I’m Not Alone Anymore

The darkest days of winter are finally behind us and every morning the sun rises just a little bit earlier and lingers in the sky for a few minutes longer. These days around the winter solstice are a season of rebirth and renewal, reminding us that light will always triumph over darkness. One of my favorite ways to mark this time of the year is with a cleansing swim. A way to wash off the worries of the past year and old habits that no longer serve me, creating space for new beginnings. If you're new here, I'm Jessica and I travel full-time around Europe in my wooden campervan Frodo with my puppy Heidi and for the next couple of weeks my partner Rissi is joining us as well. Nearly three years ago we decided to leave our old lives behind and let go of most of our worldly possessions for a simple and nomadic life guided by the seasons. Join us as we spend a quiet winter here in the mountains to reconnect with nature and grow roots in the wild. Hi everyone, we hope you've had lovely holidays. We are in Sardinia for a few weeks while Rissi is off on holiday from university and we've got this habit of going to places that are really famous for their beaches but spending all of our time inland instead and that's exactly what we've been doing this time as well. Yeah, we did it in Spain, we did it in Mallorca and I think in both of those countries I didn't realize they had such gorgeous mountains. Yeah, I mean we do like a good beach but we're definitely mountain people and the mountains and lakes and rivers here are just absolutely gorgeous. It has been so nice to be back in mainland Europe, it does just feel like you're playing van life on easy mode being here compared to the UK. Yeah, I mean when we crossed the border and we came across on the ferry it was one of the first things you said is it just feels like a weight is lifted off your shoulders. Yeah, a lot of the aspects that make this lifestyle difficult in the UK just don't exist on the mainland. There's a lot more space, a lot more park ups, it's easier to get water, you get a lot more solar. Also, in case you're wondering what these t-shirts are about, we've now got our very first Roots in the Wild merch and this design was hand-drawn by my friend Josie from Bus Up with Josie and we're really in love with it and if you want to get your own we'll leave the link in the video description. For now, Christmas is just around the corner and we're really craving to be in a nice and quiet spot away from all the buzz so we're going to drive deeper into the mountains and park next to a lake for the next few days. We absolutely love the kind of places that offer a lot of different landscapes from temperate rainforests to warm sandy beaches and dramatic mountain ridges and why we chose Sardinia primarily because it was a convenient location for us to spend time together with Rissi having to return to the UK in a couple of weeks and me planning to travel onwards to Greece. We have absolutely fallen in love with the island's vast expanse of forest and remote landscapes and we could honestly spend a very long time here. So we're currently researching a beach that we want to visit later this week which you can only access on foot, there's no car access which we really love so we're just looking up the route, the weather, the tides and all that because once we get there we probably won't have signal. So although we try and live as simply as possible we obviously still rely on the internet for work and practical things like this and because we try and spend as much time offline as possible we don't want to have to worry about data privacy all the time which is why we're really excited to partner with NordVPN on today's video. Their mission is to make the internet a safer space and we've actually been using NordVPN for ages way before we started van life. Yeah for quite a few years now both on our phones and laptops. With one click NordVPN encrypts and protects your internet traffic which helps keep things like passwords, bank details and private messages secure especially when you're traveling or connected to public wi-fi. We really like to just set things up once, know they're secure and then get on with our lives. And NordVPN also doesn't track or share what you do online which we really like. They also have a feature called Threat Protection Pro which helps protect you from phishing links, fake online shops, scammy ads and malware and it works in the background so you don't have to think about it. NordVPN also has a dark web monitor so if any of your details are stolen and leaked online it keeps an eye out for that and basically alerts you if anything is shared. I also really like the additional layer of anonymity that a VPN gives you. So much of van life feels tracked and shared so it's just really nice to have that additional level of privacy. We're on Nord's family plan which covers all of our devices and it still works when we're in different places which we often are when we're traveling and it just fits really well into a life that's mostly offline but still connected when we need it to be. If you want to try NordVPN you can get their two-year plan with an extra four months for free plus a 30-day money-back guarantee via nordvpn.com slash rootsvpn and we'll also leave the link in the video description. A big thank you to NordVPN for partnering with us on this video and protecting our privacy on our travels and now back to the video. It is the 24th of December and it's a very stormy day outside so