La Grande Vadrouille ENG

For the past 15 days, we haven’t seen much of the sun. We’ve had rain—lots of rain—and wind too, a perfect autumn cocktail. So we did like the birds and migrated south! It's true that our options were also rather limited because of the geography. In southern Croatia and Montenegro, as soon as you move away from the Adriatic coast, you’re immediately in the mountains (real, serious mountains), and had we gone that way, we would have ended up in the snow. Even though we’re equipped for it, the predicted snowfall was quite significant, so we thought it wiser not to get ourselves into that. But the reason for our migration wasn’t just the weather and geography. It was also because we were tired of feeling like cash cows… We can’t say we are thrilled with our time in Croatia, and even less in Montenegro, where we stayed just a little over 48 hours. Clearly, they don’t want people like us, nomads traveling with their little house on wheels. From the €99 fine we got in Pula to some outrag...

At last, November and its grey skies have caught up with us. It seems you can't always get away with it. But this less luminous weather was a good opportunity to leave the coast and the sea for a bit and go see something different. So we headed east toward Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo. And if we were looking for something different, we definitely found it... The difference is visible as soon as you cross the border. The atmosphere, the scenery — we immediately felt that we had entered a different world. Bosnia is not part of the European Union and is also a predominantly Muslim country, so suddenly the minarets replaced the church steeples and we could hear the call to prayer. First culture shock...   Bosnia was also at the heart of the conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, a war that lasted more than three years, and 30 years later the scars are still very visible, both on the landscape and in the collective memory. We arrived in Sarajevo in the late a...

Hello everyone, it's the tourists! Because yes, that is what we are and also how we've been feeling these past few days. Unfortunately, tourist sometimes rhymes with "tourist trap". So as the tourists that we are, we go around to see the sights and we made a stop in Pula to see the very impressive and beautifully preserved Roman amphitheatre, that could hold up to 23,000 people😲. Now that deserves respect... We walk around the town, go for a coffee and when we get back to the place where we had parked our moving house, surprise!! We had a beautiful ticket on our windscreen of 99€!! 😱. We had paid for parking so we immediately contested it. Yes, we had seen the sign that it was forbidden for campers to park there, and in the middle of summer we would have likely parked elsewhere but since it is November, and since there was practically no one else around we didn't think it would be a problem. Clearly, we made a mistake there. We haven't paid the fine and are ...

That's easy, just go to Slovenia. But since we have some time on our hands, we decided to do this in a few days instead. Latest news were that we were heading towards Ljubljana, where we arrived on October 31st. And let's say it was quiet, really quiet. We expected the following day, November 1st, to be a holiday, (like in many European countries including France) but what we didn't know is that the 31st of October is also a holiday in Slovenia, it's "Reformation Day". By reformation here we mean the protestant reform. Which is somewhat strange as Slovenia is primarily catholic. But digging into this we figured out why. One of the major changes brought over by the protestant reform that took place in the 15th century (so very much tied to the invention of printing) was to make the Bible accessible to all, not only to clergymen. As it only existed in latin at the time, the protestants started translating it in many languages, including slovenian. And that is qu...