My poor ankles and feet were swelling from sitting at my computer in that heat, and trying to get them raised just added to the twisted position I had had to adopt, given the best layout of my kit. I had to sit-on a quadruple-folder thick towel in my swimming attire, and even ended up abandoning the decorum of the tee-shirt. Whilst the bottom half of my body could not be seen, and even though I had disguised my campervan office with an MS Teams background, when there were no more formal meetings, I had thrown caution to the wind removing the tee-shirt and who cares if I’m sitting there in a tankini top. I had thought I was safe with this, but it did cause the retired house-husband and acting butler of my colleague, with whom I am regularly MS-Teaming – the colleague not her butler – in the first instance to suddenly avert his eyes/nay presence when he caught a glimpse of me on the screen, to then deciding if you can’t beat then join and suggesting that he should take his top off when delivering the cups of tea/coffee.
Well, I worked the full 5 days this week but am not working next week so that I can be un-pressured in the long journey back.
The map told me that I shouldn’t do a stay at Lake Garda, as there were other places to visit on this trip as part of a more direct route home. My first main destination was approx 350 miles, so I was going to set off Friday after work and stop over at the campsite on the Mreznicki river again, thereby being able to leave early for Slovenia on Saturday morning and beat the border queues for the stamp in my passport.
No sooner had I made these plans literally yesterday, than a rare, in fact pretty (not a comment on how they looked 😄) non-existent, fellow sole traveller female from Germany invited me to join her for a restaurant meal in the evening. The restaurant meal would be the first such on this trip, and Claudia seemed nice based on one little conversation where I told her that the pitch opposite was better for the shade. Plus I do try to be open to unexpected opportunities…. but my journeying plans would need to adapt.
We spent a lovely evening together – although I was significantly germanly-challenged, as she didn’t speak too much English. And thank you my brain for presenting me today, having singularly failed me yesterday, with the words I wanted to say such as ’empfehlen’ – to recommend – as our conversation ranged across divorce – she similarly is, and has 3 adult children – 2 sons and a daughter, our jobs and trying to explain mine!!!. She is a physiotherapist and part of her work is therapy through horse-riding – she has a very gentle, aged ‘therapy horse’, lives in Villach, Austria. This was her first trip alone in the campervan she and her daughter own, and from today she is spending a week sailing round the islands with 4 other sole individuals from all over Germany, leaving her van at Trogir marina. I haven’t described all of this to underline the depth of the linguistic challenge in exchanging all this information, but more to record another interesting set of stories from random meetings.