Pilgrims’ Progress

Krakow, Poland

“We should take a picture for Grandpa!”
”And one of the sticker too”
”I know! Why don’t you put it on your ear?!”

It all started in Mongolia. We stayed in gers, and gers are not renowned for having very high doorways. Even though he cognitively knew this, poor ol’ Grandpa would knock his head almost every time he came out of his ger, something you do fairly frequently due to the fact that there is not a lot to do inside one of those tents other than keep the fire stoked. Unfortunately for Grandpa, he does not have the protective covering on his head, called hair, and in its place ended up with both a large lump (making him effectively taller than usual and so even more prone to knocking his noggin) and a nasty graze, that turned the stomachs of anyone, who saw it uncovered. Whenever Martin, the big burly ranch owner, saw Grandpa, he called out “Duck duck rubber duck!” – but deep down I’m sure he respected the almost-eighty-year-old man for actually managing to swing himself up on a horse. More than once.

(I *could* insert a picture here as proof of the horse mounting, but it ain’t all that elegant)

That was the beginning. After that, any surface that *could* be used to graze the head, was. Bunks on trains. A suitcase lid. A kitchen bench.
Then there was the motorhome. Again, there was a slightly lower than usual doorway. Donk. And there was a bed in the canopy, which was at just the right height for knocking your head on as you went from the living area through to the cab. Donk donk.
Grandpa looked like he would not be scarred for life, but permanently grazed.

There was not too much to be done about the doorway, but the alcove donking-ground lent itself to some solutions by kind-hearted grandchildren. First of all a piece of foam was fastened to the fairly sharp edge. But it didn’t last. Neither did it work – graze number who-knows-what was scraped in spite of the foam.
Next the kids studiously coloured a danger warning strip black and yellow. Failed.
Daughter-in-law found a pinecone and hung that, embellished with some heather to make it look like an intentional decoration, a bit lower than the edge. It got knocked about a lot, but at least it didn’t leave a graze. No-one knows where it disappeared to or when, but one day Grandpa found himself grazed again.

In desperation he went to Canada, where he was certain he would be immune from such experiences. Turns out it wasn’t to be, but the funniest episode of all happened en route.
In an email Grandpa described the scene succinctly, never one to exaggerate:
“BTW I munted my cell phone - cracked the screen so I have to look for a new one tomorrow.”
Rob’s sister, who was travelling with him, filled in the hilarious details:

You’ll laugh when you hear how he damaged his phone.  We were walking around town taking  photos and had found a quaint medieval street called The Shambles.  The buildings lean over the street toward each other and Dad leant up against a building to get a better angle when he was clonked by a large sign that fell off the wall as he leaned against it.  He quickly stopped it from falling onto the ground and hooked it back up though it was a precarious hold.  He then leant against the same wall to get the same photo as he had been unable to previously and the sign not only fell off the wall it clonked him on the head and fell to the ground.  I turned around just as he was picking it up and putting it back up for the second time!!  As he did a bit of a shuffle when he got clonked he must have leaned against the wall and the hire car key must have pressed hard up against the screen of the phone which broke the LCD display.  It looks like a picture of a shattered window!! :( 

After two weeks Grandpa returned to us, still grazed.
More of the same (and we visited some cool castles and mountains).
But in the end he went home! Where he fell off his bike three times in a month, his account of which brought much laughter to our hostel room across the other side of the world.

And so when we were at the Wieliczka salt mine with its reasonably frequent red and white danger stripes on low ceilings and some without any warning whatsoever, our thoughts did not have to move far to turn to Grandpa. He’d have loved it!

But what about the sticker?
That story goes back even further.
In 2001, we were in Malaysia for a family wedding.
We also went to a butterfly park, where we were issued with a little tag on a rubber band for attaching to our cameras to prove we had paid the camera fee. Grandpa had missed that part of the entrance instructions, and so when Rob told him he had to hang it over his ear, he did. Unquestioningly. We saw a good many butterflies, scorpions, lizards and other miscellaneous wildlife samples before he realised he was the source of our out-of-proportion enjoyment at this particular attraction!
We had almost as much fun with the Wieliczka sticker - aren’t memories grand?

Now you know.

