Back after several weeks...

This is my first post after HF21/22. Why did it take me so long?

I was on vacation in Slovakia. We were supposed to do a tandem jump out of a plane a few weeks ago. The airport providing such experience is far away from my hometown, so it didn't make sense for us to travel by plane this time and therefore we decided to go by car.

The distance between where we live in Switzerland and my hometown is 1500 km and we planned to stay in Bratislava (midway) for a couple of days to meet our friends and relax before driving for another 6 hours.

One day before the tandem jump I got a call from the instructor that there are some technical issues at the airport and that we won't be able to do the jump as planned. We agreed that we will come in 3 weeks. This didn't sound too bad to me as at that time we would be on the way back to Switzerland so we would visit my cousin who lives close to that airport and after the jump we would continue driving.

We had a great time in Slovakia and after 3 weeks we packed all our stuff and went to my cousin. A few minutes after we arrived (it took us 5 hours to get there) I got a call from the instructor telling me that they realized that the issue wasn't fixed properly and that we are not able to do the jump.

This didn't make me happy at all as we did so much effort to get there and drove for hours and hours instead of taking a plane. We agreed that we will not force it this year as the weather is getting worse and therefore we will postpone it to next year. He wasn't too excited about this, but he had to agree that it wasn't our fault and that he can't expect us to travel from Switzerland just for this occasion any time soon again.

When I explained the situation to my husband the only thing he said was: 'Well, now I won't be able to sleep for another year.' 😊

We usually travel by plane as it's too far away to drive and driving takes too much time, effort and it's not even much cheaper than flying.

But driving to Slovakia has one huge advantage. We can take as many homegrown goodies as we fit in the trunk of our car! 😊 And so we did...

My relatives were very generous, and everyone gave us something from their gardens. We got delicious tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, beetroot, garlic, chili peppers, cucumbers and carrots. This is just a sample of what we got as I couldn't fit more in one photo.

My aunt invited us for lunch a few days before we left. She made stuffed peppers with her homegrown veggies, homemade ketchup and tomato paste. It was so delicious! She doesn't have children, so she packed many jars for us.

She also gave us her black currant, blackberry and cherry jams. They are all yum!

My mom gave us pickled green beans, mixture of veggies and beans, pickled chilis and pickles.

In total we have 56 jars with various goodies. It looks like we'll have enough summer goodies for winter this year.

My aunt gave us some beans from her garden as well. She also makes her own soup mixture (on the right). There are some beans that she bought but most of them are grown in her garden.

And this is the most valuable treasure! A huge 5-liter glass jar filled with dried porcini mushrooms that my uncle foraged last year. I will use them in risotto, soups, stews, pasta and more!

The trunk was so full that we had to push it down as it didn't want to close automatically.

The way back was much worse than we expected. The last 1000 km took us 13 hours to drive. We expected to do it in 9 hours but there was too much traffic and even an accident in Austria.

I can say that we don't plan to go by car anytime soon but we might reconsider when we need to replenish our stock 😊

I'm looking forward to share with you some of my summer adventures in the next couple of days.

Thank you for reading!

Cheers!
Martina