We interrupt our regularly scheduled posts to bring you this important update:

Ashley and I are embarking on another epic walk. This time we’ll be walking 509km along the Lycian Way. A coastal trail in Southern Central Turkey between the cities of Fethiye and Antalya.

View Lykian Way in a larger map

We’ll be carrying sleeping bags and a tent. We’ll also be leaving the laptops behind, so expect us to take longer than normal to reply to your comments and emails. We’ll have our iPhone with us so, as long as there is free wifi on the top of Mount Olympus, we will be able to sneak in the odd Facebook update or Tweet.

Meanwhile, a lot has happened since we left Bulgaria. Thanks to the magic of WordPress’ scheduled posts, those stories will be coming your way uninterrupted over the next 3-4 weeks. After that time, we’ll be back to tell you all about our walk.

Resuming regular transmission…

As you’ve no doubt heard, we purchased a house in Central Bulgaria. This does not signal the end of our travels. In fact, we’ve already left Bulgaria and are currently exploring the countryside of Turkey.

Now it’s all well and good for us to tell you that we bought a house, let you know how much it cost, gave some insights into Bulgaria’s bureaucracy, and showed you some pictures of our new pad. But I think it’s also important to explain why we want to live in Bulgaria.

Yes, you read that right. We want to live in Bulgaria. Contrary to popular belief, we do not make a habit of buying houses as a souvenir in every country we visit. Bulgaria is special. It’s a place we want to live, and that’s why we bought a house there.

All dollar amounts quoted in this post are $CAD, which at the time of this writing are approximately equal to $USD.

Bulgaria is Beautiful

Maybe I should rephrase the title of this section to something like “The Small Bit of Bulgaria We Actually Saw is Beautiful”. The truth is that despite living in Bulgaria for three months, we hardly travelled around at all. Bulgaria has a beautiful Black Sea Coast, mountains to ski and hike, and plenty of history on display in the form of monasteries and Roman ruins. But we didn’t see any of that stuff. I guess we decided to save it for another trip. The bits we saw are all nearby our own village, and we thought they were beautiful.

Veliko Tarnovo – River Residences

Veliko Tarnovo – Tsarevets Fortress

Emen – Canyon

Gorsko Kosovo Reservoir – A great place to swim and fish on hot days.

Bulgaria is Centrally Located

If you look on a map, you’ll see that Bulgaria borders Romania, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia. All places we want to see. Still within range of a night train/bus, you find Italy, Austria, Croatia, Slovania, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, and the Ukraine. Wow.

Bulgaria is Connected

Even the small villages, like ours, have high speed internet access. So communication is no problem. But that’s not what I was getting at. What I find amazing is the fact that you can cheaply get  everywhere by bus/train. Our small village, for example, has a daily bus to and from the closest major centre, Pavlikeni. There we can do all of our shopping, or catch a bus/train to somewhere more exotic, like Turkey. And get this, the bus to Pavlikeni costs less than driving at only $2 each way.

Village Life is a Mix of City and Farm. As it Should Be.

City Life

• You have neighbours to talk to.
• There is a local store for your daily shopping needs.
• A cafe & bar for those days you don’t feel like cooking.
• Your streets will get plowed in the winter.
• You have running water that you can drink from the tap.
• And, of course, electricity.

Rural Life

• You can buy fresh unpasteurized milk.
• You can raise your own egg laying chickens (which, FYI, you can’t do within a village in small town Saskatchewan)
• If you like, you can have goats, cows, horses, and sheep. You keep them in your yard at night, then send them out to public pasture with a local shepherd during the day. No need to buy your own pasture land.
• You can grow your own cherries, grapes, peaches, apples, pears, walnuts, hazelnuts, blackberries, vegetables of all kinds, and much more. Anything you plant in this country has a habit of growing.
• You get a big yard and privacy.

The Weather is Pretty Good:

The winters are shorter than they are in Canada by about a month on either side. There are heavy snows but there are also warm chinooks. It’s been known to hit positive 20 deg C on New Years Day, and a cold snap will only get as cold as -25 deg C.

Summers are fantastic (this is the only season we’ve personally experienced); Dry, not much for wind, temperatures between 30 and 40 deg C. I can’t imagine a better summer climate anywhere.

You Can Afford to Have a Drink

The beer is priced at a reasonable $0.70 for a 1L bottle. And it tastes not too bad. Wine is a bit more. A local vintage can be obtained 3L for $5. Better still, they’ve legalize distilling your own alcohol. And, since everyone grows their own grapes, there is a glut of hooch (officially called rakia). It’s tasty, and given away for free by nearly everyone. We’ll be making our own when we have a chance.

