France
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Facebook group: Sheepwagon Fever
Freshly painted, carpeted, and loaded with supplies; taken to their designated campgrounds for now; and waiting for the arrival of the herders from their summer spent in tents on the forest. All the men and sheep will be home soon!! 
you can always find more pictures and info at asheepherdersstory.com
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Italy
Why are 500,000 people watching paint dry?’ The man behind YouTube’s DIY sensation
n 5 October 2021, Martijn Doolaard came home. Not to a flat in Amsterdam, where the Dutch graphic designer turned videographer and travel writer had lived before embarking on the epic road trips that made him internet famous, but to two Alpine stone cabins in the Italian Piedmont region.
“Always dreamed of having my own place in the mountains,” he posted on Instagram. He’d paid €21,000 (£18,200). The cabins had the space, the view and the solitude he was craving. However, they needed a lot of work if they were to be habitable all year round. Doolaard promised to document the renovations on YouTube.
Anyone who had previously followed him on social media would have known that Doolaard would stick to his promise. In 2015-2016, he cycled from Amsterdam to Hong Kong on a whim. In March 2017 he embarked on a two-year bike trip from Vancouver to Patagonia. He had published two pleasing coffee-table books about both journeys, and shot some epic footage. He had learned to launch the drone he used to film and take photographs without even getting off his bike.
These were minor successes, however, compared with the films of him doing up his cabins on a YouTube channel he set up for the purpose, which, despite their meditative pace, have netted him 584,000 subscribers. As one journalist put it, why are 500,000 people lining up to watch paint dry? Yet his weekly instalments are fascinating and strangely elegiac, unhurriedly recording the painstaking tasks he sets himself and anything else that happens to occur.
Each episode opens with gentle piano or distant cowbells over a gliding shot from the air, like a bird cruising at his altitude. Doolaard appears on camera well before he says anything, wearing a shirt, blue jeans, leather boots and an old-timer’s hat. When he does speak, it’s as if to an old friend. Mostly alone, he digs trenches, planes timbers, stacks stones, bakes bread, looks out at the spectacular view. “When I started,” he tells me, “I thought that this is going take a long time, and if I want to make weekly videos, they need to be very close to who I am.”
Doolaard’s filmic voice is the antithesis of most YouTubers, who edit their films so tightly they even cut the breathing space. “A lot of YouTube content is very fast,” he says. “It’s incredibly tiring to watch.” His slow pace, instead, allows people to “wander a bit, reflect on things, travel through their own memories. It’s like reading a book – you create a pleasant space for yourself.”
Doolaard focuses on process, not outcome. Watching him taking on the mother of all buried rocks with a handheld hydraulic drill is like witnessing Ahab reckon with the whale. “I try to focus on the moment all the time,” he says. “Planning traps you. Arriving at a goal is only exciting in the short term. At some point my home will be finished, but that won’t last. That’s why I enjoy the journey so much.”
Back in 2014, clean-shaven and hatless, Doolaard had a day job that saw him working on branding photoshoots with confetti and swirling paint. His only building experience was “some cosmetic work in my apartment in Amsterdam – painting ceilings, that kind of thing”. But the great beyond beckoned. In May of that year, he took a yellow van on the road to the Czech Republic for a two-week stay in a farmhouse, where he hoped to write music. It’s funny, once you know where that impulse led him, to see him wondering if he’d survive without the internet and human company.
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