Monday! Another new week, another roadtrip. Wait – WHAT?!

I guess that by now, it’s quite obvious that we are just “hooked” to being on the move. Being nomadic and changing environments on a regular basis has been such an incredible thing for our creativity and our personal growth. We were simply not the same people than before we made that lifestyle choice. It has opened us up so much and brought so many new opportunities into our lives.

After spending one and a half month at our native little Luxembourg, we are once again ready to go on a new nomadic journey and take our entire life (and work) on the road again. It’s crazy how we managed to get so much done during this short amount time here in the country. I guess it’s just because we had a huge drive to make it all happen, and despite of all the stress that it caused, we still managed to do a few homely things like catch up with family, friends, and get back in touch with familiar rituals & habits. Of course, we had to make a few compromises and there were some nerve-wrecking moments, but all we wanted was to just allow this to be a stage of “letting go” and getting propelled into the right direction: one that’s true to ourselves. Letting go of doubts and blockages, choosing determination and making many things much more official.

Here’s a summary of some of the things that happened these last 7 weeks in Luxembourg:

• Work has been freaking awesome. We worked on so many new exciting creative projects lately! And… “any” negative relationships we might have had with past clients (that we simply did not connect with) are out of the way. Now we can focus on the projects that make us happy and the people who fully trust us. We designed complete brands/art direction for musicians we admire. Got contacted by really interesting people who have beautiful sustainable project ideas that they need some creative help with. And now we’re actually working with a couple that I’ve been following on youtube for a very long time, and that equally love what we do. Would love to share because I have a hard time keeping it to myself, but I’ll have to wait a bit. It’s cheesy but we are definitely having a #grateful moment in our career right now!!

• We gained some clarity by filing a few things in our mental list of “Sh*t we don’t give a f*ck about”.  By the way – I urge you to start such a list, as it helps to clarify a couple things so you can remain true to yourself and declutter from things that are not really important. For us, this included: designer events. As creatives we’re often told that it’s a big deal to attend those (something that I now highly disagree with). So we did from time to time – some were ok, but most left us with strange feelings. We attended one of those as we submitted some projects from our portfolio. It took us about a whole afternoon, (if not a full day) for us to lovingly and carefully prepare that presentation file we sent over and were quite excited about that. Then, at the last minute we were told that our work would get less than 60 seconds of visibility – what we put so much effort into was just quickly tossed around like it had no meaning. It also made me feel bad about all the other 59 + designers who were there as well and had to deal with the same sort of thing. On top of that, this event wasn’t attended by anyone outside the “design” field. No big news there, many such events work this way. But after having attended other similar ones in the past, this one finally made us realise that it’s just not our thing. And that’s ok. No harsh feelings. Moving on!

• On the list of things that we DO give a sh*t about: meeting interesting people. Which we do online (especially via instagram) but also in real life when we are in the same spot. We did meet a lot of new folks who contacted us and wanted to meet us while we were in Luxembourg, and had lovely, eye-opening conversations. Among those people were also clients from here who just hadn’t yet met us in person before (as they had contacted us while we were travelling). It was lovely to meet people face to face and spend some quality time with some familiar faces! That simply warms our hearts and makes us feel so happy inside. We did not get to meet everyone we wanted due to lack of time, but hopefully there will be a next time soon enough!

• Among those new people we also met Wolfgang Gettman who is a retired zoologist from Dusseldorf and has an otter called Nemo. If you’ve been following us for a while, then you can imagine how OTTERLY excited we were about that. More in this album!

• We also re-kindled many friendships. It was so nice to hang out with some of our best friends, tell them about our stories and listen to theirs. Good friends equals good times. Good feasts, good laughs and some crazy things too. The other day we drove to a dutch city called Eindhoven and had fruit tattoos together with 3 of our friends. And that happened naturally, without being under the influence of alcohol or anything else. That memory is now forever fruitily engraved on our skin, haha!!

• We attended a beautiful festival called Siren’s Call, located in the old part of Luxembourg city. The whole setting was absolutely magical.

• We recorded our first ever online course. Yup. Now we’re going to be editing this thing and hopefully launch it soon. It will be a course about photography, and the next one will be about hand-lettering. If you guys are interested, make sure you sign-up to our newsletter – we’ll let you know when it comes out and give you an early-bird discount!

• We experimented with foodie things, such as fermentation while living at my parents place for a bit. Made plenty of Kombucha. Also made our first ever loaf of sourdough. This stuff is fascinating and I just can’t wait to dig deeper into it when we’ll be in Crete for the fall, living the local life.

• One thing we let go of: glasses! Well, me at least. I had laser eye-surgery. And oh my goodness, the results are amazing.

• On another hand, we also made a more important decision. One that is aligned with our desire to be “childfree”: the snip, that is. I could have rather been more private about this but David and I are very open about it and happy to share this life decision. The whole thought process behind it was intense, nerve-wrecking and liberating – we had been thinking about it for a long time and it all came to a real conclusion at this stage. That alone would be something that we could write about. To some people around us, this decision seemed harsh (and irreversible), but to us it made so much sense – once again, it just had to do with being true to ourselves.

• We sold our place! Made it official and signed the notary act just about a week ago. The whole thing was incredibly stressful and full of paperwork to sort out at the very last minute. But we made it guys!!! I could write a whole post around how this felt. But when we closed that door forever and giving the keys to the new owner, it was really like closing an entire chapter to move on to the next one in our lives. Nostalgic but freeing. Farewell, little Kinlake appartment.

• We got rid of more than 3/4 of our belongings, because we are only bringing a tiny van’s worth of stuff to Crete. That was also such a huge process: Decluttering. Sorting. Recycling. Selling or donating… We organized a couple of garage sales – which were also a great way to have fun and meet new people. I will be writing a post about de-cluttering in the next few weeks for sure. We are also very grateful that our parents helped us a lot with our move – they did a few lapses with us through the whole thing. Without them, this whole process would have been much harder.

Last but not least: we bought a van! This is our little second-hand Fiat Doblo. We called it Karpouzi (which means “watermelon” in greek). Can you spot the little black stickers on it that look like melon seeds? We just couldn’t help ourselves, haha!!

We stashed all our stuff in there and starting from today, we’ll drive it all the way down to Greece. Our travel itinerary was decided less than a week ago, in fact. We will take it slow and explore Italy at first, going through Aosta’s beautiful scenery, then Perugia and Bari – and later crossing the sea onto Northern Greece where we’ll spend a couple days in the Pindos national park. Then we’ll head onto Athens where we’ll spend an easy week getting back to our projects, working & meeting friends we have there. Towards the end of the month we’ll be in Crete, where we’ll begin a whole new journey of finding our little creative space: the tiny house we dream of and where we intend to spend a few months in every year. Whether we want to travel for most of the year or not, Crete will always be our soul’s place and I just cannot wait to be there and enjoy slowing down a bit so we can focus on more long-term creative ideas, minimalism and slow life. We hope to find a home there in the next few months. If not, then it will be a little later. Let’s see. I just know that when we do, we will turn it into a beautiful project of its own.

In the meantime it is so incredible to have crossed all these things off our list and go on the road without anything holding us back anymore. This is it – the coast is clear. We’re definitely going to be sharing some glimpses of our roadtrip on our instagram account, so make sure to follow us there!

And by the way, if you have ANY recommendations at all around the places we intend to visit, or know any local like-minded folks that might be interesting to meet along the way, please let us know in the comments.

Thank you for following our crazy adventures. We love sharing all of this with you and hearing your feedback!!