Our 2022 review: a pivotal year for us ( travels, numbers, projects, coliving…)

It’s already the end of 2022 and as usual since 2014 (what a regularity 😉 ) it’s also the moment to take a step back and reflect on the year that has just passed.

I don’t know if you do too, but we tend to focus on what we didn’t have time to do… and forget to appreciate all the things we accomplished during the year. This review is our way to press the pause button to remember the past year and set new goals for the one to come.

Let’s go for the 2022 review!

After two years (2020 and 2021) completely turned upside down by the Covid, we were looking forward to start 2022 with more freedom… and to be able to finally do this roadtrip in the south of Spain that we had been waiting for since we bought our van in 2020.

From a more general point of view, we also just wanted to put all this madness aside… to spend less energy on worrying news (without ignoring them), on our more than ever divided society, and to focus on what makes us happy and makes sense to us!

It is thus in this state of mind that we left Switzerland with the first snow falls at the beginning of December 2021 towards southern Spain and Andalusia.

Our year 2022 in pictures

January (well December) to February: a wonderful Roadtrip in the south of Spain

When we left Switzerland at the end of 2021, our only goal was to reach Andalusia to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve with a friend we hadn’t seen for too long. We first spent 2-3 weeks in Catalonia and even if we are far from having covered the whole region, we loved what we found there (we stayed mainly inland and it was really nice)

We then passed very quickly over the region of Valencia (we just visited a friend in Valencia itself) to reach Andalusia for the holidays.

In total we spent 10 good weeks in Andalusia and we really enjoyed this trip to the southernmost part of Spain for many reasons:

• First of all, what a pleasure to spend the holidays in a small Andalusian village with our friend Caroline
• The climate is just perfect to travel with a van, even in winter!
• The incredible diversity of the landscapes of this region… we really didn’t expect this.
• The beautiful white Andalusian villages
• The mix of cultures and the very rich history of this region

Then there are also 2-3 things that bothered us like the omnipresent garbage everywhere in nature or the industrial farming under Almeria’s greenhouses (a good reason not to buy Spanish fruits and vegetables in winter in our supermarkets…. eat local and seasonal! 😉 ). But in our opinion, it remains a wonderful region which really deserves a visit! (besides, we have written 14 articles about Andalusia 😉 )

March to end of April: back to Galicia at Anceu Coliving

After Andalusia we took the road again towards our dear Galicia to spend 2 more months in a place we love: Anceu coliving. Anceu is a bit like our Galician home! We found old friends, we met new people, we shared a lot of good moments with all these happy folks (we visited the Cies islands for example, one of our favorite places in Galicia) and we also made the most of these 2 months to work hard on our projects.

For us it’s just pure pleasure to go back to this coliving lost in the middle of the Galician countryside and we really feel like home. By the way, to show you a little bit better what the life in a coliving is like, we prepared a video about it (it’s in french but you can just turn on the subtitles 😉 ):

May: Roadtrip to the north of the León province and La Rioja to return in Switzerland

We would have stayed longer in Anceu but our duty was waiting for us in Brittany at the beginning of June 😉 #ToughAuthorLife ;). So instead of rushing it, we took a few weeks to go back slowly to Switzerland through the north of the León province and the Rioja region (the year before we came back through Asturias and Cantabria).

This is exactly the kind of place we like when we travel. The north of Castilla y León is a relatively wild ans unvisited region (except for the pilgrims who hike the Camino Frances de Santiago) south of the Cantabrian mountain range. We made some nice discoveries there, especially around Ponferrada or the mountains of Riaño.

We didn’t like Rioja so much for the landscapes but we at least managed to stock up on good wines for home 😉

June: Roadtrip in Brittany to promote our new book Beer hiking in Brittany

As soon as we got back home in Switzerland, we were already on our way to Brittany to promote our new book Beer Hiking in Brittany (only available in french at the moment). These 2 weeks of promotional roadtrip in Brittany have been quite crazy! Between signatures in bookstores (or breweries 😉 ), after parties, group beer hikes (more than 70 of us met in Saint-Brieuc), reunions with friends… it was an intense stay! But after 2 years of Covid it was really good to meet all these new people 🙂

July to September: work and hikes in Switzerland

After 6 months of intense traveling, it was time to come back home and settle down a bit. And in order to progress on our project to open a coliving in a swiss mountain village… ehhh well guess what… we have to be in Switzerland 😉 #NoJokes (but we’ll talk about the progress of this project later in this review).

