May 2017

We spent our last couple of days in Italy on the beach just chilling out. One highlight was, when returning from the restaurant in the evening, we found a small crowd of Italians standing and admiring ‘Stavros’ (our caravan for the uninitiated!)  They noted our approach, and a large lady beamingly shouted out, pointing at Stavros “Bella, bella, molto bella!” We felt quite proud, as other than admiration when using the motor movers, we hadn’t realised how special he was! Our ferry to Split departed Ancona at eight in the evening, so we set off in plenty of time to check in by six. WeRead More →

We were off from Genova bright and early, and hit the motorway for our five hour drive to Bologna.  The roads here are much busier than in Spain, with lots of wagons, none of whom seem to pay any attention to the speed limit!  When you’re towing a caravan and a wagon overtakes you it creates a bit of a vortex, so that you’re momentarily dragged off course, and unless you’re aware all the time you veer into their lane which is a bit disconcerting for all concerned!  Add to that they have a tendency to slipstream you until the very last minute before pullingRead More →

Our previous ferry journeys had led us to expect comfortable accommodation, good food and facilities. Sadly the inaccurately named Fantastica’ wasn’t! It was rubbish; dirty, run down, poor food and indifferent service. It was also late!   We eventually docked in Genoa around 90 minutes later than advertised, so didn’t get to our chosen site until almost seven in the evening. Things picked up after that though.  the people on the site were great, and whilst it was another ‘no toilet seat/paper’ location, it was clean and very well organised.  We had a slight blip with the electricity, but the hostess explained that the connectionRead More →

I signed off last time saying we were taking the overnight ferry from Barcelona to Genova that evening, a forty five minute drive up the coast to the port. We were due to check in at 9 o’clock but as the English guy on site suggested it might be busy we decided to set off at around 7.30 to give us plenty of time. It’s a good job we did. We had gone less than a mile before we encountered our first ‘incident’. The road was blocked by cars in both directions and we realised there’d been an accident as there was a motorcyclist inRead More →

We’ve spent another couple of days in Barcelona this week. On Wednesday we took the bus again and went on another walking tour – this one run by Sandemans, who had been the sponsor of our first tour in Lisbon. Our guide was Andreas Jennngs, our first non native guide on any city tour. He’s from New Mexico in the USA (cue lots of references to Breaking Bad which seems to be their biggest claim to fame!) and prior to being a guide he was an international trainer of air traffic controllers, and is a closet England football fan. He proved this by showing meRead More →

We has a walk into Sitges on Sunday night, about 2 km from the campsite, three quarters of it along the promenade. We were informed by the Londoner who escorted us to our pitch at Camping Sitges that Sitges is the gay and lesbian capital of Spain, and he suggested that we avoid it during the day at the weekend, advice we decided to follow. However it was still pretty busy on Sunday evening, as apparently this is Mother’s Day in Spain, so everyone was treating Mum, and Granny to something! Monday morning saw us on the Barcelona bus at 10.30 from right outside theRead More →

Typically, as soon as we had dropped Ginny and Pete off at the airport the sun came out and for the first time all weekend we had beautiful blue skies. Feeling a little bit bereft and homesick we parked up and walked along the harbour to find the ferry port. The directions were minimal/nonexistent but this was mainly due to road works on the approach road and no one had bothered to signpost the detour. Anyway we satisfied ourselves that we knew where we were going later and headed back into town for breakfast, which soon cheered us up. I should mention the freshly squeezedRead More →

This edition of the Ellis Blog is kindly donated by our guest reporters, Ginny and Pete.  All the opinions expressed in this edition are theirs, and theirs alone, and no responsibility is accepted by us! As Ryanair flight FR2486 came into land at Ibiza airport there was applause before the wheels had touched the ground from all but the oldest in the plane (us) which was then accompanied by the Ryanair fanfare. Are we mad going to this party island or will we find another side to this isle? We left the airport to be greeted by two lithe and tanned folk with familiar andRead More →