Eurotrip 6, 2017 – Next stop Croatia

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It’s time to leave Austria and Lake Ossiach. We’ve already stayed nearly a week at what was scheduled to be a 1 or 2 night stopover.

The site, Campingbad Ossiachersee has it’s plus points and it’s not so plus points. The facilities, whilst not as modern as the last two sites we stayed at in Germany were clean and the restaurant was good. In the excellent category was the team running the site. Nothing was ever too much trouble and always a laugh and joke to be had at reception.

On the not-so-good side was the internet access. This was more miss than hit at the pitch and even at reception, it was impossible to get the work VPN functioning anywhere so thank goodness we had 4G access on the phones.

Anyhow, enough of Lake Ossiach and it’s now time to move on to Croatia. We had finalised a short-list of 3 sites:

  • Camping Val Saline
  • Camping Bijela Uvala
  • Camping Polidor

and we would need the entire 3 to 4 hour journey to decide which one. Val Saline was a promising recommendation from a member of CaravanTalk; Bijela Uvala and Polidor were found through the ACSI campsite book (both just south of Porec and within striking distance of Porec by bicycle).

The latter two are very different sites – Bijela Uvala, with it’s sea view pitches is a monster of a site with well over 1000 pitches (maybe approaching 2000) and at least six restaurants. Polidor is much smaller with around 75 touring pitches all fully serviced with water, electricity and grey waste. A very boutique looking 4 star site.

We hit the road around 09:30 and the first challenge was to locate a vignette for the Slovenian motorways. These work in a similar manner to the Austrian ones and fines for not displaying the said vignette are harsh – allegedly between 300 and 800 Euros.

Vignette sales hut…

We stopped at the first location advertising the vignette. It turned out to be a hut in the middle of what seemed like a building site (maybe a service area under construction?) but nevertheless we secured our 7 day vignette for 15 Euros.

Vignettes available at the Karawankentunnel toll…

There were three other options for this later on – a service area just before the Karawankentunnel (for which we didn’t actually see the entrance), the toll booths for the tunnel itself and the first service area just over the border into Slovenia.

We think we made the correct choice.

 

 

Progress to Istria (which is where our choice of 3 campsites are situated) was normal, the roads generally good and free of heavy traffic. The worst section was at the end of A1 in Slovenia and the E751 in Croatia. This is also the location of the border and passports were still being checked resulting in a 20 minute delay. The standard of this section of road was abysmal with the caravan bouncing around the worn-out road surface.

We had by now decided which site we would stay at and we had rejected our favourite one (Val Saline) due to the apparent high internet charges of 12 Euros per 24 hours – we appreciated that this is metered based upon logging in and out but it seemed just a bit too restrictive and given we’d had bad service at Ossiach, Val Saline was rejected.

Polidor beach and bar…

Out of the remaining two sites, we decided we would stay at Polidor, the much smaller of the two sites. We wouldn’t have the sea views from the caravan but Polidor does have it’s own beach (and bar) some 800m walk away and there is also complimentary travel to it from the site.

There’s much more to write about following our arrival at Polidor but I’m going to save that for another day. Lot’s of comments about the site itself, the restaurant and the location but signing off for today very soon.

Apparently, a small correction to yesterday’s post – Mo did not state she was mildly concerned that Slovenia and Croatia might not be as developed as the rest of Europe… Will she be correct? Will the facilities have toilet seats or not? Will they even have toilets or just a hole in the ground and a couple of grab handles?

All will be revealed tomorrow, so to speak.

(P.S. It’s done nothing but rain since we arrived in Istria; The one item I had guaranteed in Croatia – fine, hot and sunny weather!!!)