And besides, we love summer in the mountains in Switzerland! It’s less hot than in the lowlands, we have an infinite playground for hiking… The best way to get some fresh air after a good day of work. If we had to choose, we would say that our highlights were:

Our trip to the foot of the Weisshorn with our Breton friends to experience with them a night in a mountain hut.

• Our trip to the foot of the Weisshorn with our Breton friends to experience with them a night in a mountain hut.
• Our wonderful hiking week on the Combins tour.
• 3 days of family hikes between the valleys of Zermatt and Tourtemagne.
• Our evenings around a bottle of wine on the balcony to talk about the world with only the river below as background noise 🙂

Ahhhh yes in August our blog also celebrated its 10th anniversary and if you haven’t read it yet, we had prepared a nice anniversary post with a little video summarizing our 10 years of travel in 10 minutes 😉

October: short autumn roadtrip in Central Switzerland

After a small hop to Bratislava by night train for a wedding and a one week stay in bed because of the Covid (we had to get it once), we decided somewhat on short notice to go for a small roadtrip in central Switzerland to enjoy the beautiful autumn colors.

Autumn is certainly our favorite season in Switzerland. The colors are beautiful and there are a lot less people than in summer! So we couldn’t resist to take Winchy and our van to discover a part of Switzerland that we didn’t know very well yet. We’ll let you judge in pictures but Switzerland in autumn is not too bad 😉

November – December: winter in the mountains

It’s been a long time since we spent winter in Switzerland (the last Christmas we did in Switzerland was in 2017 actually #oouuppsss…). So before the first snow came, we offered ourselves some colorful getaways in one of our favorite valleys in Valais: the Val d’Hérens. At this season, the larch trees are literally “on fire” and the scenery is just beautiful!

Then the winter has really settled! Now, we put on snowshoes or skis to take the dog out 🙂 … we have to say that this year it has already snowed quite a lot in our area, which is something we really like. We therefore enjoy our work breaks to go snowshoeing or hit the slopes… and we hope that it will continue like that for the next months 😉

Edit: Well… actually it’s been raining all the way to the top of the mountains for several days… Hopefully cold temperatures and snow will come back.

That’s why I like to make this yearly review! When I look at all these beautiful pictures, I tell myself that we experienced a great year 😉 with lots of nice discoveries and beautiful encounters.

Review of the last few years’ surveys in video

For the last 3 years, we had prepared a little survey to ask you some questions about the blog. By the way, THANK YOU so much for taking the time to answer (several hundreds of you)! It helped us a lot to understand what you like (and dislike) about Novo-monde.

By reading your various answers, it especially appears:

• that you like our simplicity and our friendly attitude. You appreciate our tone, our sincerity, our transparency… and that makes us really happy! (and it gives purpose to what we do on this blog)
• that you like our pictures. And that’s also good to read because it takes us a lot of work 😉
• that the design of the blog could perhaps use a little update… but without changing its actual character #WeWillWorkOnIt
• that you are fond of practical information and destinations that are not necessarily the most visited
• that you are not afraid to read our posts, even if they are sometimes quite long 😉 (and it also makes us very happy at a time when video content is becoming the norm and our long posts might seem a bit #oldschool)

So even if this year we didn’t feel the need to make a survey, know that we will do our best to keep all those things you like while taking into account your comments for improvements.

Otherwise, for each survey, we also gave you the opportunity to ask us questions if you had any. And this year, we finally took the time to gather all your questions, to regroup them a bit to answer them in 2 videos (quite long, by the way… and in french but you can turn on auto translated subtitles):

The 1st one where we answer your questions about our nomadic lifestyle, kids 😉 how we make a living, our income etc…

The 2nd one where we talk more about our future travel projects, the difficult balance between travelling and ecology as well as some other questions 🙂

Our carbon footprint in 2022

Why do we keep sharing our carbon footprint with you for the 4th year in a row?

Simply because we think that calculating one’s carbon footprint makes it easy to see which actions are the most effective in reducing one’s impact on climate change.

