A short flight from Bucharest to Istanbul took us to Turkey. We joined a Luxury Escapes tour of the country that began from here. The first stop was the Shangri-La Hotel on the Bosphorus river. We joined our tour group and spent the next three days in Istanbul. This included a cruise along the Bosphorus river, which is the border between Asia and Europe. There were many mosques and palaces along the way. Istanbul is a city of mosques. There are more than 3,000 t...

We spent the last 7 days on our seventh and last road trip around Romania. We started in Bucharest where we took a walking tour with Florin, who gave us an honest insight into life in his country. Romania has never recovered from the hardships communism forced onto the people and as a result most people leave the country as soon as they can. Particularly skilled workers who can be paid up to 8 times more in other European countries, which they are free to tr...

We checked out of our apartment in Split and lugged the suitcases through the old town to the Car rental agency. We hired a Peugeot 508 for our sixth road trip since leaving home in March. We squeezed as much of our luggage and the kids luggage into the boot as we could and then piled the rest of it on top of the kids in the back seat. We drove for an hour to the Split airport and offloaded the kids and their luggage. It was then time for another goodbye. The ...

We had booked tickets for a ferry from Korcula to Hvar and we opened the email sent to us by the ferry company and followed their directions to where the ferry was to leave. There were a few other people there, but no signs anywhere indicating where the ferry was to leave from. Eventually Lidia walked over to the other side of the old town to a different port and found the ferry waiting there with a thousand people in the queue. She rushed back to us and we dra...

Our transfer picked us up at 10:00 to take us to the island of Korcula. There is a ferry direct to Korcula from Dubrovnik, but it only runs at 7:00am or 4:30pm and neither of those times suited us. The only alternative was to book a van to take us 2 hours along the coast to a town called Orebic and then a 20 minute ferry to Korcula. The ferry had two flights of long, steep, steel steps up to the lounge area and I had to carry the suitcases up there, one in each ...