You know how they say you grow to look like your spouse? Well, I do not look much like Paul, apart from the fact that we are both very fair-skinned. He is slim and does not have much hair; I am not slim and have lots of hair! However, in terms of our taste in food we embrace many of the same likes and dislikes. Even when I met him, we both expressed a preference for fresh, black coffee; we both like breakfast tea in the morning and earl grey in the afternoon (the only difference being that I like my tea with a ridiculously small amount of milk in). He had to come to like my way of eating, as otherwise he’d have to offer to help in the kitchen. It is good that he is happy to let me get on with it, as I am very particular about how I cook food, and also love to have Radio 4 on most of the time whilst preparing meals. Naturally there are a few types of food that I do not like – mainly dried vine fruit,glace cherries, candied peel, pickled onions and green peppers. Paul is not keen on squashes, although I can get away with them in soup.
One issue that we agree on is that raw onion is vile, an abomination! Onions have to be cooked until they are sweet and melting. I never put raw onion in a salad (not even a little bit finely chopped my mother would ask?!) and am amazed at how popular it is both in recipes and in restaurants. Luckily Paul dislikes them as much as I do, and it is the only time that I come across as Mrs Picky; I will happily sit in a restaurant fishing pieces of the devillish food out of my salad. The pile that you see in the photograph above grew to about 6 times that size by the end of our activity! It is one reason why I really prefer to make my own salad. Having said that, the salads in Croatia have been really good and imaginative; there are options for just having salad for lunch, whereas in some restaurants in Spain and Italy I have come across, you would feel rather hungry just eating salad.
Anyway, enough of this negativity! Our holiday apartment is really beautiful and well-equipped, but I had not taken in that the cooking facilities would be quite basic; my own fault really for not checking more thoroughly beforehand. We have two electric rings, a kettle and a microwave. There is also a barbecue outside, which anyone in the 3 letting apartments is free to use. Our host family also uses it I believe. It seeems to work out fine. We have in fact only used it once so far, as the weather has been too hot for cooking outside even in the evening. Happily the temperature dropped from the mid 90s to the mid 80s a few days ago! The barbecue is built in with a chimney, and the fuel provided is paper and olive wood – both kindling and logs. I managed to get a roaring fire going and cook some chicken thighs (marinated in honey, mustard, olive oil and rosemary) and squid – marinated in chilli, rosemary and olive oil. I did cheat with the squid and just plonk a frying pan on the barbecue. See the pictures below of our small scale barbecue:
Cooking chicken, squid and a whole red peppper on the barbecue
Roaring barbecue burning local olive wood
To go back to the subject of salads, I love them in all shapes and forms, whether they be for a side dish or a light lunch. I am rather sceptical of people who say that they do not like salad. There are so many thousands of variations and recipes that I really doubt that anyone could dislike every single one. My own daughter is not a salad lover, but I can devise a salad that she will eat – it is just a question of picking ingredients that she likes, and steering clear of raw salad leaves, tomatoes and cucumber! I have made various salads in our apartment including the Italian bread salad in the picture above. I have actually made it slightly Greek too, by adding some chunks of feta. The salad is otherwise a simple mixture of stale bread broken into chunks and sauteed in olive oil (you could bake it if you have an oven!), fresh tomatoes in big pieces, rocket and fennel dressed with good olive oil and balsamic vinegar. If you have time to leave it to soak for a bit and for the bread to take up the tomato juices and the dressing, it will taste even better. Whatever you do, don’t put it in the fridge as it will not taste good when chilled! For this reason I always advise making this salad and indeed any salad containing tomatoes, soon before you are going to eat it; you don’t want to risk your salad festering in the warm weather! It is also therefore logical not to make a mountain of salad that you are not going to eat all in one go. Of course you may have to refrigerate the left-overs, or you can do as I sometimes do, and turn left-over salad into summer soup!
Sort of Salad Nicoise
I am quite flexible when it comes to adapting and changing recipes and embrace new flavours. There are lots of different toppings you can add to a pizza, some of them more successful and tasty than others of course. However, a dish that has a name that means something should, I feel, stick more ridgidly to the original recipe. For instance, I have a huge problem with the way that Caesar salad is presented in restaurants, but I’ll leave that for another time… (mainly because I don’t have the equipment for making the dressing in Croatia).