As a reminder, the idea ( somewhat utopian though) is that in order to respect the Paris Agreement and limit global warming to 2 degrees, we must succeed in reducing our emissions to 2 tons of CO2 per capita per year by 2050. Currently, in France the average is around 9-10 tons and in Switzerland rather 13-14 tons…

As summarized in the Carbone 4 report “Doing your fair share”, to solve a problem as systemic as climate change, individual AND collective actions must be implemented. According to this report, about 1/4 of the effort required would come from individual actions and 3/4 from systemic transformations:

So no, it’s not fair to make individuals feel more guilty than necessary when the problem is 75% systemic. But individual actions are far from being negligible. Calculating one’s carbon footprint is a simple way to see concretely which levers to use to ” do your part “ (the 25%).

After using the carbon footprint calculator of Global Footprint for the last 3 years, this year we changed to use the simulator Nos Gestes Climat of the ADEME (also available in english). We find it very well done, it is open source and the origin of the data + the calculation model are transparent. That’s why we suggest you to try it (but you can try both 😉 ).

So here is our result for 2022:

In 2022 we emitted about 5 tons of CO2 (a bit more than last year)… Without surprise, the most important part of our emissions comes from our travels since we made about 20’000 kms by van/car (roadtrip in Andalusia, Brittany, travels in Switzerland). As for the rest, we already made a lot of efforts these last years since we adopted a 99% vegetarian diet (local and seasonal as much as possible), we haven’t taken any flight for a while (more than 3 years actually) and we are rather minimalistic in our purchases 😉

And if you wonder what the blue section is, it’s the part of the French public services emissions that is considered the same for everyone (yes I know we are Swiss 😉 but you get the idea… and we also have a public service in Switzerland lol)

I therefore recommend that you use this tool and “play” with your data to see what concrete action would have the most impact in your case. But to summarize, here are the action areas listed by order of importance:

• food: eat less animal products, eat local and seasonal, less packaging, less processed products, less coffee 😉
• mobility: drastically reduce the amount of flights and cars and use public transportation, carpooling, cycling… when possible
• housing: energy efficiency (unfortunately it can cost a lot of money to improve this point… hence the importance of governmental support measures)

Only after those actions come efforts like buying second hand (electronic items, clothes), digital sobriety, choosing a more sustainable bank, etc. We think it’s important to have this in mind to prioritize the most impactful measures!

Our 2022 review on the work side

Professionally speaking, we can say that 2022 was the first “post-Covid” year… in the sense that, for example, we were able to organize events with a lot of people without restriction in Brittany for the release of our new book (and that, frankly, was so good for us).

This is also the first year where there were almost no restrictions to travel… and I think we are not the only ones who are happy to be able to travel without asking ourselves all the time if there are any restrictions 😉 . At the beginning, it was almost weird for us in Spain not to have to think about this anymore… but we quickly got used to it again lol.

On the other hand, I guess you have also noticed that not everything is going well in the world (war, inflation, energy prices…). And I think that all this sad mess is also visible in the statistics of our blog:

Our novo-monde blog review in projects and numbers

Stats of the blog in 2022

In 2022 we finally got back to green numbers in terms of blog traffic… I want to say thank God because we wrote a lot of new posts in the last 3 years (about a hundred in French and the same number in English). It would be really discouraging for us if the number of readers continued to decrease… Especially since, as I’ll explain, we’ve been working hard to update our old posts too!

So in 2022, you were more than 1’160’000 people to visit our site (+10%) for about 1’840’000 page views (+9%) and an average time spent on each page of 4 minutes and 44 seconds (+1.5%).

We pushed the analysis a little more to try to understand which parts of our site were still less visited than before the Covid… and we quickly noticed that our posts about Asia in general were still very little visited compared to before (to a lesser extent our contents about South America).

It is quite logical I think… Our posts have certainly gone a bit old and are maybe a bit less well ranked than before (although… we have updated a lot of posts). But most of all, I think that there are simply less people than before traveling to these destinations.

On the one hand Covid is still fresh and some people certainly prefer to travel less far. Moreover, I honestly think that the time of cheap and long distance flights is over (I think it’s rather good news but everyone will have his own opinion on the matter).

