Life out of boxes

Despite how much I tried to pare my life down to the bare essentials prior to setting off on my travels a couple of years back, there were always going to be things that I couldn’t throw away.

For some reason, because I’m a bit of a geek, these things largely seem to take the form of wires, or speakers. There were also some socks, which I’ll come onto later. Oh, and books, a lot of books.

What this resulted in was the creation of a number of boxes filled with the detritus of nearly thirty years of living, which were sealed away and carefully placed into my parents ever welcoming loft in Wales.

This was all well and good, until my parents decided that Wales, despite being a magnificently scenic country, was also a magnificently wet country, and so a retirement somewhere in the south of France was a more scenic option.

Which meant, to me anyway, that my poor little boxes were going to be leaving their snug abode in a Welsh loft, where they would have happily lived out their remaining years, dust coated and ignored, and instead were going to be transported into the French depths.

I’m not sure that my boxes are that good at French I have to say. Many of them are certainly not European compliant – their contents containing items that largely work only with the UK three pronged plug, a plug which is designed to keep you so safe that it’s almost impossible to actually plug in.

Still, despite their silent protests, my boxes were moved. And so, when I arrived in France after a 1000km road trip from Germany in our valiant steed, I was pleased to find a room full of boxes with the instructions that perhaps I would like to sort them a little bit, prior to moving them back into a new loft.

It’s quite amazing how the perspective of travelling for two and a half years changes how you view things. Firstly, having lost around 20 kilos on the road, none of the clothes I stored fit any more. Hopefully the baggy look will be coming back in soon. Secondly, what the hell did I need approximately two million boxes of wires for? Sure, a bit of wire, or the odd extension lead, may be of use at some juncture, but carefully hoarding around fifty mini-USB cables is not something I really needed to do.

Oh, and socks. Seriously, I have no idea what kind of person I was before I left, but clearly I had some phobia about the world running out of socks at some point. I have, from what I can tell, forty seven pairs of socks. I am fairly certain I’ve just travelled the equivalent of round the world four or five times on five pairs of socks. So by this reckoning, my forty seven pairs will last me for the rest of my life. Which is handy.

Anyway, I am now in France. There is a wealth of exploration to be had here, so I will be staying for some time I suspect. My parents have taken ownership of a rather lovely, and rather tiny, adults only campsite here in France (no sniggering at the back, it’s about tranquillity, not anything else!), which I will be helping sort out in the near future based on my huge amount of experience garnered from five months of working in a campsite in New Zealand.

Around me, there is a wealth of Europe to explore, with castles and history galore. The future is looking awfully bright. And I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.