Peelies travels

Wed 25th Oct I should have mentioned that the colours show the day by day routes. It’s probably become obvious! On Tuesday we drove across Germany on motorway the whole way. I am now almost used to the stupid car drivers who won’t give way when you signal to pull out and drive as if 130 kph is the minimum. It is hard when you want to progress past  a lorry, to have a BMW hanging onto your rear bumper because they too want to progress past a Defender. We connected to the outgoing route by staying at the same campsite we had used for nights 1 and 2. Instead of 32C and a massive, scary electrical storm, is was a cold 5C overnight and very damp. It had rained for much of the way. The rain stopped as we arrived so we managed a leg-stretcher walk. However D awn seems to have entered a carefree phase of her life and got rather relaxed on this great trip. I am pleased but worried for her future. The final drive was through the Mosel region of Germany and on into Holland. There were one or ...

  Mon - Tues 23rd - 24th Oct It is starting to feel like a long drive home but we are progressing well. We left Stoupa last Monday and the sun and 26C are a now pleasant memory. Several times the locals have commented on the warm temperatures. The campsite guy in Greece said so and Halloween Rachelle in Bulgaria said that the leaves would have fallen by now but most were still on the trees. The scenery is great with great autumn colours and everywhere looks ‘organised’ once again. We are happy that we took this route and Bulgaria is still on the visit list! It feels a bit ‘frontier’; definitely different. Gone are the roaming dogs of Albania and Bulgaria. In fact the last ones we saw were at a motorway halt in Serbia. This puppy was tiny and the pair were wandering around the lorry park. You can see how people get attached to them, although not the locals clearly. Benedict’s life in Albania had been steered by them and also Sara and John in Bulgaria were planning their coming weeks...

Sat - Mon 21st - 23rd Oct What’s the issue with UK broadcasters and people like me who want to access sports events when abroad? They know it’s me, as I am logged-in to my account on ITV X or BBC Sounds. I have declared that I have a TV license. I can listen to the rugby build-up but at the moment of kickoff, I can’t listen anymore “due to rights issue”. What a load of tosh. It’s me. It’s just that I’m here, rather than there. Let me watch the rugby. Well they won’t, so for the first time I do a simple thing. I get a new app and join the thousands of others who have already done this. I am magically in the UK. Now  I can watch and I do. I watched England v South Africa (in the RWC semi-final) using the iPhone 5G providing a hotspot for the iPad. A thunderstorm had raged from the moment we got here into Croatia from Serbia. The chosen campground at Ranc Ramarin   was rejected just before nightfall because a wedding was about to start. From experience they van be very loud and v...

  Fri - Sat 20th - 21st Oct Near to Kamping Kromidovo ( click here for details ) there’s a thermal water-fed bath / pool. It is closed now but apparently is open during the summer. I must say though that it looks dilapidated, in keeping with most of the rest of the villages in this corner of the country. Campsite John was loading crates of empty bottles into his car, which I assumed was to recover the deposit. This is called ‘pfand’ in Deutschland, where they have a deposit on everything, according to a couple from Germany. That was on a campsite with large motor homes and quad bikes on which to get around. They actually said, that the pfand was good “for the poor people, who can take them in and get some money”. It conjured-up a vision of posh motor-homers leaving glass, metal and plastics lying around for the poor. John was taking the bottles to the nearby thermal spring to wash them in the free hot water, before filling them with homebrew. He told us where it was and what it loo...