Croatia quickly. Serbia slowly. It’s not that we’ve planned it that way, but it’s kind of happened like that. As with all of this trip, there’s only so much planning you can do, then the rest just happens!

After a night outside a motel close to the Serbian border, we drove to the town of Ruma, where we met our hosts; Drago and Jaroslava. Drago welcomed us into his home with the words “this is my wife” (gesturing to Jaroslava) “and this is my other wife” (gesturing to another young lady), before saying “of course I’m joking”. This set the tone for the warm welcome and hospitality that we received from their family (and Eldina, who was the other lady referenced). In fact, so warm was their hospitality, that they insisted on giving up their bed on the first night, saying that they said they would feel uncomfortable knowing that we were their guests, yet asleep outside their house. Once they saw Bertha the following day though, they were able to see that actually she’s really quite comfortable, so accepted our offer to sleep in her for the rest of our time with them.

Drago and Jaroslava lead a church in Ruma, where their particular focus is on helping people with drug addictions, as Drago used to be an addict himself and has an amazing story of recovery from that. Whilst we were there though, the church (who also help to distribute Operation Christian Child shoeboxes in Ruma) were setting up a temporary second hand clothes store with donated clothes from a church in Germany. Neither of us are clothing experts, but we were able to help with putting up posters around the town (where there appears to be a massive flyering culture!) and sorting clothes before the shop opened. The rush of customers on the first day confirmed to us the need that there obviously is for cheap clothes… we take second hand shops for granted in the UK.

Back to the hospitality – absolutely second to none. The moment we walked through the door we were offered a cup of kafa (the Serbian version of a Turkish coffee) and the sustenance just kept flowing from there! From tasty stews, to breads, to burek and Steve’s favourite, pljeskavica we were fed incredibly well. Our offering of a cup of tea in Bertha for Drago + Jaroslava seemed tiny in comparison to what they offered us, but at least we were able to offer something. This is the first time that we’ve entertained people in Bertha since we’ve left the UK, but hopefully it will have started a trend.

One of the things that we liked the most in Ruma was the culture of family; Drago + Jaroslava have 4 lovely kids under the age of 7 who were fascinated by these strange adults who only knew a few words in Serbian. We had great fun entertaining them (it’s amazing how many games still work without language) and they entertained us too. But it wasn’t just their family that we hung out with; several times in the few days we were in Ruma we either went around to someone else’s house where there were loads of kids, or people came round to Drago + Jaroslava’s house. I think the record was 11 kids in one place; absolute chaos, but what a great way to live. Kiri’s broodiness picked up a pace!

Sadly all good things come to an end and after all, whilst visiting and helping people is part of this trip, we must travel too. So we hit the road again… hoping to keep moving to avoid the imminent snow!

Roads. They’re all the same. They’re all equal. You drive on them to get from A to B. Sometimes on the right. Sometimes on the left (not so much over here on mainland Europe). But maybe all roads aren’t equal… maybe some are “more equal than others”?

The trusty map that’s helping us find our way through Europe has a lovely way of marking toll roads as pink… maybe it’s to try to soften the blow of them? France has plenty of pink roads… as does Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia… basically all of the countries that we’ve been through so far.

What’s interesting is the variety of methods of taking the tolls:

• Fixed period vignette – these are little stickers that you fix to your windscreen and they last for a certain length of time (in Switzerland it’s a calendar year, in Austria the shortest we could buy was for 10 days and in Slovenia the shortest period was a week)
• Toll booth with payment – this is the standard one that we’re used to in England; the same kind of thing as the Dartford Bridge or the Severn crossing into Wales. We experienced this with Austrian tunnels… we thought it a bit cheeky to be taxed with both a vignette for general motorway usage, then tolls for specific tunnels!
• Ticket and resulting toll booth – when you join the motorway, you take a little ticket, then when you leave the motorway, you put your ticket back into a machine (or give it to a person) and you’re charged for the distance travelled. We experienced this in Croatia and Serbia and this seems like the fairest method of them all.

When we set off on this adventure, we were determined to avoid tolls wherever possible, but from our little collection of vignettes, you can see that it hasn’t worked out quite as planned:

Actually, in France, avoiding tolls worked nicely for us; the route nationale roads are well surfaced and aside from taking you through the centre of little villages, they’re pretty fast. Switzerland was more of an issue for us; if we wanted to avoid tolls, we would have had to do lots of ups and downs. Big ups and downs. As it was, even with travelling on the toll roads, we had to do several large ups and downs, struggling to keep above the minimum speed limit on the motorways. Austria was a similar story with either toll routes through mountain tunnels and across the valleys on bridges, or non toll roads with ups and downs. We chose the tolls!

