So disappointed that our Albanian trip has been cut short.

8.9.22

Our alarm was set for 7 am, we’re all packed and off to the the ferry port which is just 6 minutes away.

The tunnel was scary and so were all the dodgy looking guys. They’re going to recruit us into their drug gangs. 3 different men asked if we’d booked. Other cars turned up hoping to park and had to turn round.

The guys weren’t dodgy at all, we do have a reservation, we got charged what they quoted and got the correct change.

It was organised chaos with heartstopping moments while getting the cars on.

How John manouevers is beyond me. I’d have had to ask them to park for me.

One poor woman had to climb out of her motorhome window 😂😂😂

The ferry runs just once a day, at 9 am, we were a little later leaving due to all the kerfuffle, but left before the other ferry, Berisha.

As promised the scenery was incredible. It’s described as the Albanian version of the Norwegian Fjords. I read about someone yesterday who ended up taking 400 photos. I limited mine as much as possible.

As the morning went on we warmed up. People were very wrapped up, it certainly was chilly, but we’ve not even so much as brought a hoodie to Albania!

3 hours flew by, then getting the vehicles off started. We felt so sorry for the guy in the middle van, everyone was watching with their hearts in their mouths.

Another couple of cars and it was John’s turn, it was very close! I was too busy counting the centimetres to take a photo but here’s the next guy to give an idea.

It was amazing and we’re happy we made the journey to the Albanian Alps.

A lot of people go to Valbona from here to hike through the Alps to the mountain village of Theth. I’d love to do this on our next visit. they recommend organising it over 3 days so we simply wouldn’t have had time.

The SH23 is a tad bendy, 3 hours of bendy to our next location.

The road was very good, no pot holes. It was unnerving as there’s a few photos of people who have died along the route.

Our fabulous day then turned into a bit of a nightmare. An email from Air Albania saying our flight on 12th September is cancelled. 😭

I looked online, 7 seats remaining on 11th. By the time I got through to a miserable woman with zero compassion there was only 1 seat left. She wasn’t going to be pushed to put us in business class no matter how much I complained, so we have to fly back at 7.30pm on 10th.

The next issue was our Turkish Airlines flight to get home. This was originally 8.50 pm on 12th but re-scheduled to 0130 on 13th. As I had never accepted this change I was able to change it to the 11th with no extra cost.

We really don’t want to leave early but so happy that we got to all the places on our wish list. I’d even googled buses and trains and other airlines to try and get back to Türkiye. No mean feat going round bends and I really needed coffee.

We stopped eventually for coffee, re-evaluated the map and decided to just find somewhere to stay and do our planned activities tomorrow.

Instead of using booking. com we just turned up at Vila Livio and were welcomed by the owner and lovely dog Bobby. The owner gave us a large jug of water with lots of ice in it. We took it upstairs, scooped out the ice cubes and used them for very large glasses of our fake Baileys. Ahhh, thats better.

We went off in search of food, very limited in this small rather strange town, Rreshen, loads of Kafe Bars but just one restaurant serving pizza and hamburgers, which we rounded off with ice cream, not crem caramel sadly, but vanilla caramel. We feel under pressure to eat as much ice cream as possible now as we have so little time left in Albania.

It was sad to see the news that the Royal Family all made their way to Balmoral as the Queen was very ill, and to subsequently read that she passed on. We’ve never known life without her and will be very odd having a King. She worked tirelessly to the end. She had met with new PM Liz Truss just a couple of days ago.

We sat outside for a while playing rummicub. The owner proudly gave us a little glass of his home made rakı to try. It literally took your breath away. Then he produced a dish of the extremely sour red berries that are floating around in the rocket fuel and insisted we tried them. We told him the Queen had died and said we would raise our glasses to her. However hard we tried we couldn’t drink it. As soon as he was out of sight John tipped it away behind the bar area.

Had to almost run off to bed quickly before he could give us anything else.

Rest in Peace Your Majesty.