The story of how Dave & Kate came to board the Zion Europa Express stretches back to late 2006. Back then they were living a life much like anyone else. Then again, maybe not.
Dave was out of work and devoted to music, somehow trying to make a living out of it. Kate was in work, doing an admin job she didn't hate but wasn't fulfilling either. The underlying feeling was "there must be more to life than this". They had gradually found themselves withdrawing from the world... losing contact with friends, not interested in going to the pub every weekend as their peers did, questioning all of the usual stuff people do, and instead found themselves searching for something else. The trouble was they didn't know what they were looking for. They never chose to be like this, to feel this way, to search for anything, it just seemed to happen by itself.
During the winter of 2006 the 'search' brought them to a variety of spiritual sources which had the effect of shattering their world view. The world as they knew it up until that point had collapsed and what was left they didn't really know. The attention turned inwards and from seeing that the world around them was not what they had believed it to be, they began questioning their own identity.
The person creates the world as he/she sees it and the world creates that person. Which is first?
On this realisation all hell broke loose! The year of 2007 was a year of endings and a new beginning. Dave's mother died suddenly and completely unexpectedly in March, aged 47, which in turn caused a chain reaction of events... too many to mention but in November Dave & Kate were forced to move from the flat they'd been in for 4 years and this seemed to mark the beginning of a period of calm after the storm.
Kate continued to work as she had while Dave found himself going deeper and deeper into himself. Everything dropped away, including the desire to make music, and for the next 2 or 3 years it remained this way.
In July 2009 they moved flat again and this now seemed to mark a new phase. Pretty soon after moving in Music started to announce itself in their lives again. Europe was also now on the horizon. They had no explanation but they couldn't see themselves remaining in Edinburgh once they left this flat. Italy felt like it might be a possibility.
Still they carried on as normal until in the spring of 2010 Kate started to feel increasingly trapped and frustrated in her work. One day in the kitchen expressing this, the words came out of Dave's mouth very casually - "why don't you just leave then?". A few months later and that's exactly what happened.
Europe was calling them and they knew this was the time. They had somehow known this was coming for a long time. There had always been something about Europe and particularly since a trip they had made there back in 2002.
This time was very different...
