Spring Colour

The title of today’s blog comes to you courtesy of Steve. He said the blog should be called “Spring Colour’ because we went for a walk today and Steve took lots of photos of flowers! Steve is rather partial to the floral photo and whenever we travel, he’s on the lookout for foliage to capture with his lens! When we were in Washington DC during the cherry blossom season, he was in his element. Then when we walked around Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada, he was on his stomach capturing artistic angles for this tulip and that daffodil! So today, on our stroll through the village, he was again happy to snap as much spring colour as possible. I like photographing trees and rivers and lanes, so I guess between the two of us, we’ve got the nature photography covered!

Today was our planned rest day and we succeeded in doing very little. We did some housekeeping, Steve did some bike maintenance, I did some sewing to mend a broken strap on a bag and other than that, we took it pretty easy, just reading or sitting. Steve had a couple of snoozes in the sun, so it was a nice peaceful day.

We went for a pre-lunch wander through the village, where Steve took his floral photos and it was a nice stroll beside the river and then into the quiet streets of Ancenis.

After another grey morning, the day finally cleared and we got some warmth and sun which was lovely. We sat down at the fantastic tables that had been provided for us and had lunch. For me, that was an enormous salad! It’s been so hard to prepare salads on the road or to carry that sort of thing around, so today with the space and time, I set to work creating an enormous blend of spinach and other veggies and tossed it all together in a bag and devoured it with a smile! Dee-lish! Since we’re on the subject of food, here are a couple of other things I’ve made as we’ve been travelling. I’ll call these “Recipes for the Road”. As Steve’s read other people’s travel blogs, a few people have asked other travellers what they carry or cook or eat, because it does require a certain degree of flexibility and creativity with limited supplies and cooking facilities. So here is a contribution from me…

All the “Recipes for the Road” are intended to be:

1. Quick to prepare

2. Can be prepared either without cooking or with a single pot on the Trangia

3. Nutrient dense

4. Vegan (but of course they can be adapted for omnivores as desired!)

5. Require only simple, transportable ingredients

I’ll start with a simple one… The Simple Smoothie

At home I have a smoothie every morning, packed with fruit and sometimes greens. It’s a bit hard to transport a blender though, so this is my solution.

Ingredients:

rice milk (or other milk of choice)

a pouch of pureed fruit (like toddler food and the 100% fruit variety). I like the berry ones the best, but the strawberry and banana and apple and banana ones are pretty good to!

To Prepare:

1. Squeeze the fruit puree into a glass (or in our case, a silicon cup!)

2. Add milk and stir. Voila! Instant smoothie!

Veggie Pasta

Ingredients:

pasta

tomato puree

can of white beans

tomato paste

capsicum, onion, carrots (or other veggies that happen to be around or available!)

To Prepare:

1. Cut up the veggies nice and small and sautee them in the pot in a small amount of water (nope, oil isn’t needed).

2. When the veggies are softened slightly but not soft, put those in the bowl you’ll eat out of and set aside.

3. Cook the pasta and drain.

4. Add the veggies back into the pot with the pasta and beans. Pour in the tomato puree, add a liberal squeeze of tomato paste for a bit more flavour and richness.

5. Heat it all through and dish it up!

Very yummy with heaps of variations to this one.

So that’s a start. Every now and again I’ll post some others from the collection just for something different to add to the regular blog.

So today has been a very nice, quiet and peaceful day, with the sun finally coming out to greet us. It’s been lovely to just pause before hitting the road again tomorrow. Tomorrow will mark the start of week number nine. Fancy that! We’re a couple of months into this epic adventure and still learning heaps every day, still seeing some wonderful sights and meeting some lovely people and generally blundering along and doing the best we can, with ups, downs, challenges and everything in between. So…

On we go, on we go, on we go

On path, road, track, hill and trail

Up we slog, down we glide, highs and lows

In the sun, in the rain and the gales

 

On we go, on we go, on we go

See the views and the scenes and the sights

See a hill, give a groan, say “Oh, no!”

But we’ll smile at the end…well, we might…!