Late summer through Eastern Europe

Last summer, our plan to travel south failed when temperatures reached 40C. We just can't sleep in that kind of temperature? With a car from 2001, there's no such thing as Air Conditioning even in the car itself. To solve this, we moved our summer holidays to September this year for a two week long trip of Eastern Europe.

The trip actually started by flying to Dusseldorf since I had parked the car there already. I went down to celebrate an old friend and to visit the Speyer Technikmuseeum. They have some really rare space objects on display, including a complete Buran Space Shuttle!

After spending a day there, I went to party with Marc and his friends and then I went home by plane. We then came back 3 weeks later and AM didn't have to do the trip through Sweden and Denmark that we've done many times by now.

Caravan messe & Schwebebahn

Arriving in Dusseldorf, we both were quite sick. Nothing serious, but we both had a fever and had to take it easy. One of our neighbours back home had found that there was a huge Camper event at the Dusseldorf Messe, so we spent the first day there. The event was so huge that we easily could have spent multiple days here. It was actually surprising how little info there was on self-building. We found a couple smaller builders that did custom conversions, but not very much.

In general, the camper community have settled on two basic layouts. This means that vans & campers from brands like Pössel, Hobby, Bürstner, Adria, Knaus, Challenger, Concorde, Hymer, Malibu and others will all have the same layout. Seating for 4 up front, kitchen/toilet/shower combo and then beds in the back. There is literally no vans made for two persons travelling and hardly any of these can be off-grid more than a day due to weak solar/battery options. A couple vendors had some creative takes on the standard layout (Forster & Eifelland), but this got boring very fast. It's surprising how little innovation there is in this space. Only the tried and true, with no experiments.

We finished the messe at the hall for camping products where we picked up a Totalcool 3000 at about half the listed price. This is an evaporative cooler running off the 12V in the van. It won't cool the entire van by any means, but it'll provide a breeze of 3-5C colder air than the surroundings. To us, that was the difference between beeing able to sleep and not when it was 32C in the van. Then it was off to Wupperthal to see the Schwebebahn. I'm a big fan of The Tim Traveller on YT and his video showing the Scwebebahn captures nicely why it's worth a visit.

Going south to Croatia & Montenegro

The plan was to go south to swim in the Adriatic Sea, so next we hurried through Germany, Austria and Slovenia to get to Rovinj. Here, the temperatures peaked so we found a nice B&B that had airconditioning and allowed ourself three calm days with no driving. It did wonders and we got to see the very unique Rovinj city, dined at a Michelin restaurant, visted Pula and did a lot of swimming and chilling.

We then headed to Zadar to see the sea-organ and the old town. In the afternoon, we headed to Split and we noticed a strange sound from the car. We didn't like the sound of it, so the next morning (Friday!) was started at the local Mercedes repair shop. They were fully booked and couldn't promise anything, but said that if it was a quick fix or something dangerous, they'd look into it. After a test drive and some troubleshooting, they found that a caliper wasn't properly fastened, but also that one of the rear bearings had 3-4mm slack. They had access to a new bearing locally and promised to fix it just before the weekend started. We thus took a Bolt downtown Split, did 4 hours of sightseeing and came back to a car that was completely free of strange sounds!

This was just brilliant, so a big thanks to OBRT Mercedes in Split! With the car in order, we took the tiny seaside roads all the way down to Dubrownik. Throughout most of the trip, we stayed at camping grounds found via the Park4Night app. Wild camping is illegal in most of these countries, so for 15-25 EUR a night, you'll get a nice flat place to park, access to power and facilities like shower, toilets, fresh water and much more. Not that expensive, but costs like this really builds up over a 15 day trip. Then again - it's great to feel a little fresh as you're sweating in a car that easily holds 35C as you're driving. We used the TotalCool unit in front while driving and in the back at night and it really helped.

We spent the morning in Dubrownik while it still wasn't too hot outside. AM got to see many of the locations from Game of Thrones since many iconic scenes are shot here. Then we headed off to Montenegro to see the city of Kotor. The roads were windy and tiny. With a max speed of 50 km/h and surprisingly few rules when it comes to parking in the middle of the street, this took most of the day. On the way there, we noticed that another heatwave was coming, so we found a place to stay with AirCon. After a luxury dinner by the seaside, we went to explore the city. The fortified city of Kotor and it's fortress really must be the inspiration for Tolkien and other middle Earth novels? One hundred percent authentic, narrow streets, a vibrant night life and most areas open to public. We finished the evening walking the city walls in pitch dark while the fortress was lit up 900m above us. Looks like the hilltop fortress is dotted with bonfires, doesn't it?

The morning after, AM stayed in bed to get rid of the fever while JC climbed “The Ladder of Kotor”, all the way to the top of the fortress. Our B&B host had adviced to do so in the early morning before the sun arrived. Turned out to be brilliant advice as all those walking up later learned. I didn't climb into the the fortress itself since that was sort of dodgy and local thugs would pressure you for money if you tried to walk down the inside of the fortress on your way out. Still a great trip up to beautiful views of the fjords of Montenegro.

We pondered going further south than this, but after calculating how long it would take and how bad the drive back home would have to be, we decided against it. Poor quality roads in Albania being the main reason for not going there, but we sure got quite a bit of bad roads on our next leg of the trip!

Bosnia Herzegovina & Serbia

Throughout the trip, we'd seen forest fires all along, but on the border crossing into Bosnia & Herzegovina it literally burnt just 50m from the car. The entire area was super dry after weeks of no rain, but a big rain was soon about to change this. For now it was still hot and we headed off to the village of Blagaj on roads with 20 km/h speed limits. The roads were in such poor condition that you could not drive faster than this for long stretches at a time, so we're glad the van has proper tyres.

