4/11-13/11
We started by taking the ferry to Kiel in Germany on the 4th of November. It was really nice to just get on board, have a good dinner and some beer and be on our way.
When we arrived in Kiel we felt a bit lost and didn’t really know where to go.The only plan we made before we left Gothenburg was to go to Ergoldsbach where our friends Sascha, Sabine and their daughter Emilia lives, so we started to drive towards them. We spent the first night outside the Weltenburg kloster.
We met Sascha and Sabine when we lived in Ghana and they came to stay at our guesthouse Desertrose lodge. It ended up with them being managers for our place when we went to Sweden in the summertime. Since then we have met many times in Germany, Sweden and different places in Europe. Sometimes with our campers sometimes at the Oktoberfest, festivals, crayfishing in Sweden and much more.
We haven’t seen them since Emilia was born and they moved from Regensburg. It was great to catch up with them and get to know Emilia. We gave her a Diinglis rabbit that she seemed to like very much, who wouldn’t.
Since we’re traveling in winter time and we like to bush camp (wild camp) we know that we will use a lot of gas for heating and cooking. So before we left Sweden I started to research about filling Swedish gas bottles in Europe. What I found out was that it’s difficult, but possible.
I read about ALUgas bottles that you install permanently in the camper and then you can fill them at any LPG gas station in Europe (if you have the 4 adapters) this bottle has a stop at 80% so that it’s impossible to fill it too much. I also found the best place to buy this system from, Gaswinkel in Holland. They could send it to our friends in Germany and then we could install it ourselves.
This all sounded like a very good idea, but right now we don’t have the money to buy it, so instead our German friends helped us to buy a German bottle, a regulator that fits and the adapters to be able to fill it. So now we have a Swedish bottle with an adapter to go with the German regulator and a German bottle.
Not only did they help us to find the gas bottle, we also had a few more things on our list to buy:-) A Rubiks cube 3×3 for me, a Rubiks cube 4×4 for Mike, and a fishing rod and everything you need to start fishing.
On Saturday we went to Munich for dinner at a very nice restaurant and had the best Schweinshaxen mit Knödel we ever had! After that we went to see The Black eyed peas. It was a great concert that brought back a lot of memories from our time in Ghana, thank you Sascha and Sabine!
Before we left they gave us the best Christmas calendar ever! A beer calendar!
We made a bushcamp at the river Isar that Sabines mum and dad recommended for us. It was a really beautiful place and perfect for spending the night. In the morning we drove to their friend Sebastian who is a car mechanic. We had arranged with him to change oil and filters before we continued on our trip.
It was really good to see him again and his new mechanic shop. Before we left he gave us a crate of German beer! That’s normally what mechanics do, isn’t it 🙂 Thank you Sebastian!
14/11
We have made it to Austria. We stayed one night at Ebensee lake, East of Salzburg. We found a parking that was perfect for campers at 15 Strandbadstrasse. Normally it costs 15 Euro/24 hours between 1 April-31 October, but now it was free. It was very beautiful, but also very cold… We tried to go for a walk but quickly realised we didn’t have the right clothes to be hiking in the Alps in the middle of November…
The view from Snigel was spectacular though 🙂
I have learned how to solve the Rubiks cube and today i made it in my record time, 2 minutes and 51 seconds, I’m very proud!
From here we drove to Hallstatt. It was beautiful scenery all the way. Mike had read about a place where they had painted skulls that we wanted to see, read more here:
It felt a bit weird to go into the crypt and look at the skulls and bones, but worth the visit if you want to see something unusual. Hallstatt itself was a beautiful town in the Alps.
15/11
Driving with a camper in the Alps in November can be a bit of a risk I guess… As i wrote before, we don’t have the right clothes to be hiking here and Snigel doesn’t have the right tires to be driving here…
When we left Hallstatt and started to drive towards Slovenia the road we choose turned out to go up over the mountains. On the shadow side of the road there was a bit of frost. We had no idea how high up this road would go before it started to go downwards again but decided to go slow and see how it turned out. Hopefully no snow! Yes, it’s cold here!
Good decision?
Yes, it was! It was no problems with the frost. The only thing is that Snigel is not that strong and going up up up is not her favourite thing. But the views were so beautiful and made up for her struggles. Mike even found a skateboard ramp that he had to try. Surrounded by mountains, cows and ski slopes it looked like the perfect place to take out his skateboard.
We arrived in Bled, Slovenia, in the evening and found a good parking to spend the night. We went for a walk and ended up at Gostilna Pri Planincu where we had the Slovenian beer Union. This was a very nice place. We only had drinks but they also had a pizza restaurant that seemed popular.
