Dinner last night at Prümtal Camping was as good as ever.

The journey to Calais today an utter nightmare. I probably said in an earlier post that the A60 Autobahn from Bitburg was closed on our way down and that the diversions were not signed and the roads we ended up on were just way to steep and narrow for towing.

For the return journey, we’d decided to head South to Trier and then across through Luxembourg, Belgium and France. That was until the guy on reception at Prümtal told us the A60 was only closed southbound and that northbound was running normally.

Wrong. Northbound was closed too and again we couldn’t figure out the diversions again. When we originally programmed the satnav, we had 267 miles to Calais. One and a half hours later and we were heading south to Trier, near the campsite and the satnav was now showing 290 miles for the route through Luxembourg.

Worse still, the condition of the motorways in Belgium was atrocious – if you think the roads are grim in Blighty then a visit to Belgium would be enlightening.

We finally arrived at Calais around 5:00pm and spent the first half an hour screwing the caravan back together!

Still, a bottle of the finest Slovenian Merlot has just been opened and it’s a very pleasant evening here at Camping St Louis in Autignes. This is our favourite Calais stopover site and this trip, the toilet block has been completely refurbished – to a very high standard.

Just changed our Eurotunnel ticket to a bit earlier in the morning and then it’s almost home…

Overnight thunderstorms hit Heidelberg, which is no real surprise as the temperature during Thursday was north of 35 degrees with extreme humidity.

Another short drive, this time to one of our favourites, Prümtal Camping near Oberweis. Dinner at their fantastic restaurant is booked for 19:00.

Thursday we travelled to Heidelberg – a nice and easy day of towing – arriving at Camping Haide mid-afternoon.

Camping Haide is on the banks of the Neckar river. This was another “odd” site, very run-down but the facilities were of reasonable quality and clean. Having to buy a token (1 Euro) for a shower just added to the eccentricity of the place.

 

 

 

Mind you, the site fees were only around 20 Euros so it was inexpensive, our pitch was just metres from the river and it was close to public transport links.

 

It’s around a 1km walk to the bus stop and buses run around every 20 minutes but only hourly after about 8:00pm.

For dinner, we ate at the Schnitzelhaus. We chose this on the basis that it is number 1 on TripAdvisor (for Heidelberg) and we wanted some decent German meat. Well, there is a reason this restaurant is number 1 – great food, awesome service and brilliant atmosphere.

We were lucky to find a table (loose definition as we were able to join a table which had space for the two of us), sharing with a group of Astrophysicists (at a conference in the Castle) and an IT Marketing lady. Conversation was as entertaining as the rest of the evening!

Some iconic pictures from Heidelburg, which is a truly magnificent city.

Wednesday and we left Bled for a near 300 mile journey to Ingolstadt and Camping “Azur” Auwaldsee. On arrival the campsite was closed for a 13:00 to 15:00 siesta (honestly, I thought we were in Deutschland).

What can I say about the site. Firstly it was perfectly positioned for us, because it pushed the next part of the journey up to Nuremburg and then east to Heidelberg, thus avoiding the notorious A8 between Munich and Stuttgart. We still got stuck in a mega-jam around the A99 and in the end, took a small road North to Munich airport before re-joining the Autobahn network.

The approach to the site was bizarre, passing through a large commercial and industrial area to then find a green haven of the campsite. Facilities were modern and clean and the area where we set up the van was not marked out. This gave the impression that it probably doesn’t get that busy – I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners aren’t waiting for a nice real estate deal to convert the site into more commercial or office space. Price was quite expensive at more than 30 Euros for the night.

Still, it served our purpose also as a base to visit Munich (about 55 minutes by train) and whilst in Munich, I was finally able to replace my worn out walking shoes! We ate dinner with friends at a nice Italian restaurant.

 

Tuesday and our last day here in Slovenia. It’s been an experience the five days we have spent in this beautiful country. Our biggest regret is not having visited Ljubljana, although we were a bit put off after an impromtu tour of the inner ring road post a satnav “failure”. Moe says I didn’t do as I was told (honestly?), but I maintain the satnav told me to go the wrong way.

As you may know, we like our trains and we haven’t been on one during this entire trip so it was a must to experience Slovenia rail.

 

We had intended to take the train to Ljubljana but decided instead to head from Bled Jezero, south west to Most na Soci.

 

The first thing to be aware of is no credit cards – cash only for our 17 Euro round trip to Most na Soci.

