A typical Sunday when I am not on the road

Posted: June 23 2019

A day off from my mission to save as much as I can by doing all the over-time that is on offer.

I wake a 7am. This is a lie in as for 6 days a week, my alarm sounds at the rather cruel hour of 5.30.

My first coffee is purely functional as I watch Breakfast TV.

Then I spend an hour or 2 fine tuning Nomadic Backpacker. I tweak the text on 3 articles, correct a dead link on one and cut 50% of the text on another. Pages are subsequently submitted to Google.

I cycle the 2km to my favourite café. Here I enjoy an Americano no milk brought to me by the Polish Chicca-Bella. She's confident, polite and ever attentive.

The café is doing well. 6 months ago I'd be the only one in here at 9 on a Sunday morning.

I try to immerse myself in Robert Byron's 'The Road To Oxiana'. I bought it from World of Books months ago and despite Bruce Chatwin calling it a "Masterpiece" I find the going too tough. It's from an alien era. It's an account of his travels from 1933 when Iran was still called Persia and Peshawar was in India.

I take a break from reading and type this up off-line and make a list in a notebook of possible future posts:

• How I plan my travels
• Countries I want to visit in the next 5 years
• Countries that are likely to elude me

A 2nd coffee arrives with a glass of water and I resume my reading.

 2 hours have passed.

I cycle a 10km loop back home via the supermarket. Avocados, bananas, cashew nuts. Then to an International Food Market run by a lady from Turkmenistan. We exchange pleasantries in Russian and I buy 1kg of hummus and a pot of Smietana. Then it's across the road to the Polish shop to buy 2 beers.

Then I do some stuff in the garden, purely to keep dad off my back. I then laze the day away. Scrolling through a few travel blogs, dunking some mini breadrings into the Smietana and supping on the two beers. Dinner is at 6pm. At 9pm I'm already in bed.