Actually, It’s Affordable All Around

We’ve already mentioned how much a house and land costs. If you missed it, you can catch up here. But it’s not just the housing and the booze. Food is also cheap, even if you are not growing it yourselves. Tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, and fruit generally run $1 per kg or less while in season. Cheese is plentiful at about $3 per kg, and bread is about $0.50 per loaf. Property taxes are almost negligible (less than $100 per year), and water is less than $10 per month (depending on how much you use).

Of course some things are still expensive. For example, gasoline for your car is quite pricey, electricity is expensive, and wood for winter heating will still run you about $1,000 per year depending on how much heat you need. But these “expensive” items are priced comparably to everywhere else in the world. They are just expensive compared to how cheap everything else is.

So Why Aren’t We Living in Bulgaria Now if it is so Great?

A couple of reasons. First, we are not done travelling. Not by a long shot. Second, despite the low costs, we still need to figure out a way to generate an income before we can move to Bulgaria full-time. The country has a very high unemployment rate, and a very low average hourly wage. To make matters worse, neither of us speak Bulgarian, a fact that will severely limit our employment prospects until we can learn the language.

Although we’ve been quite successful thus far, it’s only possible to live on dreams and rainbows for so long. So until we work out how we are going to generate enough income to move full-time to Bulgaria, we won’t be living there full time.

What’s the Plan Then?

Like so many things, we just don’t know. Our first plan, is to eventually return to Canada and get jobs. We’ll work and save until we feel that we have enough money to make a go of it, then move to Bulgaria. It’s boring and old-fashioned, but there’s a proven track record of success. While we are saving up, we’ll visit our house when we can and do as much work on it as we can with the holiday time we are allotted.

Another option would be to relocate to Bulgaria and try to pick up seasonal winter work elsewhere. For example, we may try to spend our summers in Bulgaria enjoying our organic food, and low costs. When winter strikes, we’ll set off for a warmer country and work in the dive industry. It’ll mean another investment in courses to become instructors, but could be a enjoyable/sustainable way of making Bulgaria work now.

We’ve talked about working for a year teaching English in Japan or S.Korea. The idea being that we could save up enough money to live in Bulgaria for a couple of years before needing to undertake another year-long teaching gig. It has promise, but we are not sure if we’ll enjoy teaching English or not.

Finally, we could try to work in Bulgaria. It’s possible that Ashley could get a job as a teacher at an English school. But it probably wouldn’t be within commuting range of our home. I could try to earn an income online programming, or translating from Spanish into English, but that’s not fun either. Along the same lines, we could use our company to undertake some sort of business in Bulgaria. The big problem being that we’d be earning a Bulgarian wage. That would get us by, but we wouldn’t be able to save up for future travel. And it’s not just sightseeing that we would miss out on, we’d also be away from our friends and family back home without sufficient incomes to buy tickets to go back to Canada and visit. That would be hard.

So for now, and until further notice, the matter of fitting our Bulgarian house into our lives permanently remains unsettled. But we both really, really want to make it work.

Ah, the night lights. It seems pretty rare that we share our night time pics with you, and I say it’s high time we did. We spent a total of 4 nights in Sofia en-route from Belgrade, Serbia to our HelpX gig in the village of Vishovgrad (Central Bulgaria). Compared to Belgrade, Sofia seemed like a jewel. Plenty of green spaces, nice architecture, and a very welcoming culture, if the free beer and food from our hostel staff were any indication.

If you are not the biggest fan of these nighttime photos, please do keep in mind that it was dark, and we couldn’t really see what we were doing.

I’ve been racking my mind trying to think of something exceptional to share with you about Belgrade, Serbia, and I haven’t had much luck. The truth is, we were not really enamoured with this city, but we didn’t dislike it either. It just kind of was.

It was the place I celebrated my 30th birthday. That’s probably part of the problem. For some reason, I felt the need to feed my craving for baked goods, and gorged on far too many pastries. As much fun as it was at the time, I can’t help but feel a bit sick in my stomach when I think back on Belgrade.

I ate a lot of these little guys.

It was the first place where we experienced temperatures in excess of 40° Celsius. This was compounded by a lengthy walk from the bus station to our hostel at midday, with an even lengthier wait while we purchased a city map (first time we’ve had to do that) and figured out where the heck the bus had dropped us off. It felt hot, but not as hot as I expected having never before been in temperatures so high.

The Olympics had just started, attracting a steady crowd of spectators in front of the hostel television. We spent pretty much the extent of our time in Belgrade visiting with that very same crowd, drinking beer, and soaking up the air conditioning.

We did go out a few times.

We walked through the Belgrade Fortress. Meandered into some Christian orthodox churches where we learned that there are no chairs. Seriously, a service can take up to two hours, and everyone just has to stand there. And on my birthday, we went swimming at Ada Ciganlija, a man made sheltered swimming hole alongside the Danube River.