To give you an idea, here are the charts of the number of visitors cumulated on our french posts about Indonesia and Vietnam since 2018 (easy to see where the Covid hit huh? 😉 ):

Otherwise, a few other random numbers about this year 2022:

• We wrote 39 new posts (in French and in English) as well as several new pages on the blog in 2022. Without counting our years of round the world trip, I think it’s the year where we’ve been the most productive (especially since we’ve also updated a lot of existing content, but I’ll talk about that below). If we consider all the work and the time it takes us to create a post (2-3 days minimum), we are really happy and proud of that.
• 9291 comments on the blog (+598): It’s maybe not as many as a few years ago (probably because people leave comments more easily on social media now), but this number proves us that our blog is still a living exchange platform where still a lot of travelers share information to help each other. And that’s cool!
• 27% of our readers read our posts in English (+30%): It’s really encouraging because we’re working harder to create good translations (they are in my opinion of much better quality than when we started to translate our site).
• We have published 6 videos on Youtube. It may not seem like much, but for us who haven’t posted any videos for a long time, well, it’s not so bad 😉 To follow us on Youtube and see future videos, it’s this way.

We have a new member in our team 🙂 (Hélène)

Otherwise a very big news for us since this summer: We have for the 1st time some reinforcements to work with us on Novo-Monde!

This idea was actually born during our 2 months at Anceu coliving this spring when we were complaining about not having enough time to update our old posts from our round the world trip. While discussing it with our friend Edouard (a coliving roommate), he told us:

But why don’t you hire someone to help you?

And it’s true that we had never really considered this possibility… Probably because novo-monde is our baby and we couldn’t see ourselves letting someone else get their hands on it. Besides, these are our stories, our travels… how could someone else update them for us?

But still, in 10 years, we have now around 1000 posts and pages on the blog… and even if we are 2, we realize that we can’t update our old posts as we would want to. As a result, there is unfortunately some information in our old contents that are outdated, some layouts to refresh, some readers’ comments to integrate and many other little things to improve…

So we figured it didn’t hurt to try it, we would see how it goes… and early last summer, we posted a job offer in an Instagram story to find someone to help us refresh our old posts while keeping their initial spirit.

And what a surprise it was to receive in a few days about 30 applications! So, after a dozen interviews and a very difficult choice to make, we were lucky enough to start working with Hélène during the summer.

After a few weeks of working together, our doubts quickly evaporated! We have a real pleasure to work/exchange with Hélène and it’s also good for us to have an outside look on our blog (it gives us a lot of new ideas).

And we have to say that the quality of her work is just great! She really manages to refresh our old posts (info, prices, photos, maps, phrasing, mistakes etc…) without altering what we had written initially. Thanks to her, our contents about Thailand, Vietnam and Vienna are of much better quality than before… and you can trust again the information you will find there! We’ll let you be the judge, but on our side we are very happy with this collaboration and we hope to continue working with Hélène for a long time.

By the way Hélène, as we know that you are certainly reading this report, thank you very much for your work, our discussions, your ideas… we are lucky to have you in the team.

A more relevant newsletter, organized into topics

You know it if you read our yearly reviews, we are not big fans of social media and we prefer to keep you updated with our newsletter (ouhhhh oldies 😉 ).

But we realized that not everyone subscribes to our newsletter for the same reasons:

• some people do it to download our ebook on how to prepare a round the world trip (more than half of the people actually 😉 ).
• others to be informed about our new posts
• others just to hear from us 😉

So we thought it would be a good idea to let you choose your preferences and only receive our emails about your topics of interest. So we chose 5 main categories:

• Travel Destinations: the content we create about specific destinations
• Backpacking: everything related to backpacking
• Hiking: all our hiking reports, as we write more and more of them
• Digital nomadism: the posts we write about our way of life, the colivings etc…
• Thoughts: when we share our opinion about society, ecology, travel…

From now on, when someone subscribes to our newsletter, he has to choose the topics that interest him the most (you will see in the form at the end of this post). The idea is that we don’t spam your mailboxes and that you receive the most relevant messages possible. By the way, at the end of each of our newsletters, you will have the possibility to update your preferences (or to unsubscribe of course 😉 ). And if you haven’t already done so:

Our novo-monde income review in 2022

From a financial point of view, we are also back to green numbers and 2022 was our best year since we started our business in 2016 #Yaahhoooo! We also have more expenses since we’ve been working with Hélène for 6 months now… but we’re happy to see that all the work we’ve done in the last few years is producing positive results.

This year, about 40% of our income comes from our blog novo-monde.com (the rest is mainly from the sale of our books and some other things). Of that 40%, the vast majority comes from affiliate marketing (people who buy a product after clicking on our affiliate links). Otherwise we still have a few photos sales and 1 single partnership that we made this year with the tour des Combins.

To make a small review of the income of our travel blog, it’s been 4 years that they are more or less stable… Yet it’s not for a lack of writing new posts, updating old ones and so on… But the last 3 years context is such that in spite of all our work, we have simply maintained our blog income.

