The long way round

19 May 2018

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Cornelia had another epic sleep, waking shortly after 08:30.  She is just so comfortable in the van!  I heard her cry “Get me out!” at 06:00, so I dashed out of the tent to her, only to find she was sleep crying, and had no desire to leave her bed at all!

Ian and I were both wide awake though, so decided to get up and start packing up our things.  We have been on site for a week, and lovely as it is, we’re not really doing much!  And also, the Germans are arriving in their thousands and descending on the campsite today.  It was another beautiful sunny day, and we were able to get our laundry from yesterday mostly dry.  When Cornelia finally did get up, she wanted to go shell hunting on the beach in her pyjamas with Daddy, and by the time they returned, breakfast was ready and we enjoyed our last campsite meal in warm sunshine.

Cornelia was keen to squeeze in one last swim, so I took her up there (she walked the whole way – one mile!) while Ian packed everything into Bluebell with impressive precision.  We had great fun chasing each other around in the water, along with about thirty other kids who had now appeared.  Post-swim, we treated ourselves to a pot of Nutella-covered deep-fried donut balls.  There were loads of them, luckily for Ian, who got to eat the last few, once he’d finally made it up to reception.

Having checked out, we started heading to Zagreb, before diverting to Trieste (Italy), as Ian had hoped to do onthe way to Umag.  It turned out to be a large, rather ugly, port.  We stopped off at a Lidl for a grocery shop, and decided not to hang around for lunch, opting instead to try our luck in a village off the main route.  Well, it wasn’t quite Zederhaus (or in fact anywhere near it!) but I made cheese and ham baguettes for us, and we chomped them merrily by the side of Bluebell before setting off to Zagreb.

The route took us via Slovenia again, so our journey today was Croatia – Italy – Slovenia – Croatia!  It seems rather a long way around, but thanks to the ability to move freely in the EU, we weren’t really held up anywhere at all, and finally arrived in Zagreb just after 18:00.

It all got a bit tense from then on… We pulled up in a very “dodgy” looking car park with towerblocks of flats on all four sides. “This can’t be it” declared a shocked Ian.  Yes, it was, as we saw a straggly-haired smiling lady waving her arms at us.  There was only one parking space left, and there was a car directly in front of it, so it took Ian about 15 minutes to finally get parked.  He does not take “difficulty” very well.  I was trying to give him direction as he couldn’t see the back or front of Bluebell, but he and I must communicate very differently.  He is a “right hand down” kinda guy.  Where as I am more of a “turn that way” kinda person.  He was really wound up, which didn’t really help the parking situation!  Anyway, we were finally in and were shown around a perfectly pleasant ground floor apartment, which unfortunately smelled of cigarette smoke.  Nonetheless, it is all functional and reasonably clean.  After Sanja left, a couple of good parking spaces (right outside our flat) became available, but Ian then couldn’t manoeuver the van out of the space.  Oh dear.  Isn’t it funny the things that wind us up?!

Meanwhile, I prepared supper which we all ate together around the little table.  Cornelia was being particularly gorgeous and was very happy to go to bed at last.  I settled down in front of YouTube to watch the Royal Wedding, and it was nice to actually curl up in a bed for the first time in a week again!