A cottage in one of the wildest and most beautiful areas of Europe during a long, freezing cold Winter. Life here is both a daily challenge and a great source of joy. I’m often asked why I live where I do, and in this short video I try to explain my reasoning. Traditional rural life […]

It’s again been a couple of months since I updated my blog, and quite a bit has happened. One reason I haven’t been posting often is that I’ve been focusing on making videos for my YouTube channel Carpathian Adventure. I’ve been procrastinating for a long time, and the adpocalypse (plus the major censoring) had me […]

This week Slovakia celebrated its independence from Communism. As it was a bank holiday, many traveled to the capital to protest the government’s lock down policies. Our little family instead made the 2-hour trip to Pieniny National Park, by the River Dunajec, to visit my wife’s father’s family home. We usually do this for All […]

Well, it’s been a strange couple of weeks. The week leading up to Hallowe’en, the Slovak government decided to lock down the country again and restrict travel. Out here this was a major thing because it coincided with one of the biggest religious festivals – Dušičky – All Saints’ Day. In Slavic countries, this is […]

Things had been going too smoothly this Summer but that ended on Sunday when I fell backwards on to a rock pile and broke my 6th rib. That’s the third rib I’ve broken in four years and it really sucks. I didn’t go to the hospital until Wednesday, hoping it was just a bruised lung […]

This year’s big work about the house was to build a woodshed as last winter saw us woefully unprepared. We had the wood but because there was nowhere to cut, chop and stack it, my sons and I had had to go out in literal blizzards to chainsaw metre-long logs, then chop them on an […]

On Saturday I managed to get a little riding in. Scarlet needed her engine turning over so I took her out, although with the heavy side-winds and a temperature just a little too cool for the gear I was wearing, the ride felt more like a chore than fun. I also haven’t changed her tyres […]

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 […]

Having finally bought a new car after our other two became unreliable, a Dacia Duster we’ve named Liška (Fox), we decided to take her out on her maiden voyage and do an old fashioned roadtrip as a family. Cerveny Klastor played a large part in my early years here as it is very close to […]

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. […]