Balkans - BRIDGET THE MIDGET

Ivano-Frankivsk

22nd July 2022 By roychinnorNo Comments

Over breakfast at The Frontier Hotel I met the owner is a Maltese gentleman and who at the age of 19 bought a brand new MG Midget as his first car. He was thrilled to see Bridget and learn what we are doing, albeit he questioned the wisdom of visiting some locations. We left the hotel at 08:30 and drove, without incident, the 500 metres to the border. The queue was not too long and in total it took less than an hour to negotiate Customs and Passport control for exiting Romania and entering The Ukraine. However, it took another twenty minutes to purchase a green card for Bridget. I had no local currency to pay for the card and the only ATM at the border was broken! Eventually, the broker and I came to an understanding, I only had 20€, so he would charge me 20€. As we left the border the queue of cars and charity workers waiting to cross...

Constanta

16th July 2022 By roychinnorNo Comments

Forty-five years ago, 1977, my MG Midget was produced in Abingdon and I took my wife and children on a holiday to Constanta, Romania. I have just spent the past day and a half revisiting and walking around Constanta and it is a very different place. In the late seventies, the “Iron Curtain” countries started to open up to western tourists. The Black Sea coast has some great beaches and the great tsunami of tourists, flocking to Spanish resorts, had peaked and were eager to try new locations. Our holiday was booked for June/July period, I don’t remember the exact dates, and we had an anxious period after a seriously bad earthquake in the January that had affected a large area of the country. However, we were told it was fine to go ahead and so landed in the first Communist governed country we had been too. My memories of Constanta from then are of drab concrete block buildings, gangs of women...

Let’s Drive For A Change

15th July 2022 By roychinnorNo Comments

From several possibilities I chose today to go to Pella, as I was to find out, the birthplace of Alexander the Great (not the one I wrote about in Albania). There are a number of archaeological sites to choose from in this area and I chose this particular one because the tourist information I saw confused me. It referred to Pella being a port city, but the sea is some 20 miles away as the crow flies, so it would require a massive tidal difference with many buildings and roads disappearing under water every day, or a very long pier! Of course neither was the case, but for once land has pushed back the sea, a very rare occurrence. Anyway Pella is only 15 minutes’ drive from my hotel so I went straight to the museum which I hoped would sort things out for me. First impressions as I approached it were not terribly favourable as the building itself looks classic...

North and Central Macedonia

10th July 2022 By roychinnorNo Comments

Having kept at least one day ahead of the rain all the way to North Macedonia, it had to catch-up with me sooner or later. And didn’t it just. The weather forecast in Tirana the evening before we left was for rain from 08:00am until 18:00pm for the next day. After all the good-byes (I had got to know the staff at the hotel in Tirana very well in just 48 hours) it was almost 10:00am when Bridget pulled away and we headed towards Macedonia in brilliant sunshine, again. The journey was abnormally smooth and easy from the driving point of view, even finding the correct road out of the city, which is so often fraught with wrong turns, etc. The route was through beautiful mountains (Parku Kombëtar Shebenik – National Park) to the Albanian/North Macedonian border. So far so good, then the Macedonian border official demanded that I buy a Green Card (an international insurance). I said “No, my UK insurance...

Where’s Albania?

7th July 2022 By roychinnor2 Comments

Dubrovnik to Tirana I know my education was lacking in many areas, but in this instance I felt that I wasn’t alone, but where precisely is Albania, what is the culture there and, importantly for me, how is their driving? I don’t even know anybody that has visited the country. As I have now found Albania is actually a small country on the Adriatic coast sandwiched between Montenegro, in the north, and Greece, to the south. Across the Adriatic, it is more or less opposite the heel of Italy’s boot. It shares an inland border with North Macedonia. It gained independence in 1912 from the Ottoman Empire and since the second World War has been governed by a succession of ‘appointed’ Presidents until 1991. Then the first democratically elected President took office. The country was effectively controlled by Russia from 1945 until 1991. I was initially wary on the drive from Dubrovnik, because standards were dropping the further south I was travelling. From...