Another salad that I like to keep traditional is a nicoise. I think that the basic recipe should be along the lines of: new potatoes, green beans, lettuce. boiled eggs, tomatoes, olives, canned tuna and anchovies. I am not doing a huge amount of research into this, and there may well be slight variations, but for me the above ingredients work well. The above dish of salad is lacking in green beans. Should it traditionally have onions in it?! I have no idea, but it goes without saying that I’d leave them out anyway!
Other dishes that I have made in our apartment have been blackberry spoom (a great recipe I found in the Waitrose magazine for the month of August). It is a sorbet with added beaten egg whites. I used that for making some ice-cream sundaes, by layering the sorbet with bought vanilla ice-cream (too difficult to get the ingredients for that and I could also have done with a whisk!), fresh strawberries and blackberry liquer. See the picture below:
Ice-cream sundaes, but not in sundae bowls!
For lunch today I made a Spanish omelette and some Italian bread soup – another great way of using stale bread. I cooked fresh tomatoes, red onion, fennel, canned tomatoes, dijon mustard, fresh basil and rosemary and some chunks of stale bread. I added some water by filling up the tomato can a few times. When cooked I bashed it about in the pan with whatever implement I could find in the drawer. I served it warm, as there was no room in the fridge to chill soup. I think that warm soup is really pleasant on a summer’s day. The trick with limited cooking facilities is not to get carried away, and only aim to cook two different dishes for a meal. I am not used to using a microwave, but I have used it for cooking apricots and plums quite successfully. I have also heated up Paul’s morning pastries in it, although not entirely successfully. I did try heating them in a frying pan, but that seemed to be a rather slow process!
Hunting for my make-up and jewellery bags Why does my dressing gown have the wrong cord on it? All these cables, yet not the one I am looking for!
I love our long jaunts through Europe. Once you have crossed the English Channel, the world is your oyster, or your lobster as Paul always says. I am very lucky to be married to a man who does not mind driving me everywhere, frequently round the bend! There are very bendy, mountain roads on many of our routes! He even puts up with my rubbish navigating and we always end up in our hotel or apartment in time for dinner!
One disadvantage for me of living out of a suitcase for a few days, is the possibility of losing essential items, and muddling up my clean and dirty clothes! Paul never muddles his up – he has a system! It is often not until we get to our longer self-catering stop (anything from a week up to 3 weeks) that I finally establish whether or not items are lost, left in hotel rooms, dropped out of the car in a manic attempt to find something or were left behind in the UK!
So far this holiday I have managed to lose:
My laptop charger
Half a night’s sleep worrying about the laptop charger and wondering if I can get a new one delivered to our apartment in Croatia
My phone charger
My dressing gown cord
My beach wrap
My make-up bag
My jewellery bag
Filters for the aeropress
My credit card
About 30 euros
My glasses (actually not true – I just forgot to pack them!)
Portable chargers for the mobile phones as we have no USB connection in the car
A quick update:
Everything turned up apart from the beach wrap (left at home), filters (no idea! I do remember packing them so maybe they will turn up in the car in six month’s time!), the dressing gown cord (just spotted by Paul’s mother in her washing machine!), the credit card and the euros – my purse was either lost or stolen in Strasbourg, but thankfully it is less hassle losing a credit card than a ‘phone!
The chargers turned up but were worse than useless! Paul gets a selection of them free from conferences, so maybe we need to buy some better ones! The problem with not being able to charge the phones in the car is that we have long days of driving and inevitably the ‘phones don’t keep their charge that well. So it is touch and go whether or not we’ll manage to find our hotel/apartment at the end of the day!
Once we arrived in Kastel Novi (or Newcastle as we call it) I found another way of losing things, underwear and other items of clothing. We had a lot of washing to do when we arrived, and there is a washing line on the side of our first floor apartment, which you access from the balcony in the second bedroom. It is quite easy to lose knickers and other essential items with a little casual flick of the wrist in the wrong direction! Fortunately my knickers launched themselves into our hosts’ garden rather than onto the awning. However, Kathrin assures me that they have a broom reserved for exactly these situations! See the pictures below of the scene of devastion on our first morning:
Washing line with missing knickers….Phew! The knickers landed safely!
