Now we’re cooking with gas

Tuesday 1 October 2024

We ran out of gas 10 days ago, mid-way through boiling the kettle and cooking toast for breakfast. We knew finding a replacement cylinder in Albania would be virtually impossible but we hadn’t reckoned on our search being in vain in Italy too. Thankfully Italy is home to the best and cheapest espressos. Coffee culture is massive in Italy, 97% of Italians drink coffee every day and a single espresso costs, on average, €1 irrespective of where you buy it because the price is regulated by law! We paid £4.67 for two coffees and two croissants in a cafe in Iseo overlooking the popular Italian lake of the same name.

Evenings were doable either having cold meat & salad based meals or BBQ’ing. But to start the day off properly, a cup of coffee or tea is a must …. that and toast, a pastry or a croissant! We managed to find a couple of campsites with cooking facilities but it has made us rethink our minimalist packing. We’ve never carried a spare cylinder before but we’ll look at getting a small emergency canister and compatible regulator for our next big trip.

Today, in a hardware shop in France we finally managed to exchange our empty cylinder for a full one so ‘now we’re cooking with gas’ again. This was an advertising slogan from the 1930’s which encouraged people to use gas, rather than electricity, for cooking. The phrase later took on a new meaning implying ‘heading in the right direction after a period of trial and error’ or ‘functioning effectively.’ This is our third big (6000+ miles) roadtrip in this van and after each trip we jettison some stuff and think about purchasing other useful items. In general we don’t carry too much because we’re so limited on space. After this trip the large rechargeable lantern will be consigned to the attic and I doubt we’ll bring the SUP with us again as Dave’s only used it twice in 7 weeks and it takes up a huge amount of space. The solar shower bag was also only used twice and is a bit of a faff to fill and use so that may be jettisoned too.

All our other gadgets have proved their worth - the £10 USB rechargeable fan from Argos, the very effective mossie catcher/light, our wonderful micro folding BBQ, the hard wearing griddle, the smart speaker and our indispensable Karcher window vac for sucking up condensation. The versatile little white plastic folding picnic table cost us a few £’s in Turkey 12 years ago and is still going strong - that’s definitely a keeper!!