner financing route which we were also planning to do. So we proposed a couple of options to them and then silence. We haven't heard from the agent in three weeks and we have no idea if she's on holiday, whether they don't want to sell to us anymore. We just have no idea what's going on and I've just been in this limbo and I feel like I've seen all the properties that I was interested in in Norway but then on the other hand I don't want to go to Italy and spend even more time in that area, fall in love with it even more only to be disappointed because I just couldn't cope with the heartbreak. But I feel like I need to move forward in this process. I'm starting to schedule more property viewings in Italy and hopefully they will reply to me eventually. Although for most of my time in Norway I had almost 24 hours of daylight, the sun barely came out which can be a real challenge when your van runs on solar. I've had weeks of grey skies and on the days the sun did come out briefly I was usually parked at the bottom of a fjord with a mountain on one side and trees on the other which is why I'm really happy to be partnering with Renogy whose solar panels I have on my van Frodo and they're kindly sponsoring this video. I am so glad I went with Renogy during my van build because their panels perform really well even on cloudy days and since this was my partner Rizzi's first proper trip in his camper van of course we had to get him one too. He went for the 200 watt bifacial panel. Bifacial means that it generates from the back as well as the front so depending on the mounting angle and when installed above a light colored surface such as a white surface it can give you up to 30% more energy than a normal panel of the same size. Another cool thing about this panel is that it's divided into two independent sections so if a tree shades one part the other part carries on working. It also comes with a 10-year product warranty plus a 25-year guarantee that it will still be putting out at least 80% of its power so we'll never have to worry about upgrading our solar for as long as our vans are on the road and although summer in Norway was a little bit hit and miss this year our setups meant that we never run out of power. If you want to try Renogy there's a link in the video description and you can get a discount for the bifacial panels with my code they come in 200 watt 320 and 400 watts so you can choose whatever fits your roof. Big thank you again to Renogy for sponsoring this episode. Heidi and I are going on one last short hike in Norway before we drive to the ferry this afternoon and cross into Denmark in the evening and the sun is out. It's out intermittently but it's the first day where the sun has been out throughout the day in the last six weeks or so. Oh it's glorious better late than never I guess so I'm just soaking it all in today before we leave. There's a lot more of this where I'm going so that's very exciting. Norway has a lot of these free forest cabins that you can sleep in on a camping trip let me show you they're very simple there's a place to sleep and that's pretty much it. I didn't make any use of them on my trip here because I don't like to leave the van behind unless Risi is traveling with me because it's very recognizable but next time I definitely intend to go on a few tent camping trips I just had a near-death experience while driving to the ferry and I feel really shaken. I was going down the highway where the speed limit is 50 miles an hour and drove around a bend slowed down a bit and suddenly there's an idiot in my lane coming right towards me at high speed way above the speed limit. I believe he was overtaking some cyclists and the only reason we didn't have a full frontal collision was because I was able to react very quickly and brake and swerve at the same time and luckily luckily I had a bit of a hard shoulder. I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if there had been just a steep drop like there is on many Norwegian roads but yeah I just need to stop and take a moment to breathe. I don't really have time for this. I haven't mentioned this on the channel because I didn't want to offend anyone but people's driving in Norway is the worst I've seen in all of Europe. Not only do you get a lot tourists who just don't know how to drive on these narrow tiny mountain roads, there's also just a general culture of speeding and dangerous overtaking and it's just really stressful. People cause so many dangerous situations on the road and I'm just ready to leave. I'm just so done with people's driving here. At that speed if that guy had hit me it would have been a death sentence and this is the first time I've been close to death while driving so not feeling great about it. I have made it to Denmark and last night I saw the moon and the stars for the first time in six weeks. I hadn't even consciously registered that I hadn't been seeing them but it's just been cloudy every night and I was just stood there staring at the sky for a long time which was a very magical moment and