What is the most interesting item you have ever lost on holiday?
After last year’s very enjoyable tour of the Scottish outer Hebrides and my failure to enjoy a swim in the sea, we decided to head to sunnier climes this year. However, before heading to France for the start of our main holiday, we spent a few days in Brighton and Hove, keeping Paul’s mother company whilst his sister and brother-in-law took a well-earned break. I shall write this blog piece as a diary with entries every few days and post updates and photos regularly.
29th July – 1st August
Sadly for my readers, you don’t get to see a photo of me going for a swim in the sea at Hove on a sunnier day. I did go swimming in the sea twice, as Monday and Thursday were really beautifully sunny days. As I went swimming on my own, I took no valuables with me; Paul’s mother lives 10 minutes walk from the beach, so this is not an issue. Also, I don’t take selfies as they are so unflattering! So photos of me are always taken by other people. Paul was born in Brighton, but I am the fish in the family and really should have been the sea-born one in our relationship. He will not swim in the sea until the air temperature reaches at least 90 degrees.
The photo above is therefore from the Tuesday when I went into Brighton on the bus to do some shopping. I also wanted to have lunch looking at the sea; it was quite a blustery day, so sitting in the Palm Court restaurant watching the lashing waves was a sheer delight. I am so pleased that the powers that be acknowledged that local people refer to the Pier as the Palace Pier, not Brighton Pier. I suppose that Brighton Palace Pier is a bit of a compromise. The West Pier which is now no longer, has a beauty of its own. See the picture below:
Is that a boy or a buoy floating out there?
I just love Brighton, which is so vibrant and much more exciting than my own home town, Maidenhead, but being surrounded by family and friends as we are in Maidenhead counts for a lot. Whenever I go there, or indeed to any seaside town, I wonder why I don’t just make the decision to live by the sea! It is ever changing and is as appealing in stormy weather as in bright, sunny weather. For me though the best bit is immersing my body in the briny stuff. Brighton also has the best shops and restaurants too, so really it has it all!
Other activities undertaken whilst we were in Hove and Brighton included rescuing Jean’s milk from her failing fridge. Paul had already discovered on his visit the previous week that the fridge was not functioning properly, and had had to throw away some milk. Because of health issues, Jean eats very little, so there was not much food in the fridge, but of course we needed to have meals whilst we were there. I suggested that we should buy a mini fridge as a temporary solution until she could sort out a more permanent resolution to the problem of a fridge that was not cold enough. When I chose the fridge in Argos, I had not appreciated quite how small it would be! It will come in handy for future holidays, as it can also operate from the car battery. Anyway, I managed to cram some bacon and a pack of sausages in there, as well as some yoghurt and the essential milk. I am beginning to think I have bad vibes which cause electrical appliances to fail. Only a few weeks ago we had to replace our own, large fridge, as I managed to pull the door off one day and we decided it was not worth trying to get it repaired. Usually our dishwasher and washing machine need replacing with quite short intervals between the two.
We played a few rounds of Rummikub at the table one evening. Jean really enjoys board games. I love games, and luckily I am not of a competitive nature, as I usually lose the game.
On Wednesday Paul’s sister and brother-in-law returned from their holiday in Spain, so we met up for a coffee on Thursday morning and we went round to their house for an early dinner before heading for Newhaven for our late night crossing to Dieppe.
Friday 2nd – Sunday 4th August: Dieppe, Nancy and Strasbourg
Grand Hotel de la Reine, Nancy
We took the over-night ferry to Dieppe. We have used this ferry once before; it leaves Newhaven at 11:00pm and arrives at Newhaven at about 5:00am! We always take cabins on over-night ferries, but you do have to be a bit organised with this one. We like to have breakfast when we arrive in France, and it is just not possible to find anything at that time in the morning. Apart from anything, Paul has to get behind the wheel right away and drive, so some caffeine is really needed. This time we were prepared, and I packed up some croissants, a wrap and some fruit. Then I got up in time to dispense hot coffee into our insulated mugs. All in all the experience was a lot better than last time with a bit of pre-planning.
