Tag: mountain

Moving into the Pappartment (January 2024)

After a couple of days in her new job in a small hotel in Gudauri Racki’s bosses offered us to move from Rosinante in a special apartment. For free.

The apartment was used mainly as a storage room. The owner had started to renovate it, ran out of money and so it was only partly renovated. There was no proper floor and because there was a lot of concrete dust, I put cardboard walls on the whole floor. That’s the reason why we called it the Pappartment. “Pappe” is a German word for these cardboard walls. We cleaned and reorganized a lot and then the place got our living space.

In a separate room with glass walls Racki and I established our small living space and after some work on the electric wires etc. we had light and electricity.

And after some installations in the bathroom we had a shower, a toilet with manual bucket-flush, and a shelf.

It was a very different way to live like that but it was very warm and for free. And we had a balcony pointing directly to all the lifts. So we could always check how the weather was and which lifts were running.

Directly under our Pappartment was a rock bar: Old Monkey. We had a lot of fun there but at some point we got a bit crazy about the loud music they were playing mostly every night. And the craziest thing about that was that the same songs got repeated over and over again. I guess for the ordinary guests that was no issue because most of them stay just a couple of days, but we stayed for months and so we developed a serious aversion to Queen songs.

Living on a mountain in Winter in Georgia (January 2024)

Our cars had been stuck in a parking lot for weeks when a massive excavator came and cleaned the masses of snow in the parking lot.

The massive machine had a lot to do with it and in the end I gifted the driver a bottle of wine.

Living in Gudauri at 2200m during winter was an interesting experience. Things change a lot with the cold. Of course Rosinante’s heater was running a lot. And I had to clean our cars from the snow because sometimes the layer of snow was nearly a meter thick after a night of snowfall.

Once while cleaning the cars, a tourist family from India came by and asked if they may clean parts of the snow because it looks interesting and they never had to do it in their life. I was happy to let them do so and they had a lot of fun.

We couldn’t open Rosinante’s roof because the heater was not able to maintain the warmth with the popped up roof and so our living space got much more limited and we had to deal with humidity and ice on the inside of some parts of our camper cabin. But we did very well and it was adventurous.

In the beginning we tried to use the heater as little as necessary, but next time I’d just keep it running all day and night and regulate the temperature by opening the windows more or less.

And the route leading to Gudauri was crazy. After Gudauri this road leads to the only real border between Georgia and Russia and so all the trucks have to take it.

Because of the changes in temperature, the trucks and everything else, the condition of the roads got worse. One of the sharp corners broke so much that trucks got stuck for hours blocking the whole road. Other times the mountain pass leading to the border or the border itself got closed and all the trucks got stuck in Gudauri on the road. No chance to turn back or go further.

Whoopy’s refused to turn on after some nights with about -18 degrees Celsius and so she had to wait until the temperatures had risen again. But then it started without any problems.

And from time to time we had the best pizza in all of Georgia!