We're back! Again!

Keep it short, do it often – that’s the way to write a blog, apparently. Oops. Brevity has never quite been my forte and that this is my first post in about three years shows that when it comes to accepted wisdom, I can as usual be found furthest from it. It will therefore be no surprise to anyone reading this that I have decided to pick up my ongoing Montenegrin am-dram more or less in the same vein that I started out...

February is a pretty predictable month. In the UK, it rains. On the continent, it snows. In Montenegro, it rains a lot. It is, in short, a less than ideal time of year to drive across Europe in a Landrover pulling a 2.2m high wooden hot-tub in a trailer bought for £150 off off ebay. A month after being in a road accident that you were very lucky to survive…

First, a brief summary of the last three years, where blogging for once took a back seat to the real life pursuit of our life change. We finished the house. We quit our jobs (again). We had a baby (it’s in the contract, all renovations/grand designs must be punctuated at the least opportune moment by the patter of tiny feet), and then had our first half season running activity tours at Lake Skadar in Montenegro, using our renovated house, Villa Miela, as our guest accommodation, which went quite well. We spent one winter in the UK, Emma working, me looking after little Freddy. Emma quit her job for a third time. In 2012 we came back out to Monty for our first full season, which went brilliantly, ensuring that we would not need to work over the next winter at all. We enjoyed relaxing at the lake and at our place on Vis.

IT'S TIME FOR A MONTAGE...

Amazing house, amazing guests, amazing that we got this far, really...



In January 2013 we came back to the UK to visit family and friends for a few weeks, and to get our old blue Landy, Boris, MOT’d so that we could continue to drive him all over Europe (at the time of writing, importing an older car to Montenegro is hellishly difficult and expensive). In the January slush, two Mercedes drivers decided to lose control on Norfolk’s A11 and effectively write off Boris, who was smashed front and back. Emma was hit by the second vehicle as she was heroically racing to get Freddy out of the car, and wound up with 7 inches of sliced thigh (Fred and I were amazingly uninjured). We then had to spend 4 further weeks sorting out all the insurance and finding another Landy (red this time), who in a flash of political inspiration we decided to call “Ken”.

RIP Boris. Thanks a bunch, Mercedes drivers.

Not a great start to 2013, then.

So now the hot-tub. Our 2012 guests were awesome, but following the season we realised that what the villa really lacked was a pool, or rather, a way for guests to cool down on site as opposed to in the numerous waterfalls, natural pools and of course the lake that featured heavily in our activities. After quite a lot of on-line research, I discovered that the cheapest solution was to buy a wooden hot-tub that could be installed above ground and also used as a plunge pool in summer (if proper filtration was used). The snag was, you couldn’t buy such a thing in Montenegro. Germany, however, was a different matter. You name it, the Germans make it, and make it properly. A swift “suche” auf den Internet later and I found a company that made lovely tubs from Siberian larch for a very reasonable price. The issue was transportation. Getting the tub from Germany to Montenegro was likely to cost half as much again if using a third party, and that was before you got to the thorny issue of exactly how much you’d be charged to import the tub itself into the country. As the German factory was just south of Stuttgart – and therefore on my way back across Europe – I decided to save us a large sum of money and collect the thing myself instead.

Yeah, I know.

The trailer was a rusting hulk I bought off ebay for this one-time only journey and then stored at my uncle’s until we’d found our new Landrover following Boris’ unfortunate demise. I’d carefully calculated that it was big enough to carry the hot tub, purchased a number-plate and had repaired its lightboard so that I was fully legal, and set off from Sussex in the rain for Dover. Ken was full of other stuff too: 2 more inflatable kayaks (we already had 6 out in Monty), one magimix, loads of kitchen odds and sods, new bedding, childrens toys and soft furnishings like lampshades that were simply not buyable in Croatia/Montenegro. I had bought and fitted Ken with a nice new roofrack (although not as good as Boris’), and had planned my cross-continental journey to the hour. I had, this time, thought of everything.

I should have checked the trailer’s tyres.

Waiting at Dover for the delayed ferry, I made the first of several planned checks to discover that one tyre was going flat. When I tried pumping it up again, the tyre’s entire valve pinged off and the tyre collapsed completely. When I tried inflating the spare (yes, I had made sure I had one), the pump broke, and I was due to board the ferry in 2 minutes. It was not the most auspicious of starts.

I called Emma, who was still at my mother’s house, and was due to fly with Freddy to Ljubljana three days hence to meet me. The vague plan was for us to travel together down through Croatia, hoping that we could procure some transit documents that would enable us to stop off on Vis for a week or two before continuing down to Montenegro with the rest of our belongings, which were still on the island. I know, I know. Ever the logical one, Emma found out there was a Norauto in Calais that might be able to help (Norauto being the French Halfords), and thus it was that I spent my first hour on the continent limping off the ferry at 20kph with my hazards on, letting the satnav guide me into town in the hope that the French could prove quicker than a Kwik-Fit fitter.

Norauto was shut.