I decided to spend the day cooking a little seasonal feast. Rissi and I don't celebrate Christmas per se but we tend to have a nice big meal around this time of the year to celebrate the year past and the day's getting longer again and he cooked last year so it's my turn this year and I decided to make a few traditional Sardinian dishes in a plant-based version. Rissi's gone out with Heidi for a few hours to give me some space and I've never cooked a large three-course meal in my tiny van before but I've got the induction hob, I've got the gas cooker and I've also got the wood burner which is really good for simmering stuff so that should be plenty of space hopefully. Although I'm far from an expert chef I really enjoy having a go at local dishes in the places I visit because it's just such a great way to learn more about local cultures and discover different ways of eating some of my favourite foods. For our winter feast I first started prepping the dessert filling. I had a go at making seadas which are a traditional Sardinian sweet filled with cheese and lemon zest but because I'm intolerant to dairy I instead cooked some semolina in oat milk, added some plain plant-based cream cheese which I found at the shop and I also decided to add both lemon zest and lemon juice just because I really like the taste of lemon. I cheated a little bit and bought a sheet of puff pastry instead of making my own dough simply because I just recovered from a pretty bad cold and wanted to reduce the amount of work and tidying in the small space and honestly it worked just fine. I cut out a bunch of circles, added the filling and then connected the circles of pastry with a fork. I then started prepping for the main dish which is essentially gnocchi with sausages and a tomato sauce with lots of spices. The main changes I made to the traditional recipe was swapping the sausages for plant-based ones, adding a bit of chili to fight the last remnants of my cold and also replacing saffron with turmeric. You usually put it in the tomato sauce but I couldn't find any at the shops. I was actually really surprised by the plant-based sausages. I thought they were going to be quite plain but they actually had quite a bit of spice as well. I fried the sausages separately while chopping up the veg and then mixed everything together and added white beans, tomato and bay leaves and then I put the whole pot on the wood burner to simmer while I was working on the other dishes. In Sardinia it is custom to have a side dish of winter greens so I chopped up some cabbage and cauliflower we had with more garlic and left it to braise with more bay leaves and also added cavolo nero towards the end. And then it was time to prep another tomato sauce for our starter, this time a fairly simple one with just garlic and fresh rosemary. While the sauce was simmering I started frying the ciadas in olive oil until they turned golden brown. I was struggling a bit at that point because I was running out of pans and had to juggle quite a lot of dishes but it all worked out in the end. I finished the winter greens with fresh lemon juice and drizzled the ciadas in maple syrup. Normally you would use honey for this but we just had it left over and then I only had the starter left to do. It's called panna frattao and basically you layer a type of local crisp bread called shepherd's bread with vegetable broth and tomato sauce with cheese on top. The bread kind of soaks up the broth and the tomato sauce holds the layers of bread together. I used about 10 pieces of bread and topped it with plant-based parmesan I found at the shop and this was honestly the highlight of our meal although we also really loved the gnocchi and the ciadas were gone very quickly as well. As we cozied up inside for our winter feast the storm slowly made way to the sun again and we were blessed with the most gorgeous sunset and a very sunny Christmas morning just in time for the hike we had been planning. Sardinia's landscapes are rich in pagan folk stories many of which were passed down by the fireside as a way to explain the mysteries of life and death. Its most famous folk creatures are the yanas, delicate fairies or nymphs no taller than a little girl's hand span and whose houses can be spotted all across the island. The yanas appear as beautiful small women often dressed in red or white and by night they emerge to sit at the cave entrances weaving on golden looms and singing enchanted songs. On a hike we were joined by a tiny dog who led the way to the beach rather confidently and we jokingly said that she must have been a spirit guardian of these woods or something of the sort and after a few hours of climbing down rocky slopes and walking through dense oak woods we reached the remote beach in late afternoon just as the sun was setting and painting the landscape in the most gorgeous shades of blue and pink. We ended up hiking back in the dark in the hope of spotting some of the yanas and whether we did that's a story for another day. After a couple of days by the coast we were ready to escape into the mountains again to be far away from people and we found this quiet little corner just as the next thunderstorm was rolling in and here among the peaks we would hide away from the world for the next few days and wait for the sun to make its return. As always thank you so much for watching guys we hope you had lovely holidays, a nice christmas if you're celebrating and a blessed winter solstice and yule. Until next time take good care of yourselves. Bye!