Yesterday (5th June) was planned to be our biggest travel day. 260 miles and virtually none of it on motorway. Why, you may ask, when we are supposed to be life in the slow lane were we doing such a silly thing? The reason was two fold. Firstly I set this, in retrospect, rather ambitious goal of concentrating our 2017 travelling on the Greek Peloponnese and Norway. You may see a glaring problem with this idea – they are at opposite ends of our fairly large continent!
There was reason behind this madness in that all my reading had led me to believe that the Greek Peloponnese and Norway were the two most beautiful places to motorhome in Europe and I wanted more of a challenge in our first year of retirement than spending four months sitting in a campsite on the Costa del Sol. The consequence of this decision is that there is a certain timescale we must keep to if we are to get to Norway for the summer.
Secondly, the reason for this particular big jump is that my woefully inadequate guide to the whole of Eastern Europe in 200 pages, was lacking in anything interesting in Eastern Hungary. So we decided to skip a whole country. We spent a very enjoyable few days in Budapest last year so we have nothing against Hungary and I am sure a detailed guidebook of Hungary would have provided us plenty of things to do in the east of the country, but we don’t possess one.
We did wonder whether we would be able to complete 260 miles in a day. Much depended on time taken up on border crossings and the state of the roads. As it turned out most of the roads were reasonable. The border crossing from Romania into Hungary took 20 minutes or so, with a superficial inspection of Basil and the crossing into Slovakia was a typical Schengen, blink and you’ll miss it, type.
We did have one navigational problem of my making rather than Sat Navs’ for once. The shortest and quickest route from Sapanta in Romania to Levoca in Slovakia was through Ukraine. Unfortunately we do not have insurance for Ukraine and fellow travellers on this trip have told us nightmare stories of the border checks and the road quality. For both reasons I programmed SatNav to avoid Ukraine.
The first part of our journey took us along the banks of the River Romania and we could see the Ukraine on the far bank. One of the waypoints I had set in SatNav was a large town. I wanted to avoid the centre and so as we approached the town I removed the waypoint thinking SatNav would readjust and find the quickest way without going through the centre. He did, unfortunately it was only when we saw the border crossing that we realised he still thought the quickest way was through Ukraine! A quick 20 point turn on a main road, in sight of the border guards, with ditches either side of the road to make things even more interesting, and we away back into the safety of Romania.
The rest of the journey was uneventful. The last part of Romania saw our first taste of modern agriculture since south of Bucharest. It was flat fertile land which presumably made the investment worthwhile. There was no corresponding reduction in horse drawn transport however.
Hungary distinguished itself by being free of horses and carts, but the housing was less interesting than Romania. The majority in the villages being identical small bungalows with none of the exuberance expressed by many Romanian village houses.
The whole journey was marked at intervals by storks and their ever growing chicks. This part of Europe is certainly stork central.
The last part of the journey was a little confusing. I thought I had programmed in the co-ordinates for a campsite. When SatNav took us into the beautiful walled town of Levoca I thought this was going to be a spectacularly located site. It quickly became apparent that I had just programmed Levoca city centre. A quick review of my campsite database provide me with the correct co-ordinates and we soon arrived at Penzion Pod Marianski horou (49.050585, 20.586431). It’s a bit of a mouthful to say the least but it is a largish camping area behind a guesthouse set in a beautiful forest only 2 miles outside of Levoca. It is €17.50 including electricity and has full facilities although wifi is only available near reception and the restaurant, even with our booster.
To end the day Sarah took the dogs for a walk in the forest in the never ending quest for 10,000 steps. She got an unexpected bonus with a view of a deer!