16/11-17/11
In the morning we went to the castle overlooking the lake. It’s on a steep cliff 130m above lake Bled.We didn’t go inside but it was still a nice view. Instead we decided to go down to the lake and go for a walk. The weather is much more pleasant now and you can actually feel the warmth from the sun 🙂 In the middle of the lake there is an island with a church on it. The legend says that if you ring the bell your wishes will come true.
We stopped at a café overlooking the lake to have a cappuccino and the famous Bled cream cake.
In the warmer seasons I think this is a great place to go to. There are many places to go hiking, biking, rafting, ziplining and it would be great to come back one day.
Next stop, Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, we have been here before and really liked it. But before we went to the train station where we would park for the night we went to Butanplin to fill up our gas bottles. For those of you that have tried to fill a Swedish gas bottle in Europe or a German one for that matter, you know that every chance you get to fill them up, you take!
Finding the train station was easy and I even think we might have parked in about the same place as a few years before.
We went for a walk towards the city center and passed Metelkova on the way. It’s a place that used to be a military headquarter but is now squatted since 1993. There are a lot of nice graffiti on the walls.
There are many nice restaurants and bars along the river Ljubljanica. Even though it was a bit cold it was still possible to sit outside under the heaters and enjoy a Laško beer. Ljubljana is a very nice city and highly recommended and we will definitely come back again!
18/11-20/11
We have left Slovenia and are now in Croatia.
The first night we spent at a closed (for the season) campsite, Kamp Punta Povile. It was in a really beautiful location right by the sea. I’m sure it’s busy in the summer but now it was totally empty. Perfect for us!! It was very windy in the night and Snigel was moving a lot in the wind so we didn’t get much sleep.
In the morning we continued south in our search for warmer weather. We ended up at a marina outside Zadar where we could park just outside the fence, next to the water. It was another perfect place to spend the night that we found on the park4night app. It became even more perfect when we realised we could use the hot showers inside the marina.
We had our first day with really nice weather on Murter, south of Zadar
We found a nice place next to a church where we could park for the night. Next to the sea and all alone! There used to be an old Roman town there that is now mostly submerged under the sea.
We took our bikes for the first ride this trip and cycled around the island for many hours and just enjoyed the sun. We saw some very nice campsites overlooking the sea. We thought about going there with Snigel but ended up staying where we had first parked. Mike took out the fishing rod and tried his luck fishing. He didn’t catch anything and luckily we had already made other dinner plans:-)
21/11-22/11
We spent the day in Split. We parked Snigel at a very small car park at a marina and took our bikes for a ride. We decided to go to our first (open) campsite on this trip. We need to just relax for a few days and not drive. The weather is nice and sitting here in Snigel writing this I just had my first mosquito bite. I hate mosquitos, but it’s a good sign that means were getting to warmer places 🙂
Now Mike has just made dinner for us and it smells really nice so I’m going to close the computer and enjoy a good meal with my husband!
24/11-26/11
After a few days at Camping Strobrec Split we felt relaxed and ready to go to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Here is a famous old bridge, Stari Most. It was destroyed in the war in 1993 but was reconstructed between 2001-2004, they managed to save many of the old stones from the bottom of the river. It’s 30 m wide and 24 m high, the word “most” means bridge in Serbo-Croatian. It crosses the river Neretva and connects two parts of the city. We tried to park Snigel close to the bridge but after some narrow streets and finding out they wanted 10 € to for the parking we turned back a bit and found a free parking only 5 min from the bridge.
It was raining when we went on our sightseeing tour but it was still nice. It’s a beautiful bridge and the water looks very nice. This time of year there aren’t that many tourist around which we like.
We continued on the other side of the bridge and started to walk towards a place called “sniper tower” that Mike had read about. It’s an abandoned bank building where snipers used to shoot from during the siege of Mostar. They had a very good view from the 10 story building. Now you can see the holes from bullets and bombings on the building and it feels a bit weird to walk around and look at it. There are a lot of nice graffiti on the walls that we wanted to have a look at.
On the way back to Snigel we saw many buildings that had been destroyed during the war. Some had been restored but many of them still had bullet holes on the walls, burnt out insides and broken roofs.
We had read about a nice camping called Aganovac that’s right next to the river Buna that were supposed to be open all year. When we came there it was closed for renovation and will open again in 2019…. It was already dark and it kept raining so we found a parking next to the river and stayed there for the night. It was a very beautiful view over the river when we woke up. Too bad the campsite was closed, otherwise I think we would have stayed for a few days.