 

 

 

 

 

The Bohinj Railway is a railway in Slovenia and Italy. It connects Jesenice in Slovenia with Trieste in Italy. It was built by Austria-Hungary from 1900 to 1906 as a part of a new strategic railway, the Neue Alpenbahnen, that would connect Western Austria and Southern Germany with the then Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste. The line starts in Jesenice, at the Southern end of the Karawanks Tunnel; it then crosses the Julian Alps through the Bohinj Tunnel, and passes the border town of Nova Gorica before crossing the Italian border and reaching Trieste.

There is a spectacular bridge at Solkan, the second longest stone bridge in the world.

Our trip would only take us as far as Most na Soci but we did experience the feat of engineering to create this line, including the Bohinj Tunnel, a mere 6,327.4 m long.

Our overriding assessment of the rail journey was it was a bit of a step back in time. No credit cards, not an electronic timetable or sign to be seen anywhere but the trains were fairly prompt and the scenery was very special.

Tomorrow, all being well, we head North, all the way through Austria and onward to Ingolstadt, about 50 miles above Munich. We then intend to catch a train back to Munich hbf and meet friends for dinner. It’s going to be a long day…

 

It’s Monday and today we decided to visit Lake Bohinj. More on the detail of the visit later but as nice as Bled is, it’s really busy at the moment at Camping Bled. Another daily sell-out and on our journey to Lake Bohinj, we did spot some rather nice looking smaller, quieter sites. I wish I’d had the foresight to note the campsite names – just in case we return sometime in the future.

On our arrival at Lake Bohinj, we took the boat across to Ucanc (where one of the campsites is located) and hiked back along the North bank of the lake. It’s the longest route but the prettiest and very quiet. Wear walking boots or shoes and not flip-flops!

Another thing to watch out for, shortly after we had set off, we were literally attacked by Mosquitos and took a few bites before we got “deeted” up after which no problems whatsoever.

Lake Bohinj is another stunning lake and there are numerous beaches from which to sunbathe and swim – and it’s all much quieter than Lake Bled.

 

Other things we would have liked to have experienced but didn’t have time were:

•  Cable car from near Ucanc is 1km long and the ascent takes just four minutes. The pods hold 80 people and once at the top there is a chair lift to other areas.
•  We would have liked to have hired a rowing boat on the lake
•  We also didn’t make it to Slap Sovica which is a spectacular waterfall. The Mavic Pro was launched but we couldn’t find the waterfall.

In the evening we cycled around Lake Bled and ate outside at one of the restaurants. Cheap and cheerful would best describe the experience!

An update from our visit to restaurant Sova. We arrived to find we didn’t have a reservation – it turned out our booking had been made for 2pm and not 7pm. However, we were given a table on the terrace, nearest to Lake Bled on a gorgeous summer’s evening.

The food was superb. The presentation just stunning and the service top notch. Wine suggestions were also first class. Would thorough recommend.

 

Today (Sunday) we drove to Vintgar Gorge which is approximately 4km North West of Bled.

The 1.6 km long Vintgar gorge carves its way through the vertical rocks of the Hom and Bort hills and is graced by the Radovna with its waterfalls, pools and rapids.

The educational trail leads you over wooden bridges and Žumr’s galleries, and ends with a bridge overlooking the mighty 13 m high Šum waterfall.

 

The Vintgar gorge also includes two man-made sights. The single-arch stone bridge of the Bohinj railway, constructed in 1906, which crosses the gorge 33.5 m above the trail, and the dam from which the water is routed to the small Vintgar hydroelectric power plant under the Šum waterfall.

 

Despite the temperature at the campsite around 21 degrees, as we should have anticipated, the gorge itself was much cooler. Remember to take a jacket!

In the afternoon we visited Bled Castle. Bled Castle (Slovenian, Blejski grad) is a medieval castle built on a precipice above the city of Bled in Slovenia, overlooking Lake Bled.

 

 

 

 

According to written sources, it is the oldest Slovenian castle and is currently one of the most visited tourist attractions in Slovenia.

View of Bled Island from Bled Castle.

We bought a couple of bottles of Bled red wine from the Wine Cellars and noted the traditional manner in which they open the bottles – slicing the glass neck with a large sabre.

This evening we will be dining at Restaurant Sova, a recommendation from an American Professor we met at the bar yesterday. Sova is ranked number 3 in the TripAdvisor list for Bled.

Saturday and we are now settled into Camping Bled, just a few hundred metres from the shoreline of Lake Bled. We have a large pitch and electricity, primarily due to the fact we carry two large extension cables – note for next year, do what the Europeans do and carry a large 50m DIY extension reel.

In fact we have a lot of “practical” things to take care of when we arrive back in Blighty so I’ll likely add a few blog entries.