Paul had decided that after a short night’s sleep, we deserved a night of luxury, so he booked us into the Grand Hotel de la Reine in Nancy. That was quite a drive, and as usual my navigating skills were tested to the limit. We have settled on a routine with the navigating, which is to use road atlases most of the time, and resort to google maps on the phone when trying to find streets in a city, or trying to find the right road to get out of a city! This year I bought some new road atlases. We have one for France already, but I added to our collection: Germany (including Benelux, Austria, Switzerland and Czechia), Italy and Croatia (including Slovenia, Bosnia and Hercegovina). Bad as I am at navigating at times, I do love following the route on the atlas and occasionally making the right decisions about which road to take. I write down Paul’s suggested route in a notebook.
Anyway, I diverge. Back to the Nancy experience! The hotel is in the very grand Place Stanislas, with so many grand buildings (all from the 18th century) and with many golden gates. Our room was very luxurious and pleasant, although we did not have a view over the Place. We ate in the hotel restaurant, which was superb, although I could have done with some potatoes to go with my excellent beef fillet. Plenty of vegetables though, so full marks there!
Our hotel room
Should I offer to provide some translation services to the hotel? Place Stanislas in Nancy by nightSarah enjoying her beef fillet
It is wonderful having the opportunity to explore so many beautiful cities whilst we are on holiday. I often think that I have visited more noticeable cities in southern Europe than I have in the UK. We enjoyed looking round Nancy the following morning and paid a visit to the Musee des Beax Arts, which is one of the other grand buildings in the Place Stanislas. After lunch we continued on our road journey, heading for Strasbourg. This is of course on the border with Germany and is very Swiss and German in character. There are many wooden houses and buildings reminiscent of the Swiss alps. It was nice to have a little more time to be able to speak the native language; French is the only language I have ever manged to learn competently and retain. We stayed in a completely different style of accommodation in Strasbourg, and not as close to the city centre. However I would highly recommend the City Residence Strasbourg Centre if ever you visit the city. It was more of a hostel for backpackers, but so clean, spacious and well-equipped. In fact the shower was more modern and worked better than the one in the grand hotel in Nancy! Breakfast was included and was more than adequate. We only had a fifteen minute walk into the city.
Strasbourg CentreA walk along by the river
We had dinner in Strasbourg, then a good long time to look round the following day with stops for coffee, lunch and ice-cream. One minor incident in Strasbourg, which was silly and possibly unavoidable, was losing or having my purse stolen. I realised over lunch – of very delicious Tarte Flambe ( a local speciality) that it was missing. After lunch we rushed back to the cafe where we had drunk our morning coffee, but all to no avail. Luckily I had made the sensible decsion of carrying a minimal holiday purse containing just euros and one credit card. We actually had a reasonable number of euros, as we travel a lot so just save them from the previous holiday. So although it was frustrating losing about 30 euros, it was not a disaster. Paul dealt with the online cancelling of my credit card whilst standing by a fountain on the way back to the car. Oh the wonders of modern technology! You may be surprised to learn that since then he has entrusted me with his credit card, the other one linked to the same account….
Next stop, Friedrichshafen!
Sunday 4th to Tuesday 6th August: Friedrichshafen
The lake at Friedrichshafen with Switzerland in view
I am a water lover and love the sea best of all. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in a land-locked country; there are of course many in Europe, including Slovakia, Hungary, Luxembourg. Andorra, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Vatican City. I have been to Luxembourg, Andorra, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. It is highly possible that I have been to the Vatican City, having visited Rome as a very young child, but I’d have to check that with my mother!
