The Travelling Buncebury's

  covers 30 April - 6 May 2024 shopping in Kumanova, North Macedonia before crossing into Serbia                          Most of you will already know that we never really work out much of what we’re going to be doing on these trips so the whole thing tends to be less like having a plan than a concept. So after seeing the Bee-eaters, being mindful of the time we had left before our ferry from Dieppe and with nothing booked, we just headed for the border into Serbia. No difficulties, just straight through. It was our seventh different country of this trip and we knew we weren’t able to spend much time in Serbia if we were going to have any time in Normandy before catching the ferry home. Even so, our idea now was that in the event of finding a decent site we’d have a break day and not go anywhere. Luckily we did find a good site not too far into Serbia (Camping Enigma, oddly named as there was no code to get into the shower block) and we had a couple of quiet days. The owner

  covers 26 - 29 April 2024 a typical North Macedonian landscape, lots of trees and snow in the distance We’re now headed away north from Lake Ohrid for the mountains of the Mavrovo National Park, midway up the western side of the country close to the border with Albania. There is a campsite but even though the tourist office not ten miles away told us it was open, it actually doesn’t open until at least mid-May. This is where we stayed in the hotel car park when they told us the campsite was closed but that “we can sort something out”. A good spot for the night in a small car park nobody else was using, our own lockable bathroom and a hotel restaurant about 30 yards away for the equivalent of 15 Euros. How helpful is that. our hotel car park camping spot I haven’t yet mentioned how heavily wooded this country appears to be, with mountains rippling into the distance covered in a vast variety of greens from the different trees growing on them. The fresh green of newly

  covers 22 - 26 April 2024 across Lake Ohrid from our campsite at 07.30 and from the same spot 4 minutes earlier The omens weren’t suggesting the best of days for us when our electricity supply burst into flames as we were about to prepare breakfast. It had been raining heavily for most of the night and our power supply cut out about 07.30. I thought I’d seen a wisp of mist drift past and had got up to look when a German camper passing by said ”there are flames” as I opened our sliding door. Pausing only to don my waterproof coat and galoshes I leapt into action. Our supply was/had been via an extension lead from a house and where that and our plug were joined was definitely alight. I pulled them apart and once we were separated from the supply I was somewhat more relaxed. No toast for breakfast then although the pessimistic of you will realise that we might have been the toast ourselves if the fire had happened in the middle of the night. The converter lead we’ve