Today we walked around Lake Bled which is an easy 4 mile hike. We stopped half way round the Lake for a beer and a toasted sandwich at  Devil Caffe and Bar – the sandwich was utterly uninspiring but they had a huge selection of bottled real ales from Blighty.

 

 

Unfortunately they were right out of Punk IPA but they did have half litre bottles of Fullers ESB, so all was not lost.

 

 

 

We chatted to an American couple at the bar and they recommended a nice restaurant near to the Lake. We booked a table for tomorrow evening so will report back in due course. Hope it isn’t big Mac and fries…

After our walk, we took one of the traditional boats across to Bled Island which has a number of notable historic buildings.

 

 

The main one being the pilgrimage church dedicated to the Assumption of Mary, which was built in its current form near the end of the seventeenth century.

The church has a 52 m tower and there is a Baroque stairway from 1655 with 99 stone steps leading up to the building. The church is frequently visited and weddings are held there regularly.

 

Traditionally it is considered good luck for the groom to carry his bride up the steps on the day of their wedding before ringing the bell and making a wish inside the church. Good luck with that!

 

 

 

The weather during the day was excellent but much cooler than Croatia. Nevertheless it was still warm enough for an evening BBQ.

 

We said goodbye to Croatia today and headed off to Lake Bled in Slovenia. A 130 mile journey which would have taken around 3 hours had it not been for a half hour wait at Slovenian border control and a further delay when we took the wrong turning near Ljubljana. Necessitating an unplanned visit around the city’s inner ring road!

First impressions of Bled – what’s happened to the HOT weather. Without moaning too much, we’ve also become accustomed to fully serviced pitches and whilst we have a huge plot here, it was unfamiliar territory to manually fill the water barrel and find a sneaky place to offload the grey waste.

Before packing up yesterday we visited a couple of small villages on the island of Krk.

First was Stara Baska, a remote outpost on the southern side of the island of Krk. A few eating places, small harbour, beautiful beach (we weren’t sure how one would access it) and a nice waterside campsite – another in the Camping Adriatic chain.

An opportunity presented itself to launch the drone and there are a couple of shots and a video below:

 

 

 

 

 

If you want a peaceful stay away from it all then this place is worthy of consideration. It’s called Camping Skrila, Skara Baska. If we were here much longer it could be nice to chill here for a week or two!

Next was a trip to the old hilltop village of Vrbnik which is perched 50m up on a limestone outcrop. This turned out to be a very nice old town, still relatively un-touched by tourism and definitely worthy of a visit.

The main church is the Church of Assumption and there are some pictures below of the church and the associated bell tower.

Vrbnik is also home to the narrowest street in the world – a mere 40cms wide. Now, do I go through face-on or side-on…

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Wednesday and we took a car ride to Baska.

This cultural and historical center with its old stone houses and narrow streets, has been a tourist destination since the 19th century, and has developed into a popular resort. It is known for its inscribed stone monument from 1100, for its many surrounding beaches, and its long tradition in tourism.

We walked around the bay, stopping for a beer at one of the quieter, more local haunts near to the working port.

 

 

Dinner was at Kanoba Galija. We ordered Pizzas which were excellent but all the food looked really good and it’s a very popular place. Would highly recommend.

 

 

 

 

 

Later, on arrival back at the campsite, the forecast storms arrived and whilst we smugly admired our tie down kit, we listened to the music of fellow campers drumming in some extra tent pegs, cracking open a bottle of red.

Before a single glass had been raised, the storm suddenly gained venom and a large gust of wind ripped one of the steel pegs right out of the ground. The sun canopy collapsed and the most torrential rain descended on our table, chairs and electrical stuff. In near zero visibility due to rain but an un-nerving brightly light sky (incessant lightning) we ventured out and held the awning until we could salvage and re-peg the outfit.

The temperature plummeted to 17 degrees and we were sodden from head to toe. We doubled-up the tie downs and secured a line to the car. All was still standing in the morning.

The aftermath in pictures:

Today (Monday) we had a relaxing day. Some work to catch up on in the morning and then a dip in the sea late afternoon. In the evening it’s a short walk into the town of Krk and we ate dinner at Restaurant Frankopan. Food was good and a great location just below the tower in the old town. A few pictures below:

Sunday we hit the road for a 200 mile journey to Krk (160 miles if we’d taken a mixture of motorway and coastal route). We chose the longer route which was mainly motorway but the section from the exit at Ostravica down to the coast (D501) was a little narrow and twisty.

Our preferred site was Camping Krk but we’d already been told this was fully booked so our next preference was Camping Jezevac and we’d reserved a pitch for 5 nights. We quite fancied Camping Bor, as this site is a smaller family run operation and we had been given some good recommendations. In the end and for this part of our trip, we actually wanted to be close to the sea but we almost ended up moving to Camping Bor.