Anyway, we try not to worry too much about it. We mainly write on our blog for pleasure, for the discussions with you, to share practical information about our passions which are travels, hiking etc… What is important for us is to remain relevant and coherent with our values, not to earn as much money as possible. So we’ll see how it evolves next year but we don’t put too much pressure on ourselves.

Our novo-media blog review in projects and numbers

On the Novo-media side, 2022 has been the year of emptiness lol. We didn’t publish a single post on this blog in 2022!

So it’s not for a lack of motivation or interest to write about WordPress, SEO, web development (which are the main topics of this blog)… But simply because we had other priorities this year and we didn’t have the time 🙂 .

It’s also a matter that we’ve been thinking about at Anceu this year: if we disperse ourselves too much, in the end we won’t make any progress on any of our projects. So we have put aside novo-media to concentrate on novo-monde, our books and the coliving project.

But despite our total absence, this blog continues to have visitors: about 40’000 people have visited the blog for 52’000 page views (about -25% compared to 2021). In terms of income, it’s really not much and it’s down quite a bit compared to 2021.

For next year, we don’t set any goals for novo-media and we’ll see if we have time to spend on it. But we must admit that it is a bit sad to leave it aside like this.

Review of our books in 2022

On the book side, we released not one but two new books in 2022 #proud (a paper book and a new ebook)! Plus, this year we’re officially more authors than bloggers since more than 50% of our income comes from the sale of our books! If someone had told us in 2017 (when we released our 1st book “destination tour du monde”) that we would have published 3 paper books plus 3 ebooks and that we could live partially from the sale of our books 5 years later…. we would not have believed it!

Let’s start with our new paper book released in May: Beer hiking in Brittany (only in french)

Beer Hiking in Brittany

After the nice success of Beer Hiking in France, Hadi (the founder of our publishing house Helvetiq) asked us one day to create a more regional version.

We immediately found that it was a great idea because a small flaw of the first book is that France is still a very large country. So, when people buy Beer Hiking in France, even if there are 70 itineraries, they only have a few hikes that are not too far from their home.

And as there are enough good craft breweries and beautiful hikes in France, there was more than enough to create regional editions!

Hadi first suggested the Paris area… but as we are really not fonds of big cities, we left it this area to our friends Mariette & Quentin and suggested Hadi to create a guide about Brittany 😉

You know our love for Brittany! It’s a beautiful region with living traditions and the Bretons have always welcomed us so warmly. And then there’s the terroir aspect, the “local first” spirit of the Bretons who are very proud of their products. It just fit perfectly with the concept of the beer hikes!

After more than 2 months of roadtrip, hundreds of kilometers of hiking, 212 beers tasted, several months of writing and a new roadtrip to promote the book at the beginning of June, we are very proud of the result and grateful for the wonderful welcome you have given it.

In a few months, the book has already been reprinted at least once (we don’t know the numbers yet) and we’ve had great feedback from you about it. 40 beautiful hikes that end with 40 passionate brewers of the region… We sincerely hope that our new book will be as popular with our Breton friends as with all the people who want to discover Brittany 🙂

The Dents du Midi tour guide

The most beautiful mountains in the world 😉 ! It’s the emblematic mountain range of our region and we know the trails around it like the back of our hand. So when we were asked to create a digital guide for the Dents du Midi tour, we hesitated for like a second lol (it’s kind of our dream job!).

So in the summer of 2021 we were back on the trails of the tour to document, photograph and create the best possible guide for future tour hikers. The ebook is available in French and English since spring 2022 on our sales platform.

It contains detailed descriptions of all the tour’s stages, several variations as well, information and contacts of the accommodations / huts, GPX and KML tracks, our most beautiful photos as well as a double-sided booklet to be printed with the map of the tour and the key information.

For a first season we are quite happy with the result. We sold more than 250 copies of the guide and the first comments on the sales page are very positive. And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be as good in the next years 😉

What about our other books???

