Camping Ouzouni Beach is a really popular campsite and it deserves to be. They’ve got a great stretch of beach and the site has been developed to a very high standard. The only glaring omission at the moment is a restaurant, but there appears to be one that opens later in the year. Given the number of campers, they are missing a trick.
The downside, from our point of view, is that it is relatively noisy. The site is full of children either just for the weekend or it may be half term. We will find out tomorrow. While the girls are happy to ride their bikes and play quietly with each other the boys all want to play football in the empty pitch next to us! I drifted off to sleep last night to the sound of leather on motorhome! Not really. Surprisingly the football hasn’t touched Basil yet. If it had been me as an 11 year old Basil would have been covered in dents by now.
As we sat outside for breakfast, across the sea in front of us, Mount Olympus, the home of the Greeks’ gods, appeared clearly against the blue sky. Mount Olympus is Greece’s highest mountain at 9,600 feet and still has plenty of snow on it’s peak.
Mount Olympus in the distance (if you look hard!)
Today I had two important tasks and Sarah had one. Sarah’s has the same task every day which is to make her Garmin device measure 10,000 steps. She obviously has many other things to do, but that one is a constant. I, on the other hand, had to plan our time in Bulgaria and watch the key Stage 9 of the Giro D’Italia, important stuff I think you’ll agree.
The reason for detailed planning for Bulgaria is I simply don’t know what to expect. Our ACSI map of Bulgaria is blank – no ACSI campsites and I have no idea how good or otherwise the 3G network and wifi is in Bulgaria. Since all our camping databases are on line I decided we needed a backup plan.
We have three camping cards with us: ACSI, Camping Club International and Key Camp Card. Only the CCI have any registered sites in Bulgaria. So I have plotted all their sites on a Google map and added some others, together with some wildcamping stops, taken from other people’s blogs when they have toured Bulgaria. Then in case 3G is unreliable I have plotted these onto a paper map with hard copies of their GPS co-ordinates. Belt and braces! Tomorrow it’s Romania’s turn.
Sarah and I went for a walk on the beach this afternoon, a beach that Sarah of course already knows well. We came across our first taste of mass tourism. The hotel 200 metres or so down the beach is already packed. The beach there is very narrow, unlike the lovely stretch at Camping Ouzouni, and it was crammed with corpulent bodies, slowly turning pink in the fierce sun. I may consider our campsite busy, but we all have large demarcated pitches and if you want to lie on the beach you have it almost to yourself. Give me a campsite any time.
The Beach at Camping Ouzouni
The Giro D’Italia was an anticlimax. At the bottom of the key climb one of Britain’s leading contenders, Geraint Thomas, was involved in a crash caused by one of the official motorbikes. He was one of the pre-race favourites and lost so much time as a result of the crash that he is effectively out of contention. Crashes involving official cars and motorbikes appear to be more and more common and this one happened at a particularly important moment and as had a major impact on the race. Very disappointing.
Today has been very hot, but fortunately there has been a strong breeze off the sea. The next few days sees the temperature falling back into the low 20s which will suit us nicely.
*For non Brits “Project Womble” is a not very clever reference to Bulgaria. The Wombles was a children’s TV show starring creatures called Wombles and one of the leading Wombles was called Uncle Bulgaria.