Croatia 3: Dubrovnik

Every year we find a gem; a spot that draws us in and that we find hard to leave. And so it is in Dubrovnik. We are still here! The weather is hot and sunny. The campsite facilities are very good, with free wi-fi. It's a 5 minute walk down to Copcabana, Dubrovnik's best beach, with great swimming and a beach cafe serving cold wine, 10 metres from the water. There's lots to watch, on the beach and out to sea. Every 10 minutes until 2.30am a bus runs to the old town. It's a beautiful, atmosperic walled city, fully pedestrianised with marble streets that  glisten at sunset. One of the most impressive touristy things we have done for a few years was to "walk the walls". There are good restaurants and wine bars, an outdoor live jazz bar and an Irish pub with sky sports channels for rugby and tennis. Sorted! We are just sorry we had to say good-bye to the Fouries!
We have scouted town, asked locals and read foodie blogs looking for non touristy places to eat.  Take our word for it, these are the best!
Taj Mahal -Bosnian Restaurant with best grilled meats and Borek. Book ahead or wait till after 10 to be seated.
+385 20 323 22 12
Orhan-great harbour view, just outside Pile Gate +385 20 411 918
Kopun -Modern Croatian on St. Ignatius Square +385 20 323 969.

Croatia 2 : The Dalmatian Coast

Driving this entire coastline was a treat. It's beautiful and for the most part the road hugs the shoreline, at times near the water, at others high up with panoramic seascapes.  We have driven many coastlines and this is one of the best.

The campsite in Zadar was at the beach in Borik, a long walk or a quick bus ride from the old , walled city. The city is a good place to stroll about from square to square, church to church, coffee shop to wine bar and along the promenade. Zadar is known for it's Marachino Liqueur but we preferred glasses of the local white wine, Grasevina.

We did a day trip by boat to Kornati National Park and Telasnica Island with it's inland salt lake fed from the sea by cracks in the rock below.

Our next few days were spent in Split. En route we spent a pleasant few hours in Sibenik, where Mylene found a  great courtyard restaurant with sea views and the best food of our trip so far. Pasta with truffle and Dalmatian ham, braised beef cheeks, oxtail borek.
In Split, our campsite was in the pleasant town of Omis, on the beach and a bus ride into town. The Unesco Diocletian's Palace is worth a few hours of exploring. One local speciality is Peka, lamb roasted on a fire covered by a large domed lid or "bell". You need to order it a least 3 hours in advance. By now you should have gathered from this blog that vegetarians might have a hard time in Croatia.

Croatia 1: Pag Island

Leaving Zagreb at 7am on Saturday 9th August, we hit holiday traffic almost immediately.

 We arrived at Strasko Camping near Novalje on Pag Island a few hours before the Fouries. This is the biggest campsite we have ever stayed at, with thousands of pitches and hundreds of cottages. It's well run though, with excellent facilities and more than a kilometre of private beach; pebble not sand. Coenraad and Mylene's cabin was about 20m from the beach near a bar serving us jugs of cheap, local white wine in the sun. The weather was awesome all week.

 Pag Island is famous for it's cheese and also for it's spit roast pig and lamb.It was a short walk into Novalje in the evening for sunset drinks and dinner.

 Pag Island is also famous for it's all -night, al fresco clubbing scene on Zrce Beach. We usually needed our earplugs in the early hours of the morning when all our tenting neighbours crawled back home from a night of partying, dragging drunk friends and one-night stands with them.

Bulgaria

We crossed the border into Bulgaria and continued our journey along the Black Sea Coast. During the Communist era millions of tourists came here every year and although many new resorts and hotels have been added since, we were not very impressed. After a night we headed inland through beautiful countryside to Veliko Tarnovo, yet another Unesco town. Campsites are few and far between in Bulgaria but we found the best place of our journey so far, just outside town. Bulgarian cuisine is meat based, grilled or stewed, often on earthernware or cast iron skillets, in an oven.