Instead we decided to go to Dubrovnik. But first Mike fixed a leak in the roof. It was a relatively short but very winding road and it took a long time to drive to Neum. Mike had to be very careful not to burn the brakes in the downhills.
From there we drove along the coast (it’s only 20 km long) and crossed in to Croatia again. The drive towards Dubrovnik was stunning! The water is so clear and the cliffs are so dramatic. We saw a really nice beach where another camper had parked. We walked down to see if it was possible for us to go there. Unfortunately the road was too steep and slippery after the rain so we decided not to go. We stayed one night at a parking next to a closed campsite on Babin kuk.
27/11-28/11
It’s been raining and very windy for a few days now and we want to have nice weather when we go in to Dubrovnik. So, what to do in a camper when it’s raining? Look for a nearby SPA is what we did! Very close to autocamp Matrovika where we stayed there was a Hilton hotel and for 10€ we could use the SPA. It was really nice to use the saunas and pool and i had a massage that was really good. Very clean and tired we had a relaxing evening in Snigel.
The next morning when we woke up it was a bit more sunshine and Mike cleaned everything under the hood before we went for a walk.
Only a few hundred meters from where we stayed there was a beach that is probably very nice in summertime.
We continued our walk towards some abandoned hotels in Kupari that we had read about. The military used to stay there and it used to be very luxurious and difficult to get a room (even if they had room for 1600 guests at a time) there if you didn’t know the right people. Now the 5 hotel buildings are totally destroyed from the war. They burned down the hotels, floor by floor after looting them and you can see the bullet holes in the walls. Now it’s abandoned and full of graffiti. We walked around in many of the buildings but after a while a guard told us we were not allowed to go inside. Luckily we got some really good photos before he came.
When we came back, Mike made grilled sandwiches in the waffle-iron we bought at a second hand shop in Gothenburg before we left Sweden. Yummie!
I have a new record on the Rubiks Kube: 1 minute 48 seconds!
29/11
Sun!!! So lovely to wake up with the sun shining in! Today was the day when we went to Dubrovnik. We have been waiting for the weather to clear up and now it finally has! I’m really happy we waited, Dubrovnik is beautiful when it’s not raining!
We started by taking the bus from the campsite. We stopped very close to the cable cars going up to a viewpoint and decided to do the whole tourist package. The view was really fantastic and I’m glad we did it.
From there it was just a short walk to the Pile gate leading into old town of Dubrovnik. This gate is from 1537 and they used to lock it every evening and give the key to the prince.
To enter old town you first have to walk through a second gate and then you can see Stradun which is the main street. It’s about 300 m and used to be a channel which divided the city into two but is now paved with limestone. Opposite the fountain that has supplied the old town with fresh water since the fifteenth century, close to the entrance, there is a gargoyle. According to the legend it means luck in love if you can stand on its head, keep your balance facing the wall and take off your shirt at the same time. Yes, of course we had to try it, neither of us came as far as keeping the balance. We think we have luck in love anyway, so maybe it’s for people searching for love?
Before we started the walk on the wall, we had a stroll in the old town and looked at some of the places where they have filmed Game of Thrones. Dubrovnik is where they filmed most scenes from King’s landing. Both the Pile gate and the Ploče gate are filming locations and so are the Stradun, Lokrum island and the Lovrijenac Fort that is the Red keep. I’m so glad we’re not here in the high season, apparently you have to stand in line for everything and you can hardly see this beautiful town for all the tourists. Now we had the whole town (almost) to ourselves. I read somewhere that now they have a limit of 8000 visitors per DAY! They want to take it down to 4000 to protect the city. In 2016 there were 10 388 visitors in one day that bought tickets for the walk on the wall.
After a bite to eat we started the roughly 2 km long walk on the famous city walls. From here the view is, again, fantastic! On the widest part the wall is 6 m, it’s up to 25 m high and was built to protect the city from attacks both from land and the sea. It was a really nice walk and it was almost empty 🙂 We didn’t have to wait in a line to go up the stairs or take nice photos from the wall.
It was too difficult to choose from all the photos so here are many of them… 🙂
After the wall we went to a small bar/café that was located on one of the cliff sides and had a beer with a wonderful view!
After a long day sightseeing it was nice to get back to Snigel. Tomorrow we’re going to Montenegro.
30/11
We left the campsite around lunch and drove towards a camping in Montenegro that Sebastian had recommended. The road was very winding and very much up and down and when we finally reached the place it was closed for the season… We drove back a bit and found a perfect spot to park for the night.
