Archive for August, 2009
Ron’s Trip back
August 28th, 2009 Posted 1:15 pm
Ron’s Trip back
It was time for Karl to return to England.
As he had no driving licence, Sat Nav or mobile phone Ron said that he would drive all the way back with him to ensure that he arrived home safely.
Monday 24th August 5pm Karl & Ron leave, and I am left alone.
No T.V. no radio, no internet…….and my reading glasses broke!!!!!
Felt strange being here alone. It is very, very quiet. Nothing in to eat, so had a walk to the village shop. Nothing much to eat there either, so bought some bread and cheese – and a bottle of wine.
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Kept in touch with Ron and Karl by text. They kept me up to date with progress.
Tuesday 25th August The dynamic duo are now through Romania and into Austria.
Wednesday 26th The guys are in Germany and spent a couple of hours looking at cars. They were thinking of buying a car in Germany where they are much cheaper than in Bulgaria, and Ron driving it back.
Decided against buying a car as there were no suitable ones and they had very little time to look properly.
Thursday 27th August Thriugh Germany and France without problems and arrived for 9am Ferry back to U.K.
No flights from U.K. airports on a Thursday, so Ron booked a 6pm flight from Heathrow to Sofia in Bulgaria – about 8 hours drive from Varna.
Ron caught flight which was on time, and I had researched bus and train times from Sofia to Varna.
The last train was at 11.30 and Ron was due to arrive at 11.25, so that was out of the question
There was a bus at midnight, so Ron got a Taxi from the airport to thr Bus Station. Great – Bus was there ready to leave. Sadly withourt Ron as he needed a ticket to board and the ticket office closed at 11.30. The Bus driver refused to let him pay on the Bus so he had to stand and watch it leave without him.
Taxi back to the airport where he booked a flight for 6.30 am to Varna. A long night sitting in a deserted airport waiting for morning!!
Friday 28th August. At last, flight from Sofia to Varna took off carrying Ron. I had arranged for a friend to collect him at Varna, and Ron completed the last hou of his eventful journey to arrive safely in Malina at 9.30 am
Our new life starts HERE…………………………………………………………………..
Posted in Ron’s Trip back
The trip across Europe
August 14th, 2009 Posted 1:14 pm
The trip across Europe
Landed in Dunkirk. 6pm local time. Sunday
Decided to drive for a couple of hours so that we were well past the border. We had been advised that there are many break ins and thefts near to the border.
Gosselies France
Around 9pm stopped at a Motel called Formula 1. As it had no Restaurant we ate at a lovely little Italian place across the road.
The Motel itself was very basic but clean.
It had very interesting toilets and shower cubicles. After one had finished using the toilet instructions were to close the door properly. Then the toilet cubicle went into a ‘self-clean’ mode and disinfectant and / or water came out of grills in the walls. We don’t know exactly how it was done as we could only listen from the outside of the closed door. I lived in fear of setting the thing off accidentally when still sitting.
Paid 5 Euros extra for breakfast which turned out to be bread and jam – no croissants or toast, cereal or anything much else.
Germany Monday
Left Formula 1 in France at around 9.30 am and drove until lunchtime. Stopped at a Motorway cafe for lunch and spent half an hour talking to the toilet attendant who was Bulgarian. He took us into his liitle ‘office’ and wrote down contact details abd said ‘’if ever you are passing mt town call in’’.
Saw a sign which made us laugh ‘Ausfhart’ We saw the sign again afer a couple of kilometers, then again after a few more kilometers. We said either this is a very large popular town or we are on some sort od ringroad. Only after we had seen the same sign a few more times and 20 kilometers further on did we realise that Ausfhart actually means exit. Made us all laugh.
9pm Feeling a lot brighter now so speeding along singing and chatting. Nearly forgotten about being overloaded when blue flashing lights appeared behind us. The German Police !!! Of course they pulled us over, and began carefully examining the van. They asked ‘is it very heavy?’ we said ‘’well we were weighed in Dover and they let us carry on’’ (which was not far from the truth) Ron tried to distract them by shaking hands and asking them if they could recommend somewhere to stop for the night.
