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Merv-IOM
Subscriber
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Messages
- 2,284
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Isle of Man
- Member No
- 2,034
- RV Type
- A Class
- Model
- Winnebago Journey DL 34 HD
- RV Experience
- Since 2011
The difference between the road condition in Poland and Czech was amazing! Poland, who's ageing roads can't cope with 44 ton trucks are dreadful but Czech national routes are smooth and wide – bliss!
We headed for a campsite at Roznov pod Radhostem, which is very much like Matlock – rivers, bars, restaurants, theme parks etc. A nice enough place but very busy so we decided to chill out and get the washing done – again!
After registering with the local cops (which foreigners are supposed to do), we wandered down to Brno – a lovely city, very friendly, clean but lacking in campsites. We stayed on one of 2 that we knew of, Radka, which is basically a sloping field with no services......great! What also made it interesting was that the exit/entry was at the top of the field and it rained and made the place very slippy. Luckily we parked in a spot where we knew we could get out should the field become boggy........which it did! It was, however, handy for the tram into the city – well worth a visit. One sad point is that we were 1 week ahead of the Moto GP in Brno – bugger. Rather than hang around though we've decided to go watch them and F1 at Jerez in Feb where they do their testing (much cheaper, less folks and sunny!)
The next stop was Bratislava, Slovakia on a city camp. I hope the Slovaks forgive me but the whole place is a dump. Sure there's a nice old town bit in the center but the rest of Bratislava is a sh*t hole – rubbish strewn everywhere and graffiti like never before. The campsite too wasn't much better either, rather like an abandoned farm. A shame really cos in it's heyday, we suspect, it would have been lovely. The one good thing about Slovakia is their vignette system. One reasonable price for all private motor homes, irrespective of size or weight (10 euros for 7 days) – the Austrians could learn a thing or two there......!
Enough said about Slovakia, we headed on to Komarom, Hungary and stayed on a campsite adjoining a thermal spa bath. Lovely jubbly, a couple of days wallowing in mineral rich, 35 degree waters....well that's what we thought anyway. After a couple of hours steeping ourselves in this 'healing', warm, smelly soup (along with hundreds of others), Sandra spotted what we thought was a toe nail floating by..........YIKES! Out we got and never went back again, not just because of the aforementioned toe nail but also because we couldn't stand the sulphur pong up or noses anymore.
Time for another trundle – this time to Budapest. We deliberatley drove there on a Sunday to avoid traffic and arrived at the Haller City Camp, about 3 km from the city center. It should have been called a cramp site as everyone was rammed in – unavoidable we suppose as it's a small place with massive turnaround in campers. We were lucky, yet again, to get a place on solid tarmac near an exit gate. The city itself is wonderful. People there are so friendly and helpful – quite different from the Baltic states, Czech, Slovakia and Poland where blatant staring at you is commonplace. The Hungarians are super nice, happy and even have a sense of humour!
Two full days of touring the city was well worth every effort though, it is very clean (not a speck of rubbish anywhere), no graffiti (one of my pet hates) and has some of the most spectacular buildings we've ever seen. In our opinion it is second only to Barcelona – that's how good it is.
From there we planned to stay around the Lake Balaton area, but we decided against it in the end as it was a national holiday and the place is locally known as 'the party mile'. Hmmm, we do like our peace and quiet so we re-routed to a small camp at Szigetvar, near Pecs. The site was empty, difficult to find, very clean but had a 3.0m high sign over the entrance. We are 3.8m! No problem for the owners, they kindly opened a gate for us at the other end of the field. Nice. We drove in, across the field to where the services were without a hitch. Sadly the heavens opened overnight and I thought we were buggered – the only way out was across the now sodden field.
Not unlike John Wayne in True Grit, I gritted my teeth and floored the pedal........yippeee we made it out and didn't need to change our under garments. Phew! The action can be viewed here:
http://youtu.be/zVlyantafOI
(Sandra's relief giggle at the end is the best bit).
Okay, from there it's Croatia! We crossed the border at Barcs and drove gently through the countryside on our way to Zagreb – where the nearest campsite was! A long drive, including through the middle of Zagreb (yes, rush hour) got us to the Auto Camp just south of Zagreb. Blast, it was on a motorway services – not our cup o'tea I'm afraid, both for security and noise reasons, so we drove another 60k to the 2nd nearest campsite, Slapic, at Duga Resa (ACSI). Nice and clean but very boggy after unusual amounts of rain. It's clay based too, so we stayed a couple of nights on a veranda pitch so we could escape again without fuss (not like some wobble boxes who nosed onto sodden pitches without a care in the world – numpties). They looked rather sheepish this morning, axle deep in mud, being winched out while we drove confidently past.