• Beer Hiking in France: If there is one of our books that continues to sell extremely well, it is this one! In 2021 we still sold more than 9500 copies of the book (we had big french media talking about it). So we’ll know more in March (that’s when we get the annual sales numbers) but we’ve certainly already sold more than 30’000 copies which is pretty crazy! Honestly, it’s so nice to see that all the energy and work we put into this project is paying off.
• Destination tour du monde: Despite Covid which was not exactly an ideal period for the sale of our first baby, it continues to make its way. In 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, there are still more than 800 people who bought our book 🙂 #ThankYou. We have now passed the 7000 copies sold and we are very happy! We hope that our first book will continue to inspire and help future backpackers and we have no doubt that it has many more beautiful years ahead of it 🙂
• Via Alpina: hiking across Switzerland through the Alps: Like last year, we sold again about 100 copies of our ebook to hike across Switzerland on the Via Alpina trails. We are rather happy with this number because there are not so many people who start a 2-3 weeks hike like this one 🙂 . And the feedback we got on the sales page or by email are always very positive so it’s cool!
• 31 hikes in Chablais and Valais: We only sold 35 copies of this ebook this year (although we also received great feedback on the sales page)… Maybe it’s because it’s a rather classical collection of hikes and it’s less outstanding than our other books. Who knows? But we already have a few more hikes that we’d like to include in this guide, so maybe we’ll add a few more eventually.

To conclude this part about our books, we sincerely would not have thought one day that the sale of our books would become our 1st source of income. It’s really great because we put a lot of love and work into it 🙂 . It also helped us a lot during Covid when our other sources of income were either stagnating or decreasing.

For the time being, we don’t have any new book project for the moment (as we have released 2 books in 2022, we are entitled to a one year break, right?) But we won’t deny that we loved working for the Dents du Midi tour association to create a digital guide for them. We like to work with the people who are on these hiking tours. They are nice people and if we can provide them with our skills to help them digitalize a bit and offer them some visibility, then it’s great (and there is no lack of hiking tours around here 😉 ).

Moreover, we would like to continue to develop these digital guides because they allow us to get a much better return (we keep about 90% of the sale price) than on the sale of paper books (we earn between 6% and 10% of the sale price). In any case, it is a direction we would like to keep exploring in the future.

What about the Coliving?

If you have read our blog’s 10th anniversary review (yes, our blog was 10 years old in August 😉 ), we told you that we hadn’t found the final location yet but that we were presenting our project to a lot of people to create opportunities and find solutions.

In fact, we could do this project anywhere in the world… but our heart is in the Swiss mountains and we would sincerely like to make this project happen here. This “small” constraint we impose on ourselves obviously does not make our task easier. The price of real estate being what it is in our country, it is a huge first step to overcome for small entrepreneurs like us.

But since October, we found an old hotel that we like, at the heart of a beautiful village, where we could see ourselves living (and a little twist of fate, this is where Fabienne’s parents met for the 1st time a long time ago 😉 ). And since this moment, we focused all our efforts on this possibility.

This means that we met with the local authorities to pitch our project (to see if there was any interest on their part, potential synergies etc…), we visited the property several times (with architects, artisans, fire specialists etc… lol), we asked quotes for renovations, we put together a full dossier to convince financial partners (banks, regional financial funds), we showed them the project and everything…

So we would have liked to tell you in this review that we signed and that the 1st important step is done. But even if we have never been so close to making an offer (in fact it will be done in the next few days), nothing is done yet. We have already experienced many ups and downs while working on this project and there will certainly be more twists and turns. So we prefer to keep our feet on the ground and not get excited too quickly. But we sincerely hope that we can share some good news with you in the coming weeks/months #FingersCrossed.

In any case, if this becomes a reality, I think we will have a wonderful base to create an inspiring, friendly and close to nature living environment for our future “colivers” 🙂 .

Ben’s thoughts on 2022

It’s time to move on to the more personal part of this review and I’m going to try to make it shorter than the previous years lol (I always say that before I write a lot 😉 ).

We have all just come out of 3 complicated years and to be honest with you, I doubt that the coming years will be less complicated (divided society, ecological crisis, energetic crisis, inflation, war…). Frankly, who can tell us what our society will look like in 10 or 20 years!

In this sad (and complex) mess, I feel a deep need to get involved in a project that makes sense to me and helps solve some of these problems rather than making them worse. Not that I feel like I’m making them worse by blogging or writing Beer hikes guides 😉 but I don’t really feel like I’m solving them either.

In the back of my head, I have this vision (maybe a bit utopic), of this big house lost in a small mountain village and full of people from different backgrounds. A lively place, full of people who work online but also want to meet new people and live closer to nature. This place would not be a bubble disconnected from the village, on the contrary! Everything would be done so that there would be a maximum of interaction between the residents of this house and the locals. The work space would be open to the public, the coliving events would be open to the locals, we would get involved in local associations or societies etc… In short, this big house (and its inhabitants) would be an integral part of the local community and would participate in the dynamism of the village.