They kept asking for documents that we didn’t have because it was a hired van (We assume they wanted a log book because we showed them the road tax, Insurance and passports etc.) Luckily Ron happened to be driving so the driving licence issue was not a problem.
They were eventually satisfied and said we could carry on, then as we were getting ready to set off they said that one of our tail lifgts was out and we must stop at the first garage to have it fixed. Felt like being in the film ‘The Great Escape’ when the escapees were safely on the train to cross the border when one of the police foiled them at the 11th hour.
Austria Monday night
Safely over the border into Austria, but now worried that Austrian Police will pull us for having a tail light out. We decided to go to an Hotel straight away. Because this was a major town, all the Hotels were in the town center and my toes were curled up at the thought of being stopped again by the Police. All the Hotel carparks we came across had underground parking but with heifgt restrictions, so we couldn’t park the van. Ron and Karl wanted to fix the bulb immediately so we stopped in a side street to change the offending bulb.
Changed the bulb, no light – changed the fuse – no light. Also at this point we thought that we had left the torch in Dover along with the rest of Ron’s tools, so Karl had to try to fix the fuse inside the van by the light of my mobile phone which kept turning off every few seconds.
We decided to drive on out of the town centre (Passau) and find a n Hotel for the night.
The Sat Nav showed a Hotel or B&B along a small road, so off we went in the big van into what looked like a private housing estate. We were sure that there was no large Hotel here but perhaps a B&B so that we could park the van and sort the lights out in daylight.
We parked the van and Ron got out to have a look for somewhere to stay. He saw a light on in a house so walked up the path. The door flew open and a totally naked man stood in the doorway, shouting in what sounded like German. All poor Ron could think of to say when confronted with this sight was ‘Hotel???’ The naked Austrian kept shouting ‘Nine Hotel, nine Hotel’ We thought we had better leg it quick before he called the police who would be interested in our overloaded van with no tail light.
Karl drilled small holes in the headlights, this allowed water to drain out and the fuses held. It turned out that the torrential rain we had driven through in Germany had collected inside the light cover.
We all piled back intto the van and set off again looking to stop at a Motorway Motel as soon as possible. At 12.30am arrived at a nice Hotel which to our relief was still serving food and cold beer. We satayed up until about 2am trying to wind down before bed.
Austria Tuesday Morning
Bought the necessary vignette pas th drive in Austria – lasts for 8 days and cost about 8 euros
Left Hotel at 9.30 after reasonable breakfast, with lights now fully operational, then had an uneventful journey until we stopped for at a service ststion lunch at 3pm. Thank goodness we stopped then because as Karl checked the van he noticed that the tracking had been out of line and the tyres were scrubbing off. We couldn’t risk driving any more miles like that as soon the tyres would be illegal.
Fortunately, there was a garage near the service station – unfortunately they didn’t have the correct size tyres, but they told us where we could find another garage who could have the tyres in stock.
Arrived at the second garage who said it would take 2 days to get the tryes. Karl said the only other way would be for him to put the front tyres on the back and the back tyres on the fromt. As we had only one jack and the van was so heavy it would have taken him half a day to do the job.
At 4.45 pm we came across a garage who would change the tyres over for 25 euros. We were so lucky because the garage was about to close and they were in the process of pulling down the shutters when we arrived.
I had to close my eyes as the van was lifted up, because the garage was using a jack that was only supposed to lift cars. One slip and the van (and possibly the fragile contents) would be ruined. All went well and the van (and the mechanic) survived!
Hungary Tuesday
5.30 in the evening by now, so we decided to push on and try to make up some time.
By 9.30 we were looking for somewhere to stop but not having any luck. Stopped at a garage to ask and they directed us to a place about 20 kilometers away. We arrived about 10.30, and Ron got out to see if they were still open and whether they had any vacancies. He came back grinning saying ‘Gurss what? They say we can have a bungalow for 24 euros for all three of us tonight’
We thought that this was a piece of good fortune and couldn’t wait to see what the bungalow was like.
The bungalow was like a Wendy House. It has 2 single beds, bunk beds and a sink. It was about 12 feet square, and we had to laugh as we had been expecting something totally different.
The place however was lovely. The dining room was still open, so we had a meal before bed.
