Into Slovenia

Wednesday 1st June

A dry day, but unfortunately, still very cloudy.  We were leaving Al Lago this morning and needed to use the service point to empty our waste tank and fill up the fresh water.  There's one of these service points at (almost) all campsites so that motorhomes can drive onto a concrete area with a drain in it and we (the royal we, that is) open the dump valve under the van to release waste water down the drain.  I'm describing this because you can imagine that although one hoses it down afterwards, it isn't a place that you hang around longer than you need to.  But this morning we realised that there was a small van sitting there for rather a long time and we were waiting to use it.  While John was emptying the loo - that's a completely different operation! - I went to speak to the (German) owners of the van.  They were happily sitting in their van drinking their breakfast coffee(!) so I explained that we needed to drive onto their bit of concrete to use the water services there.  They said that the 'chief' said they could stay there for 2 nights (they'd arrived in the storm last evening), but seemed completely unaware that this was not a camping pitch - but they soon understood my gesticulations and moved off.  We thanked them very much, but we hope after we left, they found somewhere a bit more wholesome to finish their breakfast.

We were soon driving on the motorway that would take us out of Italy and into Slovenia.  We needed to buy a vignette to drive on Slovenian motorways and these are available at service stations in Italy.  However, the one we stopped at only had 1-week permits and we need longer than that, so just bought a baguette and carried on to the border services and successfully bought a 1-month vignette.  We won't be staying that long, but that's the next length of time you can get. 
 
Just 10 minutes later, we arrived at our first campsite on a farm just east of Nova Gorica, near Sempas.  We were warmly greeted by the owner (don't know her name yet) who spent half an hour telling us and a Belgian lady all about the area and marking places on maps.  This evening when we were washing up, we met her baby son Ricardo. She was feeding washing into the drier and she stood him in the top-loader washing machine so he couldn't escape!  He has the most gorgeous smile - hope we see him again tomorrow when he comes home from kindergarten.