Hi everyone, we have now completed another good chunk of our travels in Eastern Europe. From Bulgaria we headed straight into Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The main thing to see here was the monolithic Presidential Palace which was only completed after the dictator, Ceausescu was removed from office. This place was immense, being second only to the Pentagon in terms of the world's largest building. The streets of Bucharest reminded us of post WWII Paris, with lovely old buildings all over the place desperately in need of some repairs and a fresh coat of paint. Next we headed nor [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone we are pleased to report that Bert, our 30 year old Bedford camper van has now made it past Istanbul :-) Since our last post in Greece, we did a big push east, and including one last day on the med, we rolled into Istanbul to look for a camping ground. The Turkish driving skills were similar to the Greeks, except a lot more angry and aggressive. In particular, Sandra had both a driver and a passenger honking, shouting, gesturing and eventually throwing an empty water bottle at us, all for driving in the fast lane at only 20 [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, we are now at the end of our travels in Greece. Since leaving the South we have had our "holiday within a holiday" traipsing around the Cyclades islands before heading north out of Athens over the last couple of days. From Athens we grabbed an overnight ferry which arrived in Santorini first thing in the morning. This ferry gave us our first taste of real beds and air conditioning for months - it was almost a pity we were asleep for the whole ride! Santorini has some really interesting geography, as the island is the top of an old [View Full Entry]

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Hi everybody, we have now reached the sunny shores of Greece. Our overnight ferry from Bari in Italy went off without a hitch and we got a cheaper price by getting "camping on board" tickets. This meant that we were sleeping in the van (again) up on deck with Bert sandwiched in amongst fifty large trucks. We still had the run of the boat upstairs, and 'private' showers and toilets which we only had to share with the two neighbouring campervans. After a surprisingly good nights sleep we disembarked in Patras to find the heat we had experienced in Southern Italy [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from Southern Italy. We are presently in Bari on the southeast coast, waiting for our ferry to Greece (Patras) tonight. Since our last post we headed out of Tuscany and down to Rome. The drive from Siena down was a little interesting as the van developed a bit of an electrical problem which wiped out our 5th gear/overdrive, windscreen wipers, indicators and other ancillary electrics. We limped tensely down to Roma and found a nice rural campground on the outskirts of town on a Sunday night. The campground operators put us onto a local mechanic who we aimed to [View Full Entry]

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Hey everyone, we have now taken a bit out of our Italian tour. From Nice we kept heading east, through rather challenging coastal roads which were pretty hard to make any distance on. Just across the border we got stuck behind a guy moving a house at 11am..... This was pretty frustrating travelling so we bit the bullet and took on the pay motorways for the first time, letting us soar above each of the bays on the way on m, We still had a fair few hills around, which seem to attract rain for us so we did a quick [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from the south of France. We have now made it up from Spain, and over the last two weeks or so have been moving steadily east. From Madrid we headed straight down to Valencia to cruise around the city and take in some of the sights - being the usual collection of Churches, walls and gates. This time however we did manage to come across the actual Holy Grail from the last supper (well at least the only one Rome has yet to discredit). We got some great views of the city from the cathedral bell tower, taking in [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone - we have made our way down to Spain since the last time we posted. We are about to start heading back north again after today - hopefully to more blue skys and warm weather. From the Loire we headed to a little place just outside of Bordeaux city called St. Emilion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-%C3%89milion), famous both for the local wine production and subterrainian religious bulidlings. They are very protective of these underground mounuments, which include a masive vaulted monolithic church and banned any photos being taken :-( We did however have a nice wander arou [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour chacun! We are now touring through France, and are presently making our way through a few vineyards towards Spain. We started this leg of the trip with a ferry from Cork to Roscoff in Brittany, which dropped us off early Sunday morning with very little other traffic around to see our first go at driving on the wrong side of the road. Supprisingly this is not accually as hard as you would first think, as long as you pay attension at round-abouts and go a bit slower at intersections. We headed straight for Paris as the weather in Brittany resembled [View Full Entry]

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Hello from Ireland. We have been touring around the Emerald Island for the last couple of weeks, knocking a bit of rust off our van Bert (due to the very bumpy roads). We dropped in on some more of Sandra's relations Hugh, Peter and Clodagh for some welcome home cooking before sailing out of Holyhead, north Wales. We landed staight into rush hour traffic in Dublin, and immediately got very lost and rather frustrated with the traffic queues (especially as we had arrived without a map). Thank god for Jonny White, our cellphone and his map, who in 20 minutes had [View Full Entry]

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