Brindisi, Italy

For the second day in a row the warm wind was howling, stirring up the ocean to waves too fierce for the little kids to venture into. At sunset the night before last, the sky had turned ominously dark and a few heavenly spits had landed on our bare arms. Wondering whether all the locals, who continued sitting and chatting apparently unconcerned at the meteorological change, knew something we didn’t, we packed up our outside room. No sooner were we inside than the first lightning sheeted the sky and the spits became bucketloads. Shrieking Italianos scurried around camp frantically packing away table and chairs, wineglasses and washing lines, guinea pig, beach towels, awnings.
The deluge was shortlived, but the wind, which strengthened by the hour, still has not abated days later. Autumn had arrived. As if to confirm its presence, it brought with it a second longer downpour in the wee hours of the morning.
Dawn revealed drifts of leaves banked up against motorhome wheels and waves thundering on the beach. Twenty degrees cooler than a couple of weeks ago, it felt nippy, but being cognitively aware that is still as warm as a kiwi summer (25 degrees), the big kids donned togs, eager to take on the surf. They only got out waist deep when waves higher than any of them crashed down, dumping their fury. Standing against the elements, jumping victoriously with the swell, occasionally going under, the biggies frolicked all afternoon.
Meanwhile, the littlies’ disappointment at finding the beach out of bounds was tempered by the fact that, being the weekend, the previously almost-empty camp had filled up, and ignoring the language barrier, they had made new friends.

All day long giggles erupted around the camp and a train of steadily diminishing (sizewise) children caboosed by ER3 puffed between motorhomes and oleander bushes. Frequently they all congregated in a circle, earnestly talking to each other, each in their own tongue – Italian, German, English, Spanish. They discussed the dead bird discovered, made up rules for a ball game, all laughed raucously when one of the daddies almost fell off a ladder retrieving said ball from on top of the shadecloth. They developed an intricate hide-n-seek spy game with bases and teams and lots of goodwill.
But late Sunday evening the camp emptied out again and when the sea was still billowing this (Monday) morning, we decided to head further south towards our ferry crossing to Greece.

After a five day hiatus, it was comfortably familiar to hit the road again. We smiled, remembering Grandpa’s most recent email – when he had taken his car for a drive at home he needed his hearing aids to detect whether the engine was running. With us he’d taken them OUT before every journey; the significant rattlings and bangings and shakings requiring no further amplification and drowning out any conversation hopes.
Yes, these vans do make a racket, but they get us from A to B.
They give us access to olive trees, down here underplanted with new bright green seedlings and black snaking irrigation hoses.
They take us past flat-roofed houses, all painted a light colour with a darker shade widely framing windows and the side and top edges of walls.
They wait outside supermarkets while we stock up.
They whizz us past the ocean, the palette of blues and greens far exceeding any paint shop selection. 
They shudder along the short motorway onramps; so short you need to both be ready to stop completely if any traffic is approaching AND ready to accelerate to 110km in four seconds (ha ha, as if we could, even if we were already going at 80) if the coast is clear.
They transport us through a landscape we thought belonged to the desert; brown dirt underfoot, cloudless blue sky overhead and hundreds upon hundreds of flowering cacti in between (beware of the prickly pear – covered with invisible spikes, it is full of seeds too hard to eat and hardly any flesh worth eating – a memorable experience, but not for the right reasons).

They pull over to the side of the road so we can eat grapes. It just occurred to us that we’ve been eating at least a kilo a day whilst in Italy. And an eight or so kilo watermelon most days.
They camouflagedly smoke their way through smoking fields, burnoff in Italy just like the burnoffs we’ve seen elsewhere, with the exception that here it’s blowing a gale making the conditions seem surely less-than-ideal.
They escort us past houses obviously abandoned. Was there an earthquake and nobody has bothered rebuilding? Does waterfront property just not hold the same attraction here as in New Zealand? Or is the global recession hitting hard?
They even reach – and exceed – 100km/hr on the autostrade, and we realise we really are comfortable driving these monsters now. Even when we get stuck in a labyrinth of narrow lanes with cars parked on either side leaving so little room The Bear Cave has to make two attempts to squeeze between, we hardly slow down. “Hardly,” I said. We weren’t going 100 down those streets. But neither were we holding our breath like in the early days.
The only breath now is outside – as if a giant is coughing, warm-to-hot puffs blow around us. In our experience (apart from the Mistral at Narbonne Plage), wind is cold and so we subconsciously expect to start shivering. But this is a warm wind, more akin to a steam engine belching at us.
We just hope it dies down somewhat before we sail!