Next morning when we cme to look around, we found ourselves in the most picturesk surroundings with many weeping willow trees, a pond and swimming pool (which was , sadly, empty) The little ‘bunhalows’ in the grounds were cute, and really ment for camping holidays. The shower block was pretty basic with no doors on the shower cubicles, but hey ho you can’t have it all!!
Had breakfast and a walk aroung the grounds before setting off once again at around 11am.
Hungary Wednesday
Set off once more to see how far we would get before night time.
Throgh Hungary and into Romania. Ron had to make sure that he was the one driving through the boeders because we didn’t want to complicate things with Karl’s lack of driving licence.
Had a vote for stopping overnight somewhere in Romania or just driving on until we reached Bulgaria. I would have preferred to stop but the boys were doing the driving and they opted to carry on.
We hadn’t filled the van up with fuel, as we were trying to keep the weight down as much as possible especially when going through borders.
Romania Wednesday
Bought the necessary vignette pass to drive in Romania & Bulgaria which lasts for 7 days and cost 8 euros.
Romania is very mountainous and driving around hairpin bends in the dark with hardly any road markings and a drop at the side of the road was a bit scary.
We followed a convoy of large wagons, as it was easier to follow lights, and the grooves in the road from the lorry tracks made trecherous driving as our van was too small to follow the lorry grooves and kept slipping on and off them.
We dicided to folloew the lorries until we got through the worst of the winding roads and onto motorway reads again, so we didn’t stop for fuel so that we could stay with the convoy, thinking that we could re fuel somewhere along the way. How wrong we were!!!
We turned off the bad roads onto more normal ones, but there were no petrol stations for miles and miles.
The fuel low light was on constantlt by this time, ans still bo sign of a garage.
Eventually the inevitable happened and the fuel ran out.
The roads were dark and had no lay by’s to pull into. We couldn’t even pull off the road a little as there was a grassy 4ft drop at each side of the road.
We had been advised not to stop at all in Romania, as it is dangerous to do so. Now here we were at 2am on a fast road with no diesel.
By now we were all very tired having driven for 15 hours and it started to rain. We put the warning triangle behind the car and Karl put on the high visibility jacket – then we waited………….
Thursday Romania (early hours)
Karl flagged down a car coming in the opposite direction. Not sure it would stop but thankfully it did. There were 3 young men and a girl in their late teens, and as luck would have it their car was a diesel like the van. They let karl syphon off some fuel (he was still tasting it days after) and then took Ron 23 kilometers to the petrol station to buy a can and some diesel.
The petrol station would not take euros, so the young men changed some for local currency so that we could fill up.
The van was difficult to start after being starved of fuel, so Karl used aftershave to get it going – don’t ask me how.
We were so grateful for the help these young people gave us as no one else stopped and left there we would have had to walk hoping to come across a garage but not knowing how far, and worried that the hazzard lights would run the battery down. All our posessions were in the van, so one of us would have had to stay with it. A very dangerous situation to be in in Romania. Also the road was so dark and fast that it was likely that a vehicle would run into the back of the van smashing all our things.
We were told that very few people stop for breakdowns or even emergencies in Romania as they are afraid of it being a set up and being mugged.
We gave all the rest of our euros (probably only about 50) to our rescuers, but it was worth much much more. We must have had a guardian Angel that night.
Filled up with half a tank of diesel and carried on heading for the border with Bulgaria.
What we hadn’t realised is that at that particular border crossing (Silistra) there is a Ferry boat to take vehicles across. By now it was 4am and the ferries had stopped for the night. We bought a ticket and were told to get in line and await the first morning ferry.
The first ferry turnrd out to be 5am so we didn’t have very long to wait. We were in line behind a lorry, then more lorries came behind us.
At about 4.45 the loading began. The first lorry went on, then the second, then us. The van made an almighty scraping sound as we went up the ramp onto the boat. We thought we were not going to make it as by this time Karl had said that the clutch was neat to the top, and we could smell it as we dragged the van up the ramp. But at least we were on.. Or so we thought!!! After much shouting and arm waving, a man came up to our van and ordered us off. We pretended not to understand as we desperately did now want to have to get off and on again. The man insisted saying ‘first the lorries you last’ so, we scraped our way back down the ramp. Of course this time the men heared the noise and we were worried that we may not be allowed back on at ass seeing as we had scratched their ramp!