By the time we got to Slovenia, we had seen our first bit of snow and, wishing to avoid further snow, we opted for the fastest route… which involved taking toll roads. Then with Croatia, we had issues finding places to stop overnight that were close to each other, so we had to travel long distances in a relatively short period of time. Best option? Tolls.

So, are these tolls taking their toll? Did I actually make that awful pun? Maybe. Without retracing our route but missing out toll roads, it would be hard to calculate how much fuel we’ve saved by taking the direct route and avoiding long hill climbs. So far tolls have cost us roughly £116 … that’s a good couple of tanks of fuel. Is it worth taking toll roads? We think for now it probably is… but that might change once we’re on flatter ground once again and not running away from something!

Who would choose to travel around Europe in a motorhome in the autumn / winter? This is a question that we guess the countries in the Balkans have considered, choosing the answer to be “no-one”. Instead, I think they’ll find the correct answer is “mad dogs and Englishmen”… well, with a good heap of Welsh heritage thrown in!

Our plan, following a lovely time in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was to head south along the Croatian coastline; landscape that we have heard great things about. With wild camping strictly prohibited in Croatia (we found horror stories on the internet of wild campers being woken at 3am by armed police), we started scanning for campsites to stay at. There are plenty of them along the coastline… only they’re pretty much all seasonal… and closed by the middle of November! As we scoured the remainder of our planned route down through Croatia and Montenegro, then up through Bosnia + Herzegovina towards Belgrade in Serbia, we were struck by the scarcity of campsites or even overnight stopping points for motorhomes. Hmmm. Issue. We found this out the night before leaving Ljubljana!

This is the map showing camp sites in central Croatia:

(Map courtesy of campercontact.com; one of our main sources for places to stop, along with campingcar-infos.com and campingcard.co.uk)

A bit nervous about the coming few days, we chatted with our hosts about our plans (or lack thereof!) for the next few days. With a bit of local knowledge, we were given the details of a hotel on the Croatia/Serbia border which is friendly towards motorhomes, so we contacted them and they gave us permission to stay overnight in their car park. That’s a long way from Ljubljana though! With Kiri’s birthday wish being to stay on a campsite for a couple of days, we realised the nearest open one in reach would be in Ptuj, Slovenia, so we headed for a campsite there which is attached to a spa.

On the way we filled up with LPG for the first time since leaving the UK; Slovenia uses the Italian “dish” LPG adapter. It was pretty intuitive to use (screw the adapter in, put the pump in place, pull the trigger to lock it, then press the button on the pump to operate) which is a good thing, as all of the instructions were in Slovenian!

We had a lovely couple of days in Ptuj, including half a day soaking in the pools and steaming in the sauna, before the long push through Croatia – 366km in total. Now in a car, that doesn’t seem like a massive distance, but when your top speed is around 90kph, you realise that’s at least a 4 hour drive. We sometimes forget that actually the base vehicle of Bertha (a Talbot Express / Peugeot J5 / Citroen C25 van) was built to drive long distances each day. However, on the other hand, there is a “block of flats” built on the back (to use our friendly mechanic’s words!). She’s doing well though, and was happy to cruise at between 80 and 85 kph for the duration of the long trip.

This is the route we took through Croatia; driven in 1 day:

It’s a shame that we haven’t been able to experience the true beauty of Croatia this time; instead speeding(?!) through it on the motorway – we’ll have to come back in the summer at some point.

If we told you that “kje je” means “where is” in Slovenian, you would probably come to the same initial conclusion as us and think that the title of the blog post was asking where the toilet is. Not quite!

When we left you last, we were in Schwaz, Austria. From there we travelled to Salzburg (via an overnight stop in Germany, as that was the most direct route) where we had quite a drizzly wander around the city. The cold weather was beginning to set in and as we travelled south towards Slovenia, the snow on the mountains was creeping closer and closer towards our altitude. Suddenly we were in a winter wonderland in the midst of snow-covered forests and mountains. So much for us trying to avoid snow on this trip!