it's also been sunny which is so strange. I didn't film the remainder of my journey yesterday because I was really shaken after that near accident and then we had a really rough ferry crossing as well. We had like three meter waves and I started feeling really sick so I just had to sit there and stare out the window to make sure I don't throw up. It's a bit of a shame that my last day in Norway ended on such a negative note because I am missing it already but alas the journey must go on. I have to be honest with you guys as I was driving down the entire length of Germany the hot summer air felt almost suffocating after the cool climate of Norway and although I had been missing summer up north being thrown into the other end of the extreme felt really hard on my body. I spend a couple of days at my mum's who lives with my stepdad in southern Germany. Their area had been in a drought for more than a month and it was honestly frightening to see the dry grass and the streams that had stopped running and to realize that I had been living a sheltered existence in Norway by comparison. Every time I visit I go to a nearby orchard to pick fruit and forage wild berries but this year there wasn't much to pick and the trees all looked a bit sad and I guess it reminded me while I live the way I do with very few resources and working towards being self-sufficient on my own land so that I can deal with whatever the future throws away while leaving the smallest footprint I possibly can. There's actually some really interesting folklore surrounding elderberries and heat waves across England, Denmark and Germany. There's a warning that sleeping beneath an elder on a hot afternoon brings strange dreams, sickness or a one-way trip to the fairy realm which is why I made sure to pick mine at first light before it got too hot. Elder trees are probably my favorite trees especially when they're flowering in spring and that property in Italy that I fell in love with had one right next to the house which I thought had to be a sign. It's very hot isn't it Snooty? Has the heat turned you into an indoor cat? Yes? You just want to be inside in this heat, huh? I have never shared this with you guys before but my biggest dream is to start a herb garden, make herbal remedies and open a shop where I can sell them and maybe even host workshops teaching other people about the healing powers of nature. I think modern medicine is amazing and I'm very grateful for it but there is so much knowledge about the plants growing all around us that's been passed down for generations over millennia but has been disappearing and I would love to be one of the people who help keep that knowledge alive. Look at this, I got some nice candles in Norway but unfortunately they did not survive my journey through Germany. This is absolutely wild now she's changed her mind, she's happily tanning in 30 degree heat. Are you not too warm? No? Are you a sun dog? It's a crazy hot day today and unfortunately I wasn't able to avoid driving during the hottest part of the day because I need to get to a city in Bavaria and have my brakes and suspension checked on the van because since my last service I have driven from the UK to the Dolomites to the Arctic in Norway and now back to Southern Europe, sorry there's a lot of traffic here so I'm just doing some basic safety checks to make sure I can drive in the mountains. I've done my oil and everything so they're just gonna make sure that nothing's gonna break imminently and I just pulled over because I saw that Heidi was panting like crazy so I built her a little cool cave and she's so happy now so I wanted to show you. So normally Heidi travels with me here in the passenger seat on a dog seat belt but what I did is I put a wet towel on the ground, hey sweetie, and another wet towel here to kind of trap the cool air and also shield her from direct sun and once I did that she immediately stopped panting, she seems to be a very comfortable temperature now, you alright darling? And she's got her little dog water bottle down there as well so this is a really good little solution for very hot days. You having a good time? Is it nice in the water? Is it nice and cool? Yeah? Is it nice? Are you happy now? I am not leaving this river until I start feeling cold again. It was like 35 degrees today and I was suffering and I will never take feeling cold for granted again ever. I was missing Norway every day during this journey, being next to a clean river to bathe in every day, watching the clouds drift through the mountains and everything looking lush and green instead of dry. But as I traveled further into the mountains of Austria and eventually Italy, I started noticing all the things I had been missing here. Swimming in a cold river on a hot summer day, the way the ground smells after rain in this part of the world and the cool breeze at altitude. And as I arrived back in my favorite mountains, I was overcome by a feeling that I'm not sure I've ever really had before and the closest I can get to describing it is coming home.