, Author at BRIDGET THE MIDGET

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...

Dubrovnik

3rd July 20223rd July 2022 By roychinnorNo Comments

I am in a hotel in Dubrovnik and this is a photo of the lift I used on arrival. Sorry about a very bad pun, but it's been in my head the whole time I have been here, My claim to fame is that I was in Schindler's Lift! Glad that's over with so let's move on. I am indeed in Dubrovnik some 200+ miles from my last stop and probably the best known location in Croatia. In modern times, it came to international recognition in 1991/2 with the break-up of Yugoslavia. Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia and reverted to an independent nation in its own right as it had been from around 10th Century, until the second World War. The conflict was officially between the Croats and the Yugoslav army led primarily by the Serbians. The army at that stage included Bosnian and Montenegrins, as well as Serbian troops, but both Bosnia and Montenegro went on to declare independence themselves. First...