It’s another travel day. 1460 miles on the odometer before we left.
Sue had another run this morning as she realized she could have run the 6k all the way around the lake… just had to be done.
(Apologies before we get into the post… this is a very boring one!)
We’ve left Slovenia behind now and headed to Croatia.
We’d looked at a bunch of options for getting down to Dubrovnik by Sept 6th, but we couldn’t find any campsites we thought we might like on the coast. They were all a bit too crowded or didn’t get good reviews.
So we decided to stay inland and take two stops to get to Dubrovnik.
As a first stop we plumped for Plitvice Lakes National Park which is a world heritage site. The Bear Campsite we were hoping to get into didn’t take reservations, so we headed out with just the hope of a space, knowing there were lots of other sites in the vicinity if we couldn’t get into the one we wanted.
But first breakfast. Seeing as we’d scouted out the cafes yesterday we went again with the one we knew to be an early opener, by Lake Bled Camping. We think it was called Zagato or something similar.
So after Shakshuka and coffee again we headed off.
We knocked about 100k off the journey and stopped at a services for a wee and a driver change. In the services shop we spotted the “Goat Beer” we’d been warned about in Slovenia!
We were going to take the dark blue route on the map. But I took a bad turn after Ljubljana and headed to Split instead of Zagreb, which seemed to be the obvious choice, considering where we were going, but it wasn’t on main roads… Where a route via Zagreb would have been. But seeing as the u-turn would have added another 20 minutes to the journey, we decided to go with the flow and rerouted down the A1.
We were short on Diesel at this point and when I saw a service station showing diesel at €1.39 a litre we dived off the A1. It was a single services supporting both carriage ways. But this was possibly one of the most bizarre services we’ve come across. The filling station forecourt and the food carparks were split for each direction of travel off the motorway. So, on OUR side the diesel was €1.89 a litre, but €1.39 on the other side! We could only guess that this was some sort of border crossing thing… dunno 🤷♂️! We put €40 in and got out of there quickly.
Our reroute then took us off the A1 with 60k to go and through some lovely rural scenery. As well as diesel we also needed a supermarket to stock up for the next few nights. And so as we saw a Lidl in Crnomelj we just couldn’t resist!
After Lidl we crossed a very deserted border crossing into Croatia…
We then headed out on one of the windiest single-ish track roads we’ve been on for a while. Passing oncoming traffic was possible, at speed, but you sort of had to dive into the gravel to make it happen. We had 26km of winding roads!
(Sue says I have to tell you how bad that road was, I quite enjoyed it! 🤣)
And the onto the Bear Campsite. They’d got 4 empty (out of 30-ish total) places left when we arrived. And after allowing a Swiss, Land Rover Defender crew to select their plot first, we plumped for this one, under the plum (we think) trees…
The campsite is basic, but does at least have loo seats. The WiFi is slow and needs us to be sat at least 10m behind the van, closer to the loos, but oddly with less signal strength – I suspect they have a dodgey router somewhere! There’s only cold water for doing the dishes and the men’s and women’s toilets/showers are all but communal. But the site is lovely.
Sue was in the loos/showers in the evening when she heard a load of screaming from a shower. A low-teens age girl jumped out screaming something in maybe Polish. Sue thought the showers were too hot or some such. Then she got a translation – SPIDER!
Apologies, this was a very dull post for anyone else reading this! Hopefully things will improve, but I wouldn’t count on it! 🤣
We’re planning to have a quieter day again tomorrow, and may just head to the supermarket or take a late entry to the lake park about 6km away, via the main road, on bikes.
1642 on the odo at the end of the day, so 182 miles today.
We finished the last 2 hours, of 11, of Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge. Opinion: what a disaster UK politics is.
IT Update: Sue’s phone has gone a bit wonky (official IT term). Looks like the power button is registering phantom presses, making it difficult sometimes to do anything with the phone. I think it will need the power button and flexi replacing at a phone repair shop somewhere on our journey. We had to call Joe to see if he could access an Apple password reset request on Sue’s laptop back in Bristol.
Harry has just seen the Dark Mark at the Quiditch World Cup.
Leave a Comment