Club Motorhome Bloggers

Another quick update - there is likely to be another in a day or two when we plan to stop for a bit in a campsite (!), not least due to it being rather warm.  We are in Leszno, Poland where last night it was 39 when we arrived at 17.00 and still 31 when we retired at 23.30, so rather a warm night!  All is going well for us; the 'tooth' (now gone!) hasn't been too bad, but my cheek where the tools bashed me has needed a bit of care when eating toast and cereals!

What with it being hot, I haven't downloaded any photos for several days, but will do a catch-up when we stop - we have a plan for a site just into Germany - probably tomorrow.  Then I'll post some up.

We decided (with some regret) to leave southern Poland for another time, as we felt the distances, times and toll charges would make it a bit pressured - and that's not the isea at all, so after leaving Warsaw we are slowly working our way towards Germany - whether we go to Berlin or not will depend on the temperatures - not if it's going to carry on being over 30 - that will be another one saved for later!

We are now in Gdansk. It is a beautiful city, and we would not be here had it not been for our (Polish) dentist recommendung it to us before we came away.  Earlier today we went to Malborg - site of he biggest brick castle that has ever been built, and very impressive it is too. We are doing our best to understand the history of Poland and its neighbours - we have got as far as understanding it has been 'turbulent'.  There are advantages to living on an island!

No photos yet, as I haven't had time to sort them out, but a request:

At the moment we are only sure of three or four people following our blog, so maybe we are doing it mainly for our own amusement?!  If you are reading our blog can I please ask you to add a comment to this post, or maybe send us an email (if you have ours) - then we'll know if we are just talking to ourselves or not - thanks :-)

The first thing we noticed on entering Lithuania was that the roads had gone back to the surprisingly high standard which they were in Estonia - in contrast to those of Latvia, which were most pretty awful.  Where did the money go, we wonder?

We went to the Hill of Crosses

Lithuania is a mainly Catholic country (unlike the other two Baltic countries which are Lutheran protesant, or in the case of Latvia, mainly nothing!).  This place is important to the nation and was started in the 1830s after oppression by Czarist Russia.  They were all 'hacked down' by the Soviets in 1960, 'bulldozed' in 1973 and again in 1975, but they kept coming back.  In fact it continues to grow, mainly with the many cheap crosses sold at the site, and now hung in 10s of thousands on the larger crosses - this last aspect being, in our view, somewhat tacky, and taking away some of what the place is really about.

Riga is a much larger city than we had anticipated. The suburbs began 10 miles outside the city centre. The city has many fine buildings, those in the old town being best maintained, but continuing well outside there are many classical buildings – give it a few more years and no doubt the whole city will be covered with fresh paint.

The freedom monument

It's been a while since we have found a wifi, so here, at last, is an update. It's a long one this time, so hope it has some interest; most of the stories are in the pictures.

We have now in Latvia on our way to Riga.

In Estonia we have visited Tallin

Well, no-one can accuse us of sitting on our laurels! 

After quitting the job in Cornwall we were a bit down, but mainly because of sitting back and reflecting over the recent events. Although we were bucked up a bit by comments by friends and fellow members of Club Motorhome and also offers to park up on their drives should we need somewhere - Huge thanks to all! Caroline got back onto the internet and looked at couple of campsite job finder type websites and found a likely looking position in Norfolk of all places, so ideal for seeing the family before we do eventually head off into Europe again.

I telephoned the site and had a chat with the owner who sounded very positive and he subsequently emailed some details of the job to us. I returned our CV and said that we would be interested should they wish to interview us.

Nothing more happened for a day and we thought that was it - but no worries, we'd just go and see the folks and forget about work for the time being.

As we were packing to leave the site our mobile rang and it was the Norfolk site owner saying that he was pleased to offer us the job and gave us a start date and an invitation to visit beforehand to look around and iron out any queries that we may have.

A long, tedious and thoroughly boring story about matters so petty you wouldn't believe led us to the point of saying 'Enough!' on Friday - so I won't go into minor details.

We're very fortunate to be doing this work by choice rather than necessity otherwise such an outcome would have left us in the lurch. We've actually enjoyed the job as previously posted and haven't minded helping out with whatever jobs were necessary to make the campsite work properly. The problem has been in the form of one of the other workers who is known to be a moaner and somewhat of a difficult character. Unfortunately we have had to share our duties with this person and have been regularly undermined in our efforts.

This culminated in an official (friendly) meeting to get the matter sorted over a cup of coffee and biscuits, at which the other party (and husband) walked out in a huff refusing to discuss any issues. Management were appalled apparently but not prepared to make any further efforts to resolve the issues.

Anyway, rather than continue to work in an unpleasant atmosphere which basically casted a cloud over this otherwise lovely environment we decided to be the ones to quit as the others were more senior and solidly installed in the warden's lodge and obviously weren't affected by their own behaviour - I guess we gave the management an easy way out.

We've been offered the opportunity to stay on 'camped' as long as we like but we've felt a couple of days is long enough and we're moving on tomorrow - a burden lifted!