We sat in the van looking up at the ferry and finally when all the lorries were loaded, we were allowed to drive on. This time the men had pieces of wood and blocks to make it easier for ud to get up the ramp. We could heat them later speaking to each other and pointing at us while making scraping sounds!!
We thought the ferry would be a quick 5 minute crossing abut it headed down the river away from Silistra, and we began to think that we had made a mistake ang gtten on the wrong ferry. There was nothing we could do but enjoy the trip, and watch the sun rise.
The ferry docked at aroung 6am and with much fuss and stop start re position the blocks we scraped our wat gratefully off the ferry boat.
BULGARIA Thursday
Finally arrived at the border of Romania and Bulgaria. The end is in sight!!! All the lorries were waved through. We were told to wait. Here we go again just as we are getting close to home, produce the documents, have a look in the back of the van etc. No problem though, and we were on our wat for the final 70 or so kilometers to Malina.
MALINA at last at about 8.30 am.
We arrived and saw that someone had weeded all the path outside the fromt of the house painted the curb black and white (as is the tradition here) and planted some little flowers. We had paid one of our neighbors to plant some grapes and said that they could use our land to grow things until we arrived. We didn’t expect to find a little flower bed, and it made us feel so happy and welcome as we had neither asked for or expected such a thing. What we were totally unaware of until a week later is that we were being charged 1,200 lev for this, but that’s another story!!!!
Posted in The trip across Europe
Leaving Home
August 1st, 2009 Posted 12:13 pm
LEAVING HOME
The sale of the house was completed on Thursday 13th August as we exchanged contacts, and our buyers wanted to move in on Friday. We couldn’t get a van until Saturday, so we arranged to stay in the house on Friday night to be out by 1pm on Saturday. Ferry was booked for 6pm in Dover.
Karl (elder son) and van arrived at 9am which gave us 4 hours to load everything. Mark (middle son) came to help with the loading. We were packed and ready to leave at 12.55 and just as we were going to set off our buyers arrived.
We had always been working on volume rather than weight when calculating the space we would have in a van.
Everything went in O.K. but the van was so heavy that it was about 4 inches from the road and as it was a low loader type it looked even worse than it was. We had to go to Marks and drop off the two leather sofas.
Left Morley West Yorkshire with just enough time to make the 6pm Ferry.
Made good time and decided not to stop for a rest, just get to Dover.
We started seeing the Dover Ferry signs and we were only 23 miles away when we were pulled over by a WPC. From the Kent Police Force.
‘You are a long way from home’ she said sarcastically. ‘Not as far as we are going to be very soon’ we thought. We thought wrong. The WPC had been patrolling the motorway looking for vehicles which looked as though they may be overloaded, and she spotted us.
We had to follow her to a weigh bridge which was about 20 miles away. ‘We could have been at the docks by now’ we were saying to each other.
As suspected, the van was over weight. The WPC said that she would empound the van and we could not move until the van and it’s contents including ourselves weighed less than 3.5 tons. (I nearly weigh that on my own!!)
She asked us to follow her to a nearby Hotel, saying that she could have left us at the weigh bridge if she felt so inclined. So – we followed her for miles to a Premier Inn Hotel car park. She said not to move from there until the van was the legal weight.
By now we had missed the Ferry, and it was getting dark and cold.
We went to see if we could book a room at the Hotel but they were fully booked. We told the WPC this and she just shrugged her shoulders and said it was not her problem.
Ron started to unload the van into the Hotel car park, and the WPC said ‘You can’t put your stiff on the car park, the local Council will prosecute you if you do that’.
What were we to do? We couldn’t move the van until we off loaded some weight and we were not allowed to take anything out of the van because the car park was private property and we were not allowed to leave it there.
With that the WPC left presumably to go home for her supper and to bed, leaving us stranded in a car park with no toilet, no light, no food and totally fed up to say the least.
Fortunately, the Hotel staff were more understanding. They let us stay in the car park over night. We had to take lots of our things out of the van so that we could sleep in it.
By this time it was 9pm and we thought that we had taken enough weight off the van to be within the legal limits, so we called the Police to ask them for a re weigh.