We are now at Plitvice Jezerce on a small stellplatz (Camperstop book) after a 100k drive through torrential rain and thunderstorms. Lucky enough again, we got the only hard standing space in the stellplatz. Tomorrow we plan to visit the nearby water falls etc in the national park and hopefully it'll stay dry (as it is now).
Tolls:
Apart from the bridges in Denmark there were none until we got to Poland. Sadly we were misinformed and didn't get a Polish go-box but we think we got away with it. Mostly we stayed on national routes and only encountered electronic tolls on the way from Auschwitz to Czech. Czech was another go-box, bought on the Polish side of the border. The box was £45 and we topped up with £45 worth of toll. From there, through Brno and down to Slovakia cost us £22 in tolls, so we were reimbursed £45 for the box and £23 in unused toll money. Slovakia, as I mentioned earlier, has a great system – a vignette for 10 euros (1 week) for all private motorhomes (no size/weight differences), just a sticker in the window.
Hungary has a similar e-vignette (no sticker required) and we paid £35 for a 10 day vignette (class B2 if anyone is thinking of heading this way). Croatia and Slovenia are toll booths so much easier.
Roads:
Sweden - the roads can be bumpy in the far north but the rest are wonderful.
Finland - are great
Estonia - appalling – like patchwork quilts everywhere. One main road we were on had road works where they had dug the entire tarmac away (both carriageways), down to the hardcore for about 10k – we all had to weave along this bumpy, muddy, rutted track dodging the odd bulldozer.
Latvia – bumpy roads again but an improvement on Estonia
Lithuania – not so bad, but some back roads are bumpy, again with millions of patches all over the place.
Poland – dreadful. All of them, dreadful and dangerous.
Czech – great national roads but the motorways are the concrete slab type – not normally bad but in Czech they've laid them all squint! It's like driving down a flight of stairs!
Hungary – very good, some patchy bits but generally quite good.
Croatia – ok thus far! Some back roads are rippled but the motorways are very smooth.
To be continued.....
We headed for a campsite at Roznov pod Radhostem, which is very much like Matlock – rivers, bars, restaurants, theme parks etc. A nice enough place but very busy so we decided to chill out and get the washing done – again!
After registering with the local cops (which foreigners are supposed to do), we wandered down to Brno – a lovely city, very friendly, clean but lacking in campsites. We stayed on one of 2 that we knew of, Radka, which is basically a sloping field with no services......great! What also made it interesting was that the exit/entry was at the top of the field and it rained and made the place very slippy. Luckily we parked in a spot where we knew we could get out should the field become boggy........which it did! It was, however, handy for the tram into the city – well worth a visit. One sad point is that we were 1 week ahead of the Moto GP in Brno – bugger. Rather than hang around though we've decided to go watch them and F1 at Jerez in Feb where they do their testing (much cheaper, less folks and sunny!)
The next stop was Bratislava, Slovakia on a city camp. I hope the Slovaks forgive me but the whole place is a dump. Sure there's a nice old town bit in the center but the rest of Bratislava is a sh*t hole – rubbish strewn everywhere and graffiti like never before. The campsite too wasn't much better either, rather like an abandoned farm. A shame really cos in it's heyday, we suspect, it would have been lovely. The one good thing about Slovakia is their vignette system. One reasonable price for all private motor homes, irrespective of size or weight (10 euros for 7 days) – the Austrians could learn a thing or two there......!
Enough said about Slovakia, we headed on to Komarom, Hungary and stayed on a campsite adjoining a thermal spa bath. Lovely jubbly, a couple of days wallowing in mineral rich, 35 degree waters....well that's what we thought anyway. After a couple of hours steeping ourselves in this 'healing', warm, smelly soup (along with hundreds of others), Sandra spotted what we thought was a toe nail floating by..........YIKES! Out we got and never went back again, not just because of the aforementioned toe nail but also because we couldn't stand the sulphur pong up or noses anymore.
