4th to 6th May
Rovinj, Croatia to Silla, Italy via Muggia and the Tourne factory in Slovenia
Before heading further south we checked the latest developments in the “Parking in Greece” saga and decided that we couldn’t be bothered with it all. We’ll let it all settle down and go back to Greece another time.
Instead we’re going to explore a couple of the Med islands we’ve fancied: Corsica and Sardinia.
After a quick look on the Ferryhopper app, we sorted out a one-way crossing with Corsica Ferries from Livorno (on the west coast of Italy) to Bastia in Corsica in a few day’s time, leaving ourselves plenty of time for a few visits on the way. All very easy and stress-free.
We left lovely Rovinj and headed North, back up through Croatia and Slovenia to Muggia on the Italian coast – where we’d stopped before.
In the car park, our electric step (which have all been useless on our vans. They’re far too fragile and precious) decided to stop working and would not retract back into its body.
Luckily we have an on-board mechanic (Kelly!) who gamely got under the van and removed the whole step assembly.
Travelling on without a step would not have been the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought that as we were so close to the Tourne factory in Slovenia, we may as well try and get it fixed.
After a quick email exchange with the brilliant sales team at Tourne’s HQ, we were booked in for the following day, so we stayed overnight in the car park by the coast.
5th May
The next morning we trotted off back into Slovenia and to the Tourne factory in a town called Vrhnika.
It’s a big old facility and very modern. Not sure what we were expecting, but it wan’t this.
We were seen immediatly by Dani and had a “while-you-wait” fix carried out by a really nice older technician chap who definitley knew the vehicle inside out. Apparently the switch on the step mechanism had failed so he just replaced the whole lot.
In addition he noticed that our “whoosh-bang” side door wasn’t opening properly so he fixed that as well. Bonus!
New step in place, we headed off in the general direction of Livorno, stopping overnight in a sosta in Treviso. We didn’t get to see much of the place by the time we arrived so have added it to our ever-growing watch list of Places to Visit.
6th May
We’d been on the main (motorway) route before to Florence and as you pass Bologna there’s an option to take the “Panoramic Route”. Being in a smaller more agile van we thought “why not” and followed the signs.
It’s a beautiful route and far more interesting than the motorway. It takes you much higher so the views are lovely. We came across quite a bit of low cloud cover and some interesting tunnels. The road is smaller and a bit more twisty, but that didn’t worry us.
We decided to stop for the night in a small moutain village called Silla.
The sosta here is lovely. Small but tidy and only €12/night including electricity. There was one other van here as it’s a bit off the beaten track and that suits us.
Behind the sosta is a well-tended park and oddly an old fighter jet!
Meg got a good walk along the river and then we settled in for the night.
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