Peelies travels

  Thu - Fri 19th - 20th Oct The border queue from Greece into Bulgaria was later explained because it is a Schengen crossing. Although Bulgaria is in the EU, it isn’t in the Schengen Zone. This means that there is still a formal border with all the checks that entails. As the Schengen Visa website puts it: These countries submitted their wish to become members of this area, which was approved by the European Parliament in June 2011 but this request was rejected by the Council of Ministers in September 2011, as Finland and Germany expressed their worries regarding the lack of these countries to enforce mechanisms for fighting corruption and criminality, as well as regarding the illegal entries of Turkish people from these countries towards the Schengen Area. It has been quite a change moving into Bulgaria. It’s definitely ‘somewhere different’, particularly as the first campsite, just a few minutes from the main road, is in quite a ‘country’ village. Some houses are quite dilapidate...

  Tue - Wed 17th - 18th Oct It’s been three days since we left Stoupa and we have covered 607 miles in 15 hours of ignition-on driving. I’m finding more and more statistics in the vehicle tracker app. These motorways are lovely to drive. There’s relatively little traffic and for a Land Rover 110 driver it is blissfully easy. Get up to speed, engage overdrive, hear and feel the engine revs. reduce by 28% and then accelerate with that extra ‘capacity’ and sit at 65-70 mph. Just when you are happily cruising, up pops another “Toll Post” sign and you have a few hundred metres to disengage overdrive, drop a few gears and then slow to the booth. Here the manned cabin attendants issue a fixed charge for a specific length of road. How these were worked out, I don’t know, obviously. They are a standard charge, based on vehicle type with the additional complication of height. This is ‘a problem’, as we are higher than the normal cars but clearly we aren’t the vans and light trucks that the s...

   Mon 16th Oct Blimy that guy running the Stoupa campsite makes his opinions known. He had somehow got animated about the Hamas massacres in Israel and the whole lot came out. The Greeks don’t like the Turks, especially as they allow Hamas to have an HQ there. He was very very upset about those events last week. Today when we left he was still fuming about a couple from Germany and young son. They drove on yesterday morning at 09:30 and blocked access to the grey water drain, whilst they used it (others were waiting to leave), emptied their toilet, smoked the place out with their ancient Mercedes camper and then a few minutes later, decided that they didn’t want to stay after all. “F-ing liars these people. They stay out and don’t pay and then they want to empty everything here. Gypsies, with their tattoos and rings. I know these types. They can’t do that in Portugal or Spain, it’s €1,000 fine. My government don’t care”. Wow he was cross. Then he smiled, because he knows we a...

  Fri - Mon 13th - 16th Oct Thoughts have been about driving home. We have committed and booked the Rotterdam to Hull ferry for 25-26th October and so that defines the end of the trip. The question is, how to get there? The ferry routes to Italy are numerous. Leaving from Greece at either Patras or Igoumenitsa, you can go to Brindisi, Bari, Ancona or Venice. These take an increasing amount of time and I’m not sure how we would spend that time. Maybe there’s a sky lounge with an up and coming singer entertaining the audience but that would be a test I think. Also many dates are full, a result of all the return trips that are pre-booked by everyone else.  No-one else seems to be driving overland except the Peelies.  Those dates that are available are almost €600 for the one-way trip.  In spite of what my camping neighbour said, the overall journey time is similar and the overland route could be made interesting  and we would rather spend a fraction of that driving...