One of the things that I noticed during our recent tour was that urinals in European toilets are, on the whole, so much more technologically advanced than our own British ones. Mind you, I’ve never had to manually flush urinals in the UK, which happened a few times on the continent. Ours tend to be flushed, en masse, on a timed basis, whereas ones in continental Europe (even the recent EU-joiners like Slovakia) tend to operate using the automatic sensor, per-urinal-flushing method. Read more...

Tim writes: OK, so we’ve been back for 10 days or so, and the blog still hasn’t caught up with the paper diary we kept during the trip. That will change, hopefully quite soon. There has been quite a lot of catching-up to do since we got back, plus Kathy caught a flu-like bug after only two days back at work! To whet your appetite, there are some more photos in the photo gallery.

Arrived in Graz around 7pm and checked into the campsite that had a HUGE swimming pool which had closed the day before!! 14.09.04. Got up early and got the bus into Graz. Kathy’s bites were no better, very angry and red, so finding a doctor was the priority. Went to the tourist information for help and then had to visit the health insurance office in the hospital to show an E111 and get a voucher. Read more...

It had started raining during the night so we packed up the van and parked it next to the laundry room so we could do some washing. It felt wonderful to get clothes clean and pillowcases, everything smelt so fresh and lovely, especially after it had been tumble-dried. We did a grocery shop while the washing was on: yoghurts, mustard, fleisch salat for Tim, muesli, oranges and nectarines. We were glad to leave the campsite as it was a bit depressing although hard to put your finger on why. Read more...

A well deserved sleep saw us getting up at 10:30am and rushing to pack and leave by 11am. It was a fantastically beautiful day, clear blue sky. Shortly after leaving we got a right shock when the roof of the van flew up, Tim had forgotten to close the catches that keep it down! Well it was his job! So we stopped speedily and did them. The land was very flat and the views were beautiful. Read more...

We got up early and prepared for our day trip to Bratislava. We had originally planned to camp there but had read that the campsites were ‘grim’. As it is not far from Vienna we changed our plans and took the train there instead. We got to travel on a double-decker train into Vienna centre! The journey took about an hour and a quarter, including a fifteen minute stop for border control / passport checks. Read more...

Buongiorno tutte! We drove all the way to Lake Maggiore, arriving about 8pm. 300 miles in one day: quite a tiring trek, really. It was starting to get dark, so we stopped at the first campsite we found. It was right by the lake, but we couldn´t see a lot in the dusk. In the morning light we found that the site wasn´t that great, and Kathy was suffering with an allergic reaction to mozzie bites, so we left post haste. Read more...

Got up and packed the van in a hurry, got the 9am bus back into Venice and visited the church Santa Maria della Salute and the church Santa Maria Gloria dei Frari which was really impressive. There were lots of large paintings (it was like a gallery) and 2 huge tombs, one that of Titian (he’s a painter, if you don’t know). Checked out of the campsite at noon and headed towards more Alps! Read more...

After heading into Bologna for some last minute essential purchases — sun-dried tomatoes, parmigiano, porcini and fresh figs (yummy) — we set off for Venice. Arrived at the campsite at about 2:30pm (it took a bit of finding); we settled down, visited the supermarket and then chilled out in the sunshine. Had a bit of a lie-in before catching the campsite’s private bus at 12:30pm. Arrived in Venice at 1pm and wandered around the bus station for a while a bit unsure as to where we were supposed to go. Read more...