When I imagine this house, I have a big smile on my face and I can see myself living there with Fabienne and Winchy. I have no doubt that the road will be long and full of difficulties, but it is a project that makes sense to us! A place to create bonds (in our individualistic societies we need it), to reinvent tourism in rural areas, to have a positive local impact and create synergies. This place could also become a solid base to create other equally interesting projects in the future.

So as I write these lines, the prospect of creating this place motivates us more than getting back on the road with our van and Winchy. And since we’ve been trusting our intuition for the past 10 years when it comes to important decisions in our lives, we’re going to go all out and see where it takes us.

And whatever happens, if there is one thing I am sure of, it is to have the right person by my side to start this new adventure. To be honest, I don’t think I would have had the courage to embark on such a project alone. So I’m just happy and grateful to have Fabienne (and Winchy) by my side, that our aspirations are aligned because we can definitely go further together.

So we’ll see where it all goes but be sure we’ll share all this new adventure with you on the blog 😉

Fabienne’s thoughts on 2022

I come to interfere in Benoit’s post for a few lines with a more personal review of my own. 🙂

Last year I had mixed feelings, the year 2021 had brought me a lot of beautiful things, but it had also left me with a certain sadness about the divisions growing in the world.

Let’s not lie, the current situation has not been particularly good… climate crisis, inflation, war in Ukraine and so on. Although these things continue to affect me and make me reflect, I would say that this year I lived it in a more positive way or let’s say with more energy to see things move.

For my part, if there were to be one word that sums up this year it would be “impatience”. This word is not very pretty, it even has sometimes a certain negative connotation. And yet, for me, I mean it on a positive note.

Our thoughts over the last few years, our way of life, our dreams that we try to turn into projects, are so many things that make me want to move forward faster in time.

I sincerely hope that our coliving project will become a reality in 2023, because the more we turn the question around, the more I’m convinced that this is exactly where I want to go and that this project will be able to give birth to a lot of beautiful things later on.

In short, I can’t wait!

On a more retrospective note, 2022 has been a great year for me. I loved our road-trip through Spain last winter, the time spent at Anceu Coliving and the beautiful summer and fall in Switzerland filled with great hikes.

I am also firmly convinced that living in the mountains is an important component of my personal balance! More than ever, I enjoy those morning walks with the dog in the forest, those spontaneous opportunities to go snowshoeing or skiing, going for an hour of climbing with my love and simply living in the middle of nature.

I am also infinitely grateful to have the chance to share my life with Ben. After 15 years together, our visions and desires for change are aligned as never before. We have worked together for many years and the more time passes, the more I feel that our team is united and ready to face the challenges ahead.

It may seem silly, but I know we can count on each other 300% and that feeling fills me with strength for the future.

To illustrate this point I will give you a very simple example from a few days ago…

There was a heavy snowfall in our village and Benoit and I went to help our neighbor to clear the snow. With my shovel, I was struggling to push the snow over an edge. Benoit was clearing the snow further away when he saw me struggling with my mountain of snow. Without saying a word, he came with his shovel to “dig a hole in my snow pile” so that I would have more room to throw the snow without having to go over it.

At that moment the neighbor looks at me and smiles:

“Ohhh but that’s love! My ex would have yelled at me because I don’t know how to do it properly… Ben just comes dig a hole to help you without blaming you.”

I smiled back with a simple “yes I know, I’m lucky!”

So don’t think that Benoit is the most gallant and romantic guy in the world on a daily basis (he’s a bit of a mountain tough guy sometimes too 😉 ), but I know that I can always count on him and that’s priceless.

On that note, bring me 2023 soon, because yes I can’t wait to see what it has in store for us!

The final word

I don’t have much to add after that 😉 . I would just like to thank you again for your trust year after year. Keep on leaving us messages at the end of the posts, sending us little emails in response to our newsletters… because those discussions we have with you are what motivate us to keep this blog going for more than 10 years!

Note: And of course, don’t hesitate to give us your opinion about this yearly review in the comments. If we share all these things with you, it’s because your opinion matters to us and it helps us a lot to move forward in our projects 😉

We wish you all a very happy holiday season and all the best for 2023!

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