Well it was a good job we packed last night!
As we went to bed last night I could see sheet lightning filling the sky to the north of us. And as I watched it for the next few hours it seemed not to be getting any closer.
But… just as I’d fallen asleep Sue realized it was persisting down. She brought in the remaining bits and pieces we’d left outside and closed the ventilation flaps in the pop-up.
Boy did it heave it down! When I ventured a look a couple of times it was biblical. And the lightning was firing off with almost no gap between the flashes.
Fortunately it had stopped by the time we got up at 7. There were huge puddles around the campsite and a thermos mug we left outside was full of water… that must have been 50mm of rain fall.
The WiFi was also out.
We started to get ready to leave and went to the loos. I could see there was no power at reception, that explained why there was no WiFi.
Sue managed to pay our bill using cash and their paper records and we left for the ferry.
The ferry terminal is in the new port and confused us a bit until we saw a couple of ferry signs and realised Trajekt meant ferry. We parked the car where they wanted us to, headed back out of the port, across the road to the ticketing office to check in and then got a coffee.
Sue got talking to some guys from Finland who were heading to Spain, and didn’t seem to have a particularly good reason for getting there through Dubrovnik 🤷♂️
It was then just a question of hanging around until we boarded, an hour and a half until we left port, and the seven and a half hours on the ferry.
We did get some great views of coastline as we left…
The crossing was calm with no incidents.
Sue spent a lot of the crossing knitting and I bashed through some Harry Potter…
We did become aware of a mass chant going on at one point… about 20 people holding some sort of religious service in the same bit of the boat we were in. They didn’t look like they were preparing a suicide attack, so we let them get on with it and put our headphones back in.
And then we landed in Bari.
We can’t get over us not actually landing in Barry Island, South Wales!
Well the streets are very Italian as you leave the port. This is clearly a working port and the roads are appalling.
We put the Torre Sibissi Bari B&B into the sat nav and set off and on the way ducked into a Lidl for something light to eat once we got to our destination.
Apple Maps has been pretty good on this trip so far. Much better than it was a few years ago, but it completely let us down getting to this B&B. On the last 200m stretch it tried to take us through an artificial football camp. And even tried to get us to drive down the walking lane between two pitches.
We aborted the route and used a satellite view to take us to the B&B.
The B&B is nice, but the area seems extremely rough. The property is gated, but maybe only about 100m from the gates is what looks like a tented migrant camp. Let’s hope the van’s still there in the morning.
Now we’re in Italy we need somewhere for another couple of nights to stay before jumping on the night time crossing to Igoumemitsa.
Harry has just saved Arthur from Nagini and spent Christmas in Grimauld Place
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