There was some swearing at this point. I had to get to Saarbrucken that evening and it was already 1pm. What was this, some sort of typically gallic lunch-break where they shut the whole store and sat out the back smoking Gitanes and moaning about the 35 hour week? Angry, I barged into the nearby Carrefour and bought a new foot pump, resolving to fit the spare myself. I was on the point of screaming with frustration, the spare turning out to have more holes in it than QPR’s defence, when Norauto’s workers unexpectedly wound up their steel shutters and flicked their sign over to “ouvert”. I practically raced into their garage. Did they have a 145/50 R10 tyre they could fit on this stupid Englishman’s trailer? They did not. They had only a pair of 155s that would not fit inside the trailer’s wheelarches. I grabbed a spanner and bent back the mudguards, freeing up another 5cm of space. Would they fit now? The Norauto blokes laughed at me, and said they’d give it a go. They were better than their word – the new wheels went on and I was at least saved from total disaster – but it was already 3pm by the time we were done, and I had 400 miles still to cover.

Now, I’ve driven across Europe in February before, and if there’s one thing you can count on it’s that you will get caught in a blizzard at some point. Unfortunately for me, that point was just a few hours later. I trundled down the motorway, whimpering in fear as the trailer slewed about behind me, all road markings hidden by snow and with visibility in the dark down to about ten metres. By the time I reached Saarbrucken it was gone 11pm, and I was a gibbering wreck. What the hell was I doing? What if it was like this the whole bloody way? I’d die. Death would have a little word with himself and think, well, I let this bloke off last month, but he seems to really, really want to snuff it in a Landrover, so maybe I should oblige him?

Fortunately for my life and my sanity, the next day was clear and bright and the Germans proved a good deal more adept at clearing overnight snow than their British counterparts. All I had to do now was head to Kettenacker and pick up the hot-tub and its woodburner from the lovely people at www.sauna-badetonne.de. They were expecting me, but even so, my appearance did prompt some head-scratching. Had anyone ever come to collect their own tub, I asked as Uwe and Silvia helped forklift the tub and burner into the trailer and onto the roofrack respectively. No, they said – and certainly not in a trailer as “kaput” as the one I had brought along. Uwe merely chuckled and shrugged when I asked him if he thought I would make it to Montenegro. Silvia whipped her camera out and took pictures (“in case you make it, so we can tell other people it can be done!”).

Uwe and I lashed the tub down with several ratchet straps. Silvia handed me the export documents, telling me that these would be good to get me as far as the Slovenian border. Once I was over the border, she said, well, I was on my own.

“You might get twenty days for transit,” she guessed, as of course they had never known anyone try to cross Croatia with one of their products before. “That’s what seems standard when our trucks have to transit through Switzerland.”

The truth was, I had no clue what to expect at the Slovenian/Croatian border. HMRC, Croatian customs online and various googling had inexplicably failed to produce one previous instance of any private person trying to do what I was about to attempt, and next to no advice on what the proper procedure was. In the meantime I had to use all my concentration to keep the Landy at a steady 45/50mph so that the trailer had the smoothest ride possible. Rather disconcertingly I had to stop twice before I’d even reached Slovenia to replace snapped ratchet straps after being alerted to hot-tub wobblage by other motorists, but once I realised this was because the straps were getting frayed on the trailer’s rusty bodywork, some judiciously placed cardboard seemed to do the trick. Munich, and then Ljubljana were reached with a minimum of fuss, and Emma and Freddy were likewise gratefully retrieved for the big day: crossing into Croatia and seeing if we could a) get through and b) stop off on Vis en-route.

At the Slovenian border, my export documents were scanned – this meant I’d get back the MwSt (German VAT) that I’d paid back in January but from here on, I’d be making things up as I went.

My first foray into the Croatian customs building was not terribly productive. Various uniformed men and women sat behind glass partitions and either shrugged at me or ignored me completely when I asked – in Croatian – how I could get transit documents. When I did manage to get one lady to reply, she told me brusquely that she did not know how to help me and suggested that I drive to the border with Hungary instead (!). Undeterred, I went back outside and got Emma and Freddy to come into the building. If ever you have a paperwork issue with stubborn and unhelpful bureaucrats, I can highly recommend using your adorable toddler as emotional blackmail material. Eventually I was directed to a different counter, where – wouldn’t you know it – it turned out there was a chap working in the customs office who could procure my transit documents after all. Funny that.

€150 later, we were finally into Croatia. The downside was that we had been granted only three days to get across into Montenegro, so there would be no stopping off at Vis - I’d have to drive for a 6th straight day all the way down to Montenegro after we’d overnighted in Split. With Freddy watching endless episodes of In the Night Garden on our headrest DVD player (best invention ever, if you have young kids) and Emma’s legroom somewhat restricted by the bolt on air-conditioning unit Ken had had fitted at knee level across the front dash, we just about survived the infamous swirling winds of Sveti Rok and arrived at our final hurdle, Montenegrin customs, sometime around 4pm the next day.

This is what happened at Montenegrin customs.

And so it was that we finally rolled down into Herceg Novi, stayed overnight with the ever wonderful Jack and Hayley and the next morning pottered another 100km to finally arrive at Villa Miela, which was miraculously intact and undamaged (we had had break-ins the previous two winters, where a few things got pinched and the doors got a little bashed up). This was in part thanks to the new alarm we had installed, but also I suspect due to our leaving the keys in the hands of one of the local boss men, an influential villager with whom we are now on good terms. Twas not always thus (he was one of the guys who tried to get our wall knocked down a few years ago), but allegiances tend to shift along with necessity out here.

We’d done it.

Now, how exactly were we going to get the hot-tub over the wall…?