Germany of course is not land-locked but it does not have much coastline. The beauty of Switzerland and of parts of Germany is the staggeringly beautiful lakes and mountains. Swiss people must treat their lakes as their places for watery leisure. Paul booked us into a guest house in Friedrichshafen in Germany for two nights. This is a beautiful town with the lake as the focal point; you can look at the other side of the lake and see Switzerland. Although we do take long holidays, we make a point of not staying long in expensive countries, so we enjoy the scenery of Switzerland without stopping there. For this same reason, we have not yet explored Northern Europe. In the future we hope to explore Norway, Finland and Sweden, but this can wait!
Our Guest House in Friendrichshafen
We had a very pleasant two day stay in this German lake-side village. I spent an afternoon swimming in the lake and walking along the beach. It really was like a beach, with lots of water sports and opportunities to hire boats and other equipment. Our guest house was very pleasant, but quite basic. Although the room was spacious, I felt that the owner was somehow missing a trick. We had a lovely balcony, but there were absolutely no facilities, such as kettle or a fridge. We really wanted to have breakfast on the balcony, but of course this involved going to the shop, having coffee dispensed into our insulated cups, and purchasing fruit and pastries to take back. Luckily there were a few good, small shops nearby, so this was feasible.
Dinner at Buchhorner Stuben by the lake in Friedrichshafen
We had two excellent meals in Germany. The first one was at a simple Italian restaurant close to our guest house. This might sound unadventurous, but it was getting late by the time we arrived and we needed a quick fix and for Paul not to have to drive much further. The second night I researched lake-side restaurants and made a booking online. Usually we don’t book restaurants on holiday, but the town is quite stretched out and I was really keen to find a location with good views of the lake.
As my daughter Jess has not joined us on our jolly jaunts this summer, choosing instead a jaunt with her cousins to Scotland, I have been having a little joke with her, seeing how many flamingos and cats I can spot and photograph for her. Flamingos we love, and we held a flamingo-themed 80th birthday party for my mother last year. Cats are just because we are a cat-loving family, and love seeing all the semi-wild cats in europe. Here are some flamingos I spotted in Friedrichshafen:
Next stop: Merano!
Tuesday 6th to Saturday 10th August: Italy (Merano, Udine and Trieste) with brief stops in Switzerland and Liechtenstein
Udine centre The view from our apartment in Trieste showing the fabulous ‘Eataly’ shop Driving through the mountains in Switzerland
Our lovely hotel pool in Merano
Before leaving Friedrichshafen, we purchased some excellent sandwiches, fruit and drinks from the excellent shop there. Paul had planned that we would be in Switzerland for lunch but did not want to pay for lunch out! This might sound crazy and stingy, considering how far we have travelled and how many meals out we’ll be purchasing. However, Switzerland is notoriously expensive, and it is on the list to visit when we are even richer! It also seemed like a novel, fun idea to take sandwiches to Switzerland. In addition, the mountains are fabulously breathtaking. However, I am ahead of myself here. Paul is trying to help me to visit a few more countries, as I am not very well travelled. We both filled in one of those ‘how many cities and countries have you visited on this list?’ games on facebook recently. Of course he scored about 60 and I scored about 30; I cannot remember how many destinations there were altogether. We worked out that the only way I can catch up with him is if from now on we only go to places he has already been to before! Anyway, we can both now add Liechtenstein to the list (not sure it was even one of the options on the facebook game!) Before you exclaim that this was a rather expensive stop, I hasten to add that we only paid for parking and two cups of excellent coffee.
We had a beautiful drive through the Swiss mountains, and enjoyed the German sandwiches immensely. We also managed to find some statues and landmarks commemorating ‘Heidi’ from the book by Joanna Spyri and the sequels by Charles Tritten. They were books I really enjoyed reading as a child.
Paul enjoying his German sandwich in Switzerland Sarah sitting by the Heidi statue Paul about to fall off the mountain
Being musical theatre enthusiasts, we planned to drive into Merano playing the relevant soundtrack from the musical ‘Chess’ so I made sure that we had the CD in place ready to play and sing along to. Our hotel in Merano was beautiful, a boutique-style hotel with excellent customer service and a very friendly German host. She welcomed us most warmly, advised on places to eat and assured me that I’d be able to use the outdoor pool before we set off on our travels the next day.
