The Latest from the Road

Hi everyone, Pema here.

Over my almost 14 years, I’ve learned a lot of things about this world of ours like kibble tastes best in the mountains, never stand when you can lie down, swim whenever possible, hike always without complaint, and mountain water tastes the best…especially in the Balkans.

Last week we drove with two friends from Farma Magaraca Martinici to go to a Farm to Fork Dinner in Bari village with Brit and Jovan (the founder and marketing manager of Meanderbug) to feel what it’s like to have a true experience of eating on a farm.

“Guys, it’s okay. These things take time. I remember reading in the book “A Year Off”, that it took the couple at least a month into their journey to find their rhythm,” said Lila optimistically to our family on our drive from France to Italy a few weeks ago.

I am an experienced equestrian at home in Colorado.

At home, I was fortunate enough that I could walk over to my neighbor’s house, saddle up their horse, Daphne, and ride all day alone through the mountains of Evergreen, without a care in the world. I taught myself to jump on a fallen log in the woods, and then started working with a wonderful trainer who taught me different jumping patterns and strategies to work with my horse. I have been riding consistently for two and a half years now but learned most of what I know last year. I am a fast learner on an equestrian level, so I became experienced very quickly.

It seemed like a great idea at the start.

As Wende and I sat at home in Colorado, reflecting on the simplicity and joy we all found while doing nothing and everything on a beach in a bay in the middle of nowhere, Colombia, we realized that we had, in a matter of days, lost that joy. We had been sucked, unwittingly and unknowingly, back into the vortex of life, the bewildering swirl of to-do’s and must-do’s, of should haves and would haves and could haves, of schedules to keep and benchmarks to meet and little, if any, joy to be found. Yet here we had everything one could want – a nice house, a couple of cars, cute kids and a dog, a yard, and two jobs – but the place we pined for had so much more with so much less.

Hi Guys,

It’s been a while again since I wrote – sorry to keep you hanging. But, as my great uncle’s second cousin’s former roommate, Sir Tim, used to say, good kibble comes to puppies that wait.

Today, we climbed our first Via Ferrata. It was called the Col Rodella Via Ferrata.

For those of you who don’t know what a Via Ferrata is, it’s a climb/hike where you wear a harness and clip into a metal cable attached to the mountain for safety. It’s steep enough that if you didn’t have the cable to clip into and you fell, you’d get hurt or worse.