They arrived at 11pm and escorted us to the weigh bridge again, leaving our furniture personal belongings etc. In the Hotel car park.
We were just over weight, and the Police man and woman (different ones this time) were more helpful, and said just take a few more kilos off ang arrange for a re weigh in the morning. They told us of another Hotel about 10 miles away, but we couldn’t go there for the night leaving our van and all our belongings on the car park at the premier Inn.
There was nothing else to do but all 3 of us sleep in the van until daylight.
Next morning we woke at 6am cold and stiff with most of our stuff still on the carpark. Most of it by now wet with condensation and bits of it broken from being taken in and out of the van so mant times.
Sunday morning is not a good time to attempt to arrange anything.
We had many thoughts at this time. We could:-
1. Ask someone to hire a van and drive down to Dover. Expensive and would take at least 7 hours.
2. We could ask a local hire company to loan us a van and try to arrange storage. Again expensive and time consuming supposing we could even get a hire van at short notice on a Sunday.
Both these options would mean that our posessions would be somewhere in England and we would be in Bulgaria.
We are not planning to drive back again overland for quite some time, so storing our things in England seemed expensive and pointless.
The only way that we could shed the excess weight ang get on out way was to dump a lot of our things.
The only problem with that was that we couldn’t get a skip hire to come out on a Sunday.
Here again the Hotel staff came to uor rescue and said that if we paid for a skip to be delivered on the Monday morning thet would load it with our things and it was O.K. to leave the stuff in the Hotel car park until the skip came. We paid the Hotel Chefs to put the things into the skip when it arrived.
The staff at the Hotel were horrified at the way we had been treated by the Police. We were just abandoned in a dark car park all night without any thought to our wellbeing. We could have been diabetic or had other medical conditions, but they appeared not to have ay concerns for our health – physical or emotional.
The Hotel Manager, bless her, offered us a room which had been used but not serviced yet so that we could use the bathroom. She supplied towels and coffee in the room for no charge. We were so grateful to have some sense of normality after a stressful night discussing ways around our situation, and always coming back to the inevitable – dump our things in Dover.
Now came the task of deciding which of our prized possessions we could bear to leave behind to go to into the skip.
This was heartbreaking and also humiliating with people looking on in curiosity and sympathy.
We managed to give away the BBQ, lawn mower, garden hose and reel, bike, sofa and some books.
All Ron’s tools which were heavy and most of my clothes, wellie boots, books, a bed and lots of kitchen equipment had to go.
Due to stress anxiety and lack of sleep I feel that we made some rash decisions, and now we are in our lovely house in Malina in Bulgaria, we say ‘why didn’t we dump this particular item and rescue something more useful instead’. All too easy to say in hindsight, especially as I left my box of underwear and if I had been thinking clearly I would have thrown out some crockery and brought the box of undies instead. I arrived here with one pair of knickers to my name!! I have bought some since in case you are wondering (Too much information J)
Still, I dread to think of strangers going through all our personal items like that after we left.
Many times since we have been in Bulgaria, Ron has begun to do a job only to realise that his electric drill or saw or whatever is somewhere in Dover.
We rang the Police again at 7am and they arrived at 10am to take us once more to the dreaded weigh bridge.
This time we were the correct weight and we were allowed to go on condition that we did not return to the Hotel and try to rescue some of our possessions.
The van was weighed without myself and Karl, so we would have been overweight still had we all been in the van.
Karl and I got a taxi to the docks (which cost £50!) where we met up with Ron who drove there alone just in case the Police stopped him again. We definitely did not want to go through the weigh procedure again, but now we were worried in case we were weighed getting onto the Ferry. We had brought with us some photographs and photo albums that I just could not bring myself to leave behind, and later I found that Karl had added a few things to his case for me.
Got onto the Ferry at 4pm. Heaved a sigh of relief until Karl said that he had left his driving licence at home. To make matters worse he had also left his Sat Nav behind in Dover. He was going to need this for his return journey back through Europe.
Worse, when we were half way across the channel, Karl discovered that his mobile phone was not enabled for calls outside the U.K.
Just when you think that it can’t get any worse……………….
We just said that we would carry on now and deal with problems as they present themselves. So our road journey to Bulgaria began.
Posted in Leaving Home