We drove into Merano and had a very simple dinner of pasta. It was actually pouring with rain, so we did not get much of a chance to explore the city centre. We did peer into the Therme hotel, which is modern and quite splendid. Through the windows you could see the amazing set up of the various pools and thermal treatment rooms.
This is all I have time to write at the moment, but watch soon for the update to include the rest of this section of our journey….
We spent 2 nights at a fabulous apartment in Trieste. The view from our window is in one of the pictures above. See below for a couple of pictures of the interior of our apartment:
This was one of those situations where we nearly came to grief trying to find our apartment. This time it was not just because of my inadequate map reading. We stayed in a number of hotels/apartments this holiday which were not obvious from the outside in terms of similarity to the picture included with the property details; this letter had included a photo of the seafront. There was no number or name on the building. In the end we had to find a space in the car park and then do some further investigating. Anyway, it was worth it in the end!
Once more I shall say, and I could bore for England on this subject, that not all people in the holiday letting business want to rip off August holiday-makers. We stayed in some fabulous places, some quite quirky. probably at an average of £100 a night, but some costing only £40 or £50 a night. Of course, with an apartment, you have the option of self-catering, so you can save on restuarant bills too. I decided to cook in the Trieste apartment, because we had eaten out for many nights, and it is relaxing just having a meal ‘at home.’ In addition, we had this wonderful shop just across the road called ‘Eataly.’ Having a wander round, your immediate impression would be that the prices would be high, but it really was very reasonable. Here is one of the meals that I cooked in the apartment, a simple dish of pasta with seafood:
We also bought delicious ciabatta sandwiches from Eataly, for a picnic by the sea, and for our onward journey when we left the apartment.
The only feature of the apartment I would fault was the design of the bedroom. For a start it had beautiful beams; yes very attractive, but hazardous for bumping your head on, which Paul did a couple of times! However, he might not have bumped his head quite as much had we not switched to sleeping at the ‘wrong’ end of the bed. I have a habit of getting up in the middle of the night at least four times to go to the loo. I also have to sleep on the right hand side of the bed, as I like to lie on my side but I cannot lie on my right side! Why not? I don’t know; maybe it is something weird in my genetic make-up but it is so uncomfortable that I just cannot do it. The other feature of the bedroom, as you can see from the picture, is that you can only get out of the bed from one side, without climbing over your partner. Hence we had to switch the pillows to the other end, and hence the low beam being particularly hazardous – I actually took the photo before we changed the bed round!
Whilst staying in Trieste we visited a castle by the sea and had the most beautiful walk. Because of the difficulty of parking the car in the high season, we had to park closer to the castle and pay for the parking; at this end of the beach swimming was not allowed, as it was a protected area. I had to ressit immersing myself in the water, and just gaze at its beauty. See the pictures below from our walk.
After our short stay in Trieste, we headed off on our exciting journey to Croatia. This was quite a challenging day, and we kept crossing borders and wondering what documents we might be asked for! Having been stopped in Switzerland a few days before and asked to show passports, driving licence and log book for the car, we were somewhat apprehensive. Paul had forgotten to pack the log book. ‘Well, how do we know you haven’t stolen this car?” demanded the Swiss police! What I was thinking, but did not actually voice out loud, was that car thieves very rarely bother to steal or pack a collection of dirty clothes, board games and a large collection of chocolate bars – the chocolate was even Lindt bars! Anyway, they let us go, but told us that in Switzerland it is the law to have the car lights on all the time.
To get to Croatia, we had to cross into Slovenia first, which meant going through border control twice. We had to wait an hour in the queue at border control, and were wondering if they would let us in without the car log book – would they also accuse us of stealing the car? Not that they would see many GB cars on the road, and most officials are initally confused by the right hand drive. I did actually spot one other GB car, which was quite exciting! Anyway, after establishing online with the DVLA that we could not prove Paul’s ownership of the car without writing in (the queue was not that long that this was a feasible option), we did manage to retrieve the insurance documents; the wonders of technology! In the event it was a bit of a let-down. Border control did not even open our passports; luckily they did not ask for any other proof of identity either!
I am going to start a new blog to relate the exploits of the Croatian leg of our holiday…..