Bulgaria is poorer than Romania. The average monthly wage in Romania is 200 Euro per month and in Bulgaria it's even less. Things are a little cheaper than the rest of Europe but not by much and fuel seems to be about the same price everywhere. I once read a book called The Geography of Bliss. The author had travelled to the happiest and unhappiest nations of the world to try and understand what makes people happy. The Moldovans were apparently the unhappiest nation in the world due to the fact that they were on the outside of Europe, longingly looking in. The Bulgarians and Romanians we met were often fairly dissatisfied with life and always comparing their countries to Germany. Not everyone felt that being part of Europe was a good thing for them.

Romania.. Danube Delta and Black Sea

The Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve in the North- East corner of Romania on the Ukranian border is Unesco protected and the biggest wetland in Europe. It's a prime birding spot and the biggest Pelican breeding colony too. We camp for 3 nights in Murighiol. The campsite owner is a crazy Romanian guy, who insists on downing shots of local grappa with his guests, then plying them with cheap wine out of a plastic flagon until he has convinced you to do a private boat trip with him at some exhorbitant price. He kept popping back to see us in the camper and asking to do reciprocal shots of Neil's Johnny Red with him!
The boat trip through the Delta is a once in a lifetime experience and we see wonderful birds; hundreds of pelicans, swans, herons and terns.
The Black Sea coast is very popular in summer, there are loads of cheap resorts packed with locals enjoying a seaside holiday but it doesn't quite tick all the boxes for us.

Romania - Transylvania and other stories

We cross into Romania and go to Timisoara. This is the small city where the 1989 Romanian Revolution started. It's a tatty, student town with many of the tourist sights under renovation.

 Once out of the urban areas, one small village runs into the next. The roads are potholed and the new highway East towards Bucharest stops and starts as construction continues. We share the narrow roads with cars, trucks and horse-drawn carts. Drivers are crazy, overtaking madly on blind rises and corners. Through towns, the road is lined with Saxon style houses built up against the street, with no gardens and enclosed courtyards, to form a solid walled defence. Many people have set up stalls to sell the produce from their gardens and small farms. There are truck-loads of ripe watermelons everywhere. People are preparing for Winter already, chopping up huge logs into firewood in the streets outside their houses. It's noticeably poorer and undeveloped compared to the rest of Europe.

As we head towards Transylvania and Dracula country, the hills become more undulating. We visit Sibiu and camp in the hills outside Ciadora. Next we stay in Sigisoara, another Unesco site and birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. It's a pretty town and we do see a lot more tourists. This is castle country- Pele, Rasnov and Bran; THE Dracula Castle, with all the surrounding tourist tat. For the record, Bram Stoker based his Dracula Character on the real Vlad, who apparently never came to Bran Castle at all. Anyway, it's still all spooky fun.

We planned to camp in Siniaia, a mountain resort popular with locals on weekends. It's a Friday afternoon and it's madly busy so Bucharest makes it onto our agenda after all. Finding a scruffy Irish pub means we can see the Super 15 Rugby final and spend a very pleasant day in Bucharest, which is less scruffy than we expected. We enjoyed the vibe in the Centro Historico, sampling local wines and traditional grilled meats and polenta.

Homer 7 begins

We arrived in Munich on 16th July and collected Homer for the seventh summer in Europe. In May 2008 no-one would have predicted that we would still be travelling full-time in 2014 but here we are. We had a few days to catch up with everyone and do all our chores. We spent a weekend in Switzerland with Justine and Arjen and the boys and a night in Assling with Elizabeth and Randolf.
On 24th July we left for Czech Republic, driving through the Bavarian Forest and Southern Bohemian countryside to Cesky Krumlov; the Old City and Castle is a Unesco site. It was a pleasant bike ride into town from the camping site, which was solar powered. The bar had a live rock band belting out everything from Beatles to ACDC. We heard it from the camper and changed out of our pajamas to join the locals for beer and dancing into the early hours! We went to the town of Ceske Budejovice( Budweis )  and toured the REAL Budweiser Brewery, where the beer actually tastes like beer! We camped a night near Brno at a huge "working-class" holiday resort at the lake packed to the gills with reveling teenagers and families. We were there to tour the local Morovian wine regions and sample some wine. We visited Mikolov, Lednice and Valdice. The countryside in that region was "landscaped" over several centuries by the Liechtenstein dukes and the whole area is a Unesco site.
We then traversed Slovakia into Hungary, via Gyor and spent the night in Szeged.