Hi! We’re a family of four – Tina, Ralph, Alexander, and Eoin. I’m Ralph and I’m from Ireland, Tina’s Greek-Australian, and Alexander and Eoin are just confused. We used to live in Brisbane, Australia, but in early 2023 started moving into our new house in Rathdowney. It’s still in Queensland, but it’s a good hour and three quarters south of Brissie.
We use this blog to document our travels. Despite living in Australia, far away from everything, we’ve been lucky enough over the years to have done a few big trips overseas: Mexico, Bali, Malaysia, and Barcelona being some of the latest ones. Our 2019 trip took us back to Ireland, taking in Denmark (Lego House), Helsinki, and Russia (St. Petersburg, Veliky-Novgorod, Moscow, and Smolensk) before we ended up for two weeks in Zakynthos, Greece.
Isolated in Australia for the past couple of years, however, what with lockdowns, kids’ schooling, and mortgages to pay off, we hadn’t been able to get back to our usual European haunts. Which made us turn our attention to the countryside around us, places like Mount Barney and Hervey Bay, with its passing whales. At one stage we bought a teardrop-style camper van to get us around, before selling it again to buy our house in Mount Barney (just south of Rathdowney).
But the bad times came to an end and we booked our flights back to Europe for an extended stay. There will be jobs. And school. We don’t plan on returning to Australia until the first few virgin days of 2024. We call all this Project Frappé. As in the caffeinated, iced Greek beverage. First stop was Ireland, where we spent just over two weeks paying our respects and seeing the sights. From there we flew to Athens, and after only three days there caught the ferry to Zakynthos. Greece is where we’ll spend most of this year, between Zakynthos and Athens.
Over the past few years we’ve tried ways of travel that allowed us to stay longer in the places we wanted to see and to meet some of the people who lived there. If you book a hotel for a week in, say, Barcelona, other than the hotel staff you’re not going to meet many of the people who actually live there. Staying in an Airbnb will occasionally allow you to meet the hosts but even Airbnb has become fairly sterile, in our experience, with more and more places run pretty much like ordinary, anonymous hotel rooms.
So a few years ago we decided to take eighteen months off to travel around Europe, experimenting with two social networks along the way: Help Exchange and Couchsurfing. Helpx allowed us to spend a month in Vienna with a family that were, until the day we arrived, total strangers to us. Within a short amount of time we considered them friends. Ditto Poland. For smaller (two- or three-day) stays, Couchsurfing let us spend time in Budapest, Salzburg, Brussels, and Provence, to name just a few spots on that very same trip, and to hang out and chat with some of the coolest people we’ve ever met.
On our last European trip we managed to do a couple of nights’ couchsurfing again, this time in Denmark, which as well as introducing us to some real-life, actual Viking descendants, saved us a few krone (that’s right; they don’t use euros in Denmark) since Denmark – anywhere around there, in fact – is so expensive.
The patron house of this blog, Koukla House, is the house Tina’s parents built in Zakynthos, the island in Greece from which they emigrated to come to Australia a long time ago. We go there as often as we can – usually about once every two years. It’s probably the thing we most look forward to in the world. Fun fact: I wrote a book about our time in Zakynthos in 2015 called “On a Greek Island” which you can buy on Amazon.
kouklahouse.com 