Blagaj has the biggest natural spring of water in all of Europe, pushing 43 000 liters of water per second from the source across the surrounding mountains. Very much a “touristy” place, but still worth visiting. Many of the local restaurants along the river is piping off water from the spring to cool down their dining areas with small rivers and water features. Very comfortable when it's 30C!

We found a nice camping along the river that not only offered a place to sleep and facilities, but AM got a bottle of wine as a welcome gift, we were offered a welcom drink at the bar by the river and got a huge plate of fresh fruits - all of this for just 15 EUR. It was almost too much, but much appreciated. If you're in the area, check out Blagaj River Camp. Brilliant value and we might have stayed here longer if we had more time.

The morning after it started pouring rain and we drove to Mostar. We did sightseeing while literally rivers of water was running down the streets. It was raining so much that the umbrellas hardly had any effect, but the air was warm and the place was exciting, so we didn't care.

Back into the van, we put on warm clothes and headed towards Sarajevo. We remembered the shots in Sarajevo from our history books and walked the city to check out historical spots and the tourist market. All across the city there are houses full of bullet holes and grenade marks from the Bosnian war (1992-1995). Above the Sarajevo city thrones a huge yellow building called Jajce Barracks - a former military barracs that was completely burnt out during the 3 year siege. It's simply too much damage that they haven't been able to repair it all, despite it being close to 30 years since the conflict ended.

Looking at the ethnic map of Bosnia before the war, you can see what a mashup this country really is. Cities such as Mostar has 34% Bosniak, 34% Croats, 18% Serbs as well as others. Religion is also very varied among the population. They simply have to be friends and they are really proud of how friendships are formed across ethnic and religious boundries. It's a true inspiration to how things really should be and we also found the posters at the above cafe a good reminder of how narrowminded we can be.

Trying to pay for our parking, we noticed that some of the locals had a somewhat unfriendly attitude towards tourists. I guess they are tired of tourists asking the same questions, but as a kiosk owner, you will typically benefit from being more friendly? After withdrawing 20 Marka (local currency required by parking machine) and paying 10 Marka as a withdrawal fee, I walked a long distance to break the 20 Marka bill into coins at a more friendly kiosk by buying some snacks for the next stretch of the trip.

We spent the night wild camping at a parking lot close to the Serbian border. The coming days would hold some really long drives with 250-350 kilometers per day. In Serbia, we only stopped in Novi Sad. We walked the fortress to find the nice Restaurant Terasa at the top. Great quality and probably the second best meal of the trip (after the Michelin resturant in Rovinj). Throughout the trip, we didn't mind spending money on good restaurant meals (and cakes!). Food really is culture!

While the Petrovaradin Fortress is massive and has a huge “old town” at it's foot, the main attraction is an old clock tower? If we compare Petrovaradin Fortress and it's Old Town to Prague/Bratislava/Dubrownik/Kotor or  any other town we've been to on this trip, you really do feel it's extremely underdeveloped in terms of tourism. It looks like the main reason is the fact that it's not a living town, but rather full of government offices? While it's refreshing that everything isn't a souvernir shop, I really feel that this is a missed chance for Serbia and Novi Sad.

Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia

The next stretch took us to Hungary and we spent the night in a camp site in the city Székesfehérvár (say that fast 3 times!). The morning after, we checked out the oddball, but fun Bory Castle. This is a largely self built castle by an architecture professor, sculpter and painter. Many features seem built just to test out building techniques and the place is chock full of portraits of his wife (who was also a painter).

Another long drive took us to Bratislava and dinner there. We checked the view from the castle and hung out in the very charming and lively Old Town. To really get some kilometer in this day (260!) we drove off to the city of Lednice in Czechia and spent the night at a camp site operated by a winery. We have a thing for visiting castles & fortresses and we've done so ever since our (now adult) kids were small, so we really do have some experience when it comes to this. I think Lednice-Castle is one of the best preserved and most impressive castles we've ever seen! Going here, you really need to spend some time and we did a tour of the Representative rooms as well as the extremely impressive Greenhouse built in 1843(!).

It was so impressive that we contemplated doing more tours of the palace, but looking at the weather charts we could see that Czechia would get more than 100mm rain the next day. Instead, we dropped by the nearby (and by no means as impressive) Valtice Castle before continuing our drive home. Rain was pouring all day as we drove (328km that day) to the small town of Pirna outside of Dresden, to spend the night near to local castle there as well. A full-on Castle-day!

Last stretch

The next day was just driving. +600km and most of it in rain. We grabbed food along the road, listened to audio books and went to sleep by the harbour in Sassnitz to take the fast ferry (2.5hr) to Trelleborg the morning after. We really do enjoy this ferry as it's so much faster than anything else. The trip home was quite uneventful apart from a stop at the Landskrona castle for lunch.

We could have done much more the last two days, but we had avoided the floods in central Europe and the thought of having a full day at home before work seemed tempting. The van will soon be off on new adventures as my dad will be using it to hop around for playing golf. We'll also do some repairs as the fridge literally fell out when we once forgot to secure it. The drawer slides literally fell apart with ball bearings everywhere.

And then - in just a months time - we're looking at yet another EU approval. Crossing our fingers that we'll get another two years given that we now know that the car is easily capable of driving 5500 km in a couple weeks. Add to that our northern trip this spring (3405 km) and getting our youngest to Stavanger (1025 km) and we had to expand our insurance well beyond what we've formerly had. So happy for having the van and looking forward to new adventures!