After all of that snow, we descended to a campsite by Lake Millstätter, where we endured an extremely windy night. As the only motorhome (and possibly the only campers!) on the campsite, we were rather exposed and sure that we might be blown away at any minute. When we heard what sounded like an air raid siren in the middle of the night amidst gusts that were rocking the van, we decided to seek safety in the main building until the winds had died down a little!

The wind continued as we travelled towards Slovenia, dying down by the time we reached Ljubljana and met up with our hosts for the week. Whilst in Slovenia, we have been helping the team at ZVEŠ; a society working with universities, encouraging open, creative and critical discussions about the bible. The theme of this week: “Kje je Bog?” – or in English “Where is God?”. During the week there were several events; a talk, a concert and a creative workshop, exploring some of the questions around this. Our task was to help publicise these events. The best way to get attention? Dress up a Danish person as God and wander around Ljubljana!

Kiri and I aren’t really designed for giving out flyers; we don’t have the confidence to strike up a conversation with random strangers, so we watched in admiration as we saw Slovenian students willing to stop and have a chat with those who were handing out flyers. “Where is God in suffering?”. “Where is God in creativity?”. Often the conversations started with the question of “Is there even a God?”. One thing that I’m loving about this trip is that it’s given me brain space to get back to the basics of my faith and do a bit of grappling.

The first event was a talk by (and discussion afterwards with) Stefan Gustavsson; a Swedish philosopher who led us through an examination of the apparent dichotomy of an all powerful and loving God and a world where there’s a lot of suffering. As a result of this talk, I think I’m going to add Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” to my reading list.

The other two events featured Andy Mayo; firstly an acoustic concert in Semafor; a cafe in the heart of Ljubljana. Andy’s a very talented guitarist and his music is raw and from the heart with some pretty thought-provoking lyrics. It was a great night in a student bar… made us both reminisce over our student days!

The second event run by Andy was a creative workshop; exploring what creativity is, what the tensions are within creativity, how to cultivate creativity and lastly where God might be within that creativity. This workshop also featured a couple of local musicians; Urban and Laura.

All in all it was a cracking week and it’s been great to settle in one place for a short time, rather than constantly being on the move. It’s also encouraged us that we might be of some use at the other projects we intend to visit!

Sadly our time in Ljubljana is now over and we’re hitting the road again; once more trying to keep ahead of the snow and cold weather!

Following our last blog post, we had lovely warm showers at the campsite near Interlaken the following morning, and as a result, decided to stay an extra night there as well. It might not have just been the showers that convinced us, but they helped. A little investigation (as a result of lots of help from friends in the UK) suggested that oil was probably getting into the carb through a breather pipe. but the clutch was ok. Placated by that news, we proceeded to have a lovely day in Interlaken; loving the stunning snow-capped mountains and appreciating the symphony of cowbells.

After another hot shower the next morning, we bought some engine oil (for our Swiss readers, there’s 20% off Mobil oil at Co-op Bau+Hobby), topped up, then set off to conquer Brunig Pass; the mountain road that would lead us towards Zurich. 2nd gear was required to get to the top, but Bertha climbed well and there were no signs of any smoke… at that stage. However, once past Lucerne we caught a whiff of burning once again, and spied smoke from the exhaust; clearly blue. This got worse and worse and the oil level was dropping, so we decided to take Bertha to a Peugeot garage. They fired her up and asked how long the engine had sounded like that… it didn’t sound any different to normal! Their reaction was that there might be an oil leak inside the engine, but they didn’t want to investigate, so they told us to top up the oil and get on our way. How encouraging… ummm… really?!

At this stage, our plans changed and we decided to head to Germany to see if any German mechanics would be willing to look at Bertha. However after a very long tunnel, which we polluted heavily with thick plumes of oily blue smoke, we conceded defeat, donned the mandatory reflective jackets, put the warning triangle behind us and called breakdown. I think the Swiss may have taken our smoke signals as a sign of invasion, but as they’re such a peaceful people, they just let it happen. I hope it doesn’t mean that we are inadvertently ruling Switzerland… only time will tell!

When the Swiss breakdown arrived, they took one look at the engine, said it looked terminal and asked whether we wanted to be taken to a Peugeot garage (which would probably be the one we went to earlier in the day… no thanks!) or their depot, prior to being sent back to the UK. A quick call to the UK breakdown people led to us being informed that we would spend the night at the depot, then they would decide in the morning whether Bertha would be repatriated or scrapped. Scrapped? Bertha? But she’s part of our family!

