We spent a very pleasant evening yesterday in our car park in Vergina. First we went for a quick, cheap and adequate meal in one of the many tourist restaurants which cater for the coachloads that visit Phillip II’s tomb. Much more enjoyable though was the hour or two we spent with Liz and Ant.
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that we had met another English couple who were the other occupants of our capacious car park and so we invited them over for a drink after dinner. Liz and Ant have been travelling extensively throughout Europe in their Bailey motorhome. Their aim is to visit every country of the EU and this year they are taking in Bulgaria and Romania. Interestingly this year they had travelled through Albania to get to Greece.
Regular readers of this blog will know the availability of insurance for Albania from British insurance companies is one of my bugbears and so Ant was able to give me the name of his insurance company, which he admitted it had been hard to find.
Ant is also a software developer and so had state of the art knowledge on all things internet. He gave me some great tips on one or two bits of equipment which he has to get better access to both wifi and the mobile phone network. Next year we will be even better equipped!
Other than these specifics, we had a great conversation ranging over all sorts of topics aided by copious quantities of wine.
Team Basil woke up this morning ready for probably our penultimate journey in Greece. We waved goodbye to Liz and Ant and headed for a final few days at the beach. The journey was probably the most boring of all those we have undertaken in Greece. It was 90% on the motorway, but this time we only paid just over €1 for nearly 100 miles. One tip for travelling on Greek motorways is that the different tariffs on some motorways are based on the height of the vehicle. Two days ago we arrived at a toll booth and unthinkingly handed over the tariff for a vehicle over 2.7 metres high. The attendant looked at our vehicle quizzically and then the swung a Heath Robinson 2.7 metre bar over Basil. It cleared Basil but then hit our solar panel. So the 2.7 metre tariff it was. Today in the same scenario I proffered the correct tariff for the below 2.7 metre vehicles. The attendant again looked at Basil, but was satisfied and sent us on our way. If we had known this before we reached Athens, we could, perhaps, have saved a small fortune in tolls.
We completed a quick trolley dash around LIDL in record time, before finishing our journey at Camping Ouzouni Beach (40.216665, 23.317026). This is a totally renovated site at the top of the western most of the three peninsulas which extend south from northern Greek coastline, just to the east of Thessaloniki. At an ACSI rate of €15 with free wifi, it is great value and on first inspection looks an excellent site.
Basil parked up on the front row with a great view over a very sandy beach and the Aegean. The campsite is echoing to the sound of tiny feet, or more accurately screaming children and thumping footballs. It is presumably half term somewhere in Europe or it could just be because it is the weekend. The site is fairly full with a mixture of nationalities including, for the first time, caravans from Bulgaria and Macedonia.
Basil at Camping Ouzouni Beach
The plan is to stay here for three to five days, planning and otherwise girding our loins before we plunge headlong into what was, for the majority of our lives, the “eastern bloc”.
As an aside, I mentioned yesterday we had seen dark brown squirrels on our journey. It turns out that the cute little red squirrel, inhabits most of Europe, including northern Greece and its colour varies across its range from light grey to black! So the little brown squirrels were the same species as our Squirrel Nutkin, for those brought up on Beatrix Potter.