Time for another trundle – this time to Budapest. We deliberatley drove there on a Sunday to avoid traffic and arrived at the Haller City Camp, about 3 km from the city center. It should have been called a cramp site as everyone was rammed in – unavoidable we suppose as it's a small place with massive turnaround in campers. We were lucky, yet again, to get a place on solid tarmac near an exit gate. The city itself is wonderful. People there are so friendly and helpful – quite different from the Baltic states, Czech, Slovakia and Poland where blatant staring at you is commonplace. The Hungarians are super nice, happy and even have a sense of humour!
Two full days of touring the city was well worth every effort though, it is very clean (not a speck of rubbish anywhere), no graffiti (one of my pet hates) and has some of the most spectacular buildings we've ever seen. In our opinion it is second only to Barcelona – that's how good it is.
From there we planned to stay around the Lake Balaton area, but we decided against it in the end as it was a national holiday and the place is locally known as 'the party mile'. Hmmm, we do like our peace and quiet so we re-routed to a small camp at Szigetvar, near Pecs. The site was empty, difficult to find, very clean but had a 3.0m high sign over the entrance. We are 3.8m! No problem for the owners, they kindly opened a gate for us at the other end of the field. Nice. We drove in, across the field to where the services were without a hitch. Sadly the heavens opened overnight and I thought we were buggered – the only way out was across the now sodden field.
Not unlike John Wayne in True Grit, I gritted my teeth and floored the pedal........yippeee we made it out and didn't need to change our under garments. Phew! The action can be viewed here:
http://youtu.be/zVlyantafOI
(Sandra's relief giggle at the end is the best bit).
Okay, from there it's Croatia! We crossed the border at Barcs and drove gently through the countryside on our way to Zagreb – where the nearest campsite was! A long drive, including through the middle of Zagreb (yes, rush hour) got us to the Auto Camp just south of Zagreb. Blast, it was on a motorway services – not our cup o'tea I'm afraid, both for security and noise reasons, so we drove another 60k to the 2nd nearest campsite, Slapic, at Duga Resa (ACSI). Nice and clean but very boggy after unusual amounts of rain. It's clay based too, so we stayed a couple of nights on a veranda pitch so we could escape again without fuss (not like some wobble boxes who nosed onto sodden pitches without a care in the world – numpties). They looked rather sheepish this morning, axle deep in mud, being winched out while we drove confidently past.
We are now at Plitvice Jezerce on a small stellplatz (Camperstop book) after a 100k drive through torrential rain and thunderstorms. Lucky enough again, we got the only hard standing space in the stellplatz. Tomorrow we plan to visit the nearby water falls etc in the national park and hopefully it'll stay dry (as it is now).
Tolls:
Apart from the bridges in Denmark there were none until we got to Poland. Sadly we were misinformed and didn't get a Polish go-box but we think we got away with it. Mostly we stayed on national routes and only encountered electronic tolls on the way from Auschwitz to Czech. Czech was another go-box, bought on the Polish side of the border. The box was £45 and we topped up with £45 worth of toll. From there, through Brno and down to Slovakia cost us £22 in tolls, so we were reimbursed £45 for the box and £23 in unused toll money. Slovakia, as I mentioned earlier, has a great system – a vignette for 10 euros (1 week) for all private motorhomes (no size/weight differences), just a sticker in the window.
Hungary has a similar e-vignette (no sticker required) and we paid £35 for a 10 day vignette (class B2 if anyone is thinking of heading this way). Croatia and Slovenia are toll booths so much easier.
Roads:
Sweden - the roads can be bumpy in the far north but the rest are wonderful.
Finland - are great
Estonia - appalling – like patchwork quilts everywhere. One main road we were on had road works where they had dug the entire tarmac away (both carriageways), down to the hardcore for about 10k – we all had to weave along this bumpy, muddy, rutted track dodging the odd bulldozer.
Latvia – bumpy roads again but an improvement on Estonia
Lithuania – not so bad, but some back roads are bumpy, again with millions of patches all over the place.
Poland – dreadful. All of them, dreadful and dangerous.
Czech – great national roads but the motorways are the concrete slab type – not normally bad but in Czech they've laid them all squint! It's like driving down a flight of stairs!
Hungary – very good, some patchy bits but generally quite good.
Croatia – ok thus far! Some back roads are rippled but the motorways are very smooth.
To be continued.....
