Casa Robino

Oh wow! They actually are sailing! I can't believe that Charlie and Lily are sailing off from the United States and are headed for Australia. Lily wrote a little bit about it on her blog. And there is this video as well. Happy voyage you two!

Sailing over the Danube with a paddle-boat. Sounds crazy huh? Flore and Manuel, both based in Berlin, are currently sailing down the Danube river on a paddle boat. A couple of days ago they started in Vienna and they are writing about their adventures at http://pepora.wordpress.com/

The Danube is Europe's second largest river with 2850 km, going from Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania. See also this post by Hugo earlier this year about the idea to sail down the Danube with a self-made raft.

An idea in my mind for 3 years : building up a wooden raft, rafting down the Danube from source to delta.
Well this morning I woke up willing to make this idea concrete. Each year at first buds, first rays of sun, East and Balkans are calling me deep inside, and I find myself each time following the meandering river, dreaming : what if i followed it to the end?
But it just sounds senseless alone. I'm a lonesome walker, biker, dreamer, but I want to be a social sailer! Yep.

In my previous life, I never thought I would end up on the seas. Possibly I would not have ended, if I hadn't refused to go on with my worker life in this efficient western society. However, a lot of things came together. It all started with my habit of visiting the sea shore at my home city, Oulu, Finland. Spending time gazing endlessly at the horizon, I was hoping to see land on the other side - were it Sweden or any other country, I didn't care. I knew, deep inside me, that I had to leave, to find out other worlds, find out my own stuff.

Dear Casa,

tonight I want to share with you some tips that I collected during my last trip to Iceland. I recently had a conversation with Jass, which I have re-organized here; and wrote a story on RandomRoads, that I hope will soon be reviewed and published. I heard that some of you are thinking about doing this trip, and of course I can't but recommend it, because it's truly awesome. I hope you will find this info useful!

Boat-Hitching:

Maybe there were always nomads out there taking to the seas. Maybe travelers just got sick of the highways. Or maybe the aviation industry finally spilled too much fuel... In any case, boat-hitching is gaining ground in the rambling world – we wanna sail!

It was the Wright brothers, those enterprising Ohio bike dudes of history, that discovered a way to keep airplanes in flight. They believed that flight technology would make wars of attrition obsolete - a noble scientific aim. But the inventor of dynamite, the inventor of the machine gun; they too believed the same thing of their own never-before-seen technological accomplishments. High hopes for the cutting-edge geniuses of our progress-hungry society.