Lots of cool tanks and such at the fortress

The insides of an orthodox church

One of my favourite things about Belgrade was this building that was blown up by NATO in 1999. We were told that it’s the last example of the bombing left in the city – whether that’s true or not ,I have no idea. Even though Canada was responsible for about 10% of the bombs that were dropped during  that time, none of the locals held it against us personally. The people we met in Belgrade were some of the friendliest we’ve met anywhere, and the bakeries were kind enough to give me a few bonus pastries on my birthday.

Bomb damaged building

So that was Belgrade. Just a reminder, there’s plenty more photos where these came from in our Photo Album.

Check out our Q&A session on HelpX with Talon from 1dad1kid by following this link. HelpX is a online service that we use to find opportunities to work in exchange for food and lodging while we travel.

I don’t know much about my family history, but I do know that I come from primarily German stock (on my dad’s side) and British stock (on my mother’s side). Today, it was that German heritage that I was most interested in.

A few years ago, thanks to my younger sister, I became aware of a small town in Germany, complete with its own castle that goes by the same name we do – LENZEN.

My sister made what I suppose could be termed a pilgrimage to the town of Lenzen and returned home to tell us all about it. Ever since, I’ve been mildly obsessed with visiting for myself. It even made it onto our Bucket List – which I now see is in dire need of updating (look for this soon).

It wasn’t exactly on the way to or from the Deichbrand Rock Festival but it was close enough that I was going to have a really hard time leaving Germany without having seen it. Our whole trip from Salzburg to Deichbrand and back required us to drive an epic 21 hours at a minimum, so the addition of 3 hours to swing through Lenzen seemed like a comparative drop in the bucket.

Over the years, my mind had separated from reality a bit where my town was concerned. I had often imagined that the residents of the town would be overjoyed by the glorious return of the Lenzen family, namely me and Ashley.

Naturally I expected nothing short of a week of feasting, the finest room in the castle, and several new born babies named after us that year.

Surprisingly, for nobody but myself, the welcoming we received was somewhat milder than I had imagined. Nobody really reacted in any special way at all. Some were perhaps mildly amused, others perhaps not.

So no feasts, not even a free beer. But it didn’t matter much. There was something magical about that town that kept me wearing this huge smile the whole time I was there.

I was having grand ol’ time.

We had a bit of fun walking around town, and photographing ourselves at the conspicuous landmarks, like this information sign.

I’m like a reference library on the subject.

The castle was still impressive. There was a plaque on the outside wall which detailed the impressive history of Lenzen Castle. After having it translated from German to English, it became apparent that Lenzen had not really been a place of any historical significance, though once, some papers were signed there.  Exciting stuff, huh?

The famous Lenzen castle, notorious for being the location where certain important documents were once signed.

We were still given a chance to feel a bit like kings. The castle has been turned into a restaurant, and they didn’t mind serving us as though we were royalty (so long as we paid…)

Since the famous “signing of documents” the castle has been turned into a restaurant.

Having a non-local German beer at Lenzen Castle.

The town church.

The organ my sister played on her pilgrimage. They were tuning it while we were there. Not the most pleasant of sounds.

Typical buildings in town.

I love our town (and the fact that some papers were signed there). I can also see how we came to a place like Saskatchewan. Lenzen, like the province of Saskatchewan, is fairly flat and very rural.

After Hamburg, we (Jutta, Pedro, Ashley, and I) headed on to the Deichbrand Rock Festival on the North Sea between Denmark, and the Netherlands. All that day and the day before, there had been a lot of rain. And it showed. As we approached the festival grounds, the traffic slowed to a halt. The mud parking lots were doing everything they could to swallow up each and every vehicle that tried to cross them.

By the time we were stopped became stuck, it was dark out. The rain had more or less let up. We spent Thursday night discussing the prospects of a cancelled festival over a few wobbly pops, after learning that the main stage had partly collapsed. It sounded like the same thing had happened in years past, and then it had meant the end of the festival.

A bit ‘o’ mud

Come late Friday morning, we went out to survey the damage. Already, crews were hard at work putting the stage back together, and covering the ground with wood chips. The festival was delayed, by a few hours, but by 5:00pm the gates were open, and the show was on!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this somewhere before, but for our new readers, our friends Jutta and Pedro are working the festival circuit in Germany this summer – running a piercing stand. They were completely awesome and invited us along with them to take advantage of their free entry passes. They even gave us a lift from Salzburg!

Jutta and Pedro in the piercing tent that doubled as our hotel room

We really had a blast at the festival. We went out and watched just about every band, none of which we had heard of before. Each day the ground was a bit dryer than the last. By the thrid day, the ground was dry, and the sun shining. The only complaint, as we’ve said before was the lack of toilet facilities. At least these ones were free.

The twin main stages

Concert T-Shirts