Just Humans Being...

  It has been such a treat to have good weather again, especially as we are on another pet sitting assignment. We decided to take a longer route to our destination in Hampshire - taking a more scenic route out of Cornwall, along the Atlantic Highway and a wonderful stopover with our dear friends in Glastonbury. As always, we enjoyed feasting with great company and left with full bellies, feeling relaxed.  We had already travelled from Cornwall, through Devon and into Somerset and the next part of our journey took us slightly north through Wiltshire and West Berkshire before landing over the border in Hampshire. It was a gorgeous sunny journey with little traffic and we thoroughly enjoyed taking our time, soaking up the sights and loving the changing scenery. It seems such a long time since we travelled through this part of the country...Frome, Trowbridge, Avebury, and Marlborough. Seeing delights such as:  Westbury White Horse   Silbury Hill   West Kennet Long B...

                           It's a sign there are big changes afoot, when a company like Lonely Planet acknowledges that veganism is here. Although we are not into buying stuff anymore, we do have a passion for books...especially travel books! We have collected many travel guides over the years and we continue to use our French ones even though they are probably over 20 years old now. We bought our first Lonely Planet Publication in 1991... Europe On A Shoestring ! We found it to be a great resource, using it frequently to do research when planning trips, as well as taking it with us.  We love nothing more than sitting with maps and travel books, dreaming and planning our next or future adventures and always try to find whatever information we can about places to eat, so when we heard about a new vegan travel guide - we had to check it out. Click here for a preview of The Vegan Trav...

This lovely village is in the Loire. It looks like it could be popular with tourists. But we had the place to ourselves. Lots of pretty places. And a huge Abbey where Richard the Lionheart is buried. A lovely old doorbell. Love Kay and Sime xx

Day 7 of  World Vegan Month and our last night in France for this year, so we decided to treat ourselves to a vegan pizza.... With onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, artichokes, olives and potatoes. We are now staying near to Roscoff in Brittany and will be taking the ferry to Plymouth tomorrow.  The pizza came from a pizza emporter in St Pol de Leon, a few minutes from where we are staying - another lovely place...and the owners lit the wood burner before our arrival, which we were thrilled with, as it feels so much colder up here...but at least the cabin is toasty! We will take some photos of the place tomorrow in the light. It's always a joy to be back in Brittany, having spent a winter here some years ago - we know it very well and love it's uniqueness. Visiting the monument for the Breton Resistance Fighters. Love Kay and Sime xx

We have spent yesterday exploring this lovely area of Brittany. Nice to do when it's a quieter time of year. We drove to Port Navalo at the end of the gulf where it was warm and sunny. We found lots of quiet villages. Marshlands. Maps. Lighthouses. We watched a storm come in while we ate our picnic. There was a cormorant sat on the rock just out at sea, but the camera hasn't picked it up. Lots of the beaches were covered in red seaweed. Chateau Suscinio A 13th century castle with connections to Henry VII and the War of the Roses. We enjoyed a walk around Port Navalo's headland before the stormy weather started! Such a warm and quiet day!  Love Kay and Sime xx

We have travelled from the Auvergne, through the Loire and are now on the south east edge of Brittany in a lovely space. Finding places with kitchens is always important, as we like to cook! Tonight's dinner was fresh organic broccoli from the Biocoop, which we steamed for 5 minutes, then fried with 5 cloves of garlic and 1 red onion in soy sauce with dried basil and black pepper. We also added a tin of mixed beans and sweetcorn and finished with the juice of half a lemon. We served it with last night's leftover tabbouleh and a mixed salad. It's always good to have an opportunity to cook when travelling and it doesn't have to be difficult or long-winded. This place is perfect and it's obvious that the owners are enthusiastic cooks themselves, as the kitchen is well-equipped!  Another nice space to be!  This is Day 5 of World Vegan Month. Love Kay and Sime xx

We were travelling from the Auvergne to the Loire Valley and had a plan to visit the Biocoop in Saumur to buy supplies for dinner, but as usual we got distracted - stopping off and taking different interesting routes and consequently arrived too late. We had a few things to eat, but not really enough. On our journey, we had the spinach and spirulina cuppa soups, some peanuts and bananas. Then we felt a need to "carb up" and had just 15 minutes to fly around the supermarket and make our purchases. We bought tabbouleh, carrot salad, salad leaves, cornichons, baguette and as Sime was craving potatoes - we bought some very cheap tinned spuds! We already had this vegetable and basil chutney... And houmous from our last Biocoop visit. For desert we found these soya red berry yogurts. Day 4 World Vegan Month. Our feast while on the road...More tomorrow! Love Kay and Sime xx

We often get shocked at how much folks are willing to pay for vacations. Even if we become billionaires...no don't laugh, you never know...we will no doubt continue to travel simply.  We love camping for starters, so we can't imagine not doing it and then there's a real joy in bargain hunting hotels and holiday accommodation. We tend to camp if we can do more than 3 nights and the weather's nice. If it's not so good, then we usually look at self-catering accommodation and easily find great places. When we're on the road we tend to find cheap motels for overnight stays and book a few hours before arrival to save money. These can be anything from a motel chain to a more fancy pants country hotel...on our last trip to France we found ourselves staying in the grounds of a vineyard in Burgundy and it was lovely!  A lot of small hotels open up to business travellers out of season and when they still have rooms available, they reduce their prices and ...

As lots of you will be aware...we eat porridge every day. When we go away, we take all our ingredients, pan and utensils so we can continue to eat it on the road. We have recently introduced various hosts to the benefits of eating a daily bowl of what we call superfood porridge and have gone through the recipe with them, but we did promise to make a video too, so here it is! It's funny, but we still get contacted by old blog followers and B&B guests from years ago asking us for a reminder of the recipe.  Simon made it back then and would beautifully hand write the recipe out for anyone who requested it. One guest wrote to say after using Simon's recipe for years, she went and knocked a cup of coffee over it and could no longer read it, so this spurred us on to create a copy on our laptop and now we just press a couple of buttons and off it goes attached to an email (yes, we realise this technology has been around for a while, but still - it's a cool id...