Our pre-allocated pitch was a nightmare. Firstly the route up to it turned out to be stone steps, and when we finally found a road, I can only describe the location as poor. Extremely poor. Tiny pitch, no view, right beside a permanent caravan with a great big plastic windshield running all along the back. No room for the car, so we headed back to reception, having to detach and motor move the van on one occasion.

By now we were ready to move on to Bor when miraculously reception managed to find an alternative pitch – we decided to give it one more try. This time the pitch is great. Decent size, fully serviced and distant views over the ocean.

Some pictures of place E37:

 

 

It’s Saturday and another scorching hot day. Temperatures overnight in the van only fell to 26 degrees and even though we got an early start ready to pack up and move on tomorrow, it was at least 30 degrees in the shade as we pulled everything apart after our 3 weeks in Nin. Sue got her flight back to Southend and we are more or less prepared for our move to Krk island tomorrow.

Friday and we walked to the Salt Museum in Nin – in hindsight we should have driven as another baking hot day here on the Dalmatian coastline. The salt museum is still operational and produces some 3 million kg of salt each year using the traditional method of salt lakes and evaporation.

A series of interconnected ponds gradually increase the density of the salt as it passes from area to area until finally the brine concentration is so great that the salt crystalises and it is then manually harvested.

The production period is limited to 3 months of the year around June – August. The perfect conditions for such an operation rely upon abundant heat, a decent sea breeze to aid evaporation and little rain. Nin certainly ticks all of these boxes!

It turned out to be open day so we didn’t pay for the tour although we did buy rather a lot of different types of salt from the onsite shop. Bet we can’t taste the difference!

Lunch we shared a Pizza at Peperoni’s and dinner was at a nice restaurant overlooking the town of Nin and its coastline.

Thursday was a quiet day with lots of cooling off in the pool. In the evening we visited Zadar old town as we wanted to see the Solar display. Apart from the central light display, each of the planets of the solar system have their own light piece as they stretch along the promenade.

The Greeting to the Sun consists of three hundred multi-layered glass plates placed on the same level with the stone-paved waterfront in the shape of a 22-meter diameter circle. Under the glass conduction plates there are photo-voltaic solar modules through which symbolic communication with nature is made, with the aim to communicate with light, just like the Sea Organs do with sound.

The cathedral and tower also looked rather splendid after dark.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday we returned to Krka National Park. You can read about this in more detail in a previous blog post. However, on this occasion we drove to Skradin and took the boat into the National Park. This boat transfer is included in the standard entry price.

There are lots of parking “entrepreneurs” and we chose to park ours near to a restaurant. The parking was free so long as you produced a till receipt from the bar / restaurant – quite innovative we concluded.

A few more pictures from the return to Krka.

Tuesday another chill day with a late afternoon walk to the Church of St Nicholas, just on the outskirts of Nin.

Today we had an early start (at least for us) and headed to the Plitvice Lakes National Park. About a 2 hour drive from Zadar, we would arrive just before 10:30am.

Plitvice turned out to be unexpectedly stunning and was truly a hidden wonder tucked away in the Croatian mountains. I use the phrase “tucked away” fairly loosely because despite it’s location, many hundreds of other visitors had managed to find the lakes, where one can explore some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world.

The daily high temperature around Zadar is now in the mid 30s but the visit to Plitvice was very pleasant and the temperature remained in the early 20s for our hike around the park.

The stunning park is awe-inspiring and many have described it as “Mother Nature in her loveliest, most scenic guise”. Words can’t describe this picturesque park which has 16 stunning blue-green Plitvice Lakes, which are separated by natural dams of limestone on the Plitvice plateau.

It is surrounded by the mountains Pljesevica, Mala Kapela and Medvedak, which are part of the Dinaric Alps.

A selection of photos follow from this truly beautiful location.

Lastly, some information – it’s all available on the website but it took some time for us to fathom out what to do. The two most popular walks are around 8km, with some steep ascents and descents. These two walks are called “C” and “H” and cover similar parts of the national park but are more or less a reverse of each other. Walk “C” starts from park Entrance 1 and involves a 1 hour walk, an electric boat ride, a 1.5 hour walk and then a panoramic train ride to Station 1, which is a 10 minute walk from Entrance 1. Route “H” starts from park entrance 2 and is more or less the reverse of “C”.

In the evening we walked into Nin and ate at Peperoni’s – excellent pizza.

Sunday was a “chill” day, followed by a tour of Zadar with Sue. BBQ in the evening.