We didn’t sleep well that night, but began to adapt to the idea of going home; already planning how we would continue this adventure even if Bertha was condemned. The night brought heavy rain and hail, which dented Bertha a little, but not our resolve to fight against her being scrapped. And then the sun came out… in the form of Paschal the mechanic, who informed us that they would investigate the problem a little further to see if she could be fixed. To cut a long story short, a compression test revealed that all of the cylinders were sound (to everyone’s surprise), but a blocked air filter was leading to the carb sucking oil into the engine rather than air. With a new air filter and 300 Swiss Francs lighter (labour’s expensive in Switzerland!), we were off again; a little dazed and bemused by this turn of events

That afternoon we drove 80 smoke-free miles to Liechtenstein, where we stopped overnight in a stadium car park, overlooked by beautiful mountains. All for the princely sum of 1.50 Swiss Francs! The morning brought sunshine and although we were still a little nervous about Bertha’s health, we were able to enjoy the journey into Austria. We didn’t see much of the sun though, as we were mostly driving in tunnels. Lots of tunnels. And then a toll tunnel. And then more tunnels!

We stopped in Schwaz, just past Innsbruck, where we parked up for the night and had a little wander around the town. One thing we equally love and dislike is that our destinations are basically decided for us in terms of where we can park overnight. Without the limitations of finding somewhere to stay, we would have probably gone to Innsbruck… but then we would have missed the beauty of Schwaz.

So we’re on the road again and back to Plan A (carrying on south east), via Plan B (heading to Germany) and Plan C (being sent back to the UK). Happy times!

We’re on the road. We’re actually on the road. In Bertha. What a change of lifestyle it’s been as well; we’re only just beginning to settle into a routine and get our heads around how to travel, cook, eat, sleep and live in a 5.6 by 2.5 metre space. We’re rising to the challenge though and now have a daily routine of getting up, mopping up the condensation (our biggest enemy on the road!), getting dressed, brushing teeth, airing our bedclothes, having breakfast, reading our bibles, doing the washing up, then stowing things away and switching things off ready to drive. Oh, and checking the coolant level!

So, where are we, and where have we been so far? You may have been following our timeline, from which you will have gathered that we pretty much sped through France (sticking to the speed limit naturellement… as if Bertha could speed!) and are now in Switzerland. We’ve had some absolutely stunning driving days with amazing sunshine and although we’ve basically been staying in car parks that allow motorhomes to stop overnight (to keep costs down!), the views when driving have made up for it. Neither of us have driven a right hand drive car on the right hand side of the road before, let alone a beast like Bertha, but it’s surprisingly intuitive and already it’s feeling natural for us both.

As we’ll be going back through France a few times on this trip, our aim was to get the kilometres under our wheels as efficiently as possible and head south and east before the cold weather sets in. For this reason, we spent most of the days in France just travelling (as well as adjusting to full time life on the road); not stopping to take in the sights. We did make sure that we bought a baguette, some onions and some cheese though!

Switzerland has been an altogether different ball game. Yes, we’re still aware that the snow could come at any point, and we’ve had a couple of cold nights to suggest it’s imminent, but we’ve spent time taking it all in. We had an amazing day next to Lake Geneva on Saturday, wandering around the autumnal vineyards before a bread and cheese lunch with an incredible view of the lake.

Yesterday we worshipped at a church in Grandcour and were overwhelmed by the welcome they extended to us. We were a bit nervous about going to a random church in a small village and especially worried about the language barrier. As we got out of Bertha, we said “bonjour” to the first person we saw, to which she replied “Are you British?”. It turned out that she and her family were also British and have lived in Switzerland for 12 years. Not only did we then, very kindly, have a personal translation from French of a tricky passage (anyone fancy translating Revelation?), but we were also invited back to their house for lunch with them and some other friends from the church. We were really bowled over by such warm and inspiring hospitality; they even offered to wash our clothes for us (we hope it wasn’t because we smell!).

And how’s Bertha holding up? Well, she’s stayed dry so far. The waterproof mattress protector has made the world of difference on our bed over the cab. She’s also bravely chugged up some pretty long and steep hills; our highest altitude has been over 1000 metres so far. However, there have been a few suspect smells when she’s been climbing the hills, which we think may be signs that her clutch may be on the way out – we’ve got some investigating to do today!

If you’d like to know more details about our individual overnight stays or where we’ve topped up with fuel, we’ve also got a map of our route that we’re keeping up to date. For more photos, check out our KIST 2EU gallery