Our lives out here are completely affected by the seasons and the various events and changes which happen within them, far more so than if we lived in an urban environment. Autumn brings with it the crazy rush to get wood in and prepared for winter, both day and night Red Deer stags cry out […]

My daughter wanted to see Hallstatt in Austria so we booked a hotel in the Alps and, following a week’s break by the sea in Croatia, made a 12-hour drive through Slovenia and via the incredible Loblipass to Tauplitzalm above Bad Mittendorf. At 1650 metres (5413 feet) above sea level, we were woefully unacclimatized to our […]

Yesterday, my friend Rusty met me in Bardejov, East Slovakia to take me hill walking. I left my car and got into his Toyota Hilux Kingcab, then we headed off on the Stara Lubovna road until turning off onto progressively smaller and worse condition roads until ending up in the incredibly middle-of-nowhere, end-of-the-road village of Livovská […]

It’s been quite a while since I last updated my blog, since well before Christmas in fact. It’s been a strange period with several ups and downs and much reflection. We stayed at the house in Eastern Slovakia over the Christmas and New Year period, which was both hard and amazing at the same time. […]

A few weeks back I got really sick of hearing people tell me that, because of global warming, we’d have a warm winter this year. The start of November was incredibly warm – I was doing our evening walks wearing a t-shirt. However, you could smell the oncoming cold in the air, and then it […]

The view of the town of Svidnik from my office, although more snow has fallen again since then. This Winter is really dragging on. Freezing temperatures, permanent grey sky. Happy happy joy joy…. I’m supposed to be writing an article for the Spring issue of Bushcraft Magazine but there’s no sign whatsoever of Spring. Then […]

Last week a friend of mine was telling me about some ghost footage he’d seen online and asked if, when I was doing my ghost hunting several years back, I had ever seen one. I showed him a copy of Carpathian Ghost Hunter but the photo I’d wanted to use as an example looked terrible […]

We spent the Christmas/New Year holidays at the house. When we arrived the inside temperature was 3 degrees Centigrade but slowly, and with a great deal of wood burning, we managed to get it up to a livable temperature. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the extreme winter like we did last year- we only had snow […]

This weekend we decided to have a break, leave the kids at home to fend for themselves, and go visit our our old friend Jana at her pension, Tatranska Krcma (formerly Polsky Krcma) in Horny Smokovec in the High Tatra Mountains, Slovakia. We were only there a few months back by motorbike but we just […]

Yesterday we returned, exhausted, after a week’s holiday to the tiny resort village of Arillas, Corfu. Prior to going I was a bit concerned that we’d be in some mega resort filled with lager louts and 24 hour nightclubs but the opposite was true. It was peaceful, beautiful and filled with nature. We stayed at […]