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A Trip to Bulgaria
Driving in Bulgaria
This is an account of our holiday in Bulgaria which we took in August. We arrived at Stansted airport and we left the car in the long stay car park. After an uneventful flight we arrived in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria at 11:00 a.m. We picked up our hire car, a very smart Seat Leone an hour later. The instruction on the resort’s website was NOT to follow the directions as given in Google maps but to follow their directions and we would arrive at the resort (they confidently predicted) within two and a half hours. The instructions were not very long and seemed quite straight forward. We started off full of confidence and excitement in the blazing heat. The directions told us the names of the roads to drive down and names of roads to turn into. It didn’t take long for us to realise that none of the roads we saw in Sofia had names on them so we drove around looking for signs to towns I could recognise on the map we had. After one hour we were still in Sofia and a small white car shot into the roundabout we were on and crashed into us causing a large dent in our hired car. As the driver immediately shot off the roundabout there didn’t seem any point in stopping. After two and a half hours (when we should have arrived at our resort) we were still driving round Sofia. We eventually saw a sign to a Black Sea resort which was in the opposite direction to where we were going but at least it would get us out of Sofia. In order to get to the area we were aiming for we had to turn off the motorway we found ourselves on and cross a mountainous range. The road we then travelled up had the biggest potholes I had ever seen and I feared for the safety of us and the car. We eventually made it to the resort after nine hours of sometimes terrifying driving, thanks to the kindness of many Bulgarians who I accosted at every junction, waving the map in their faces to check we were going the right way. The resort staff were wonderful and full of sympathy for our difficulties. The next day one of the resort’s handymen pointed out that one of our tyres was in a terrible state. Again they were very kind and took us to a garage where we bought a new tyre and then changed our wheel.
Two days later we drove to the local railway station, went on a narrow gauge train journey up to the mountains, had lunch in a picturesque village and arrived back to our car. It was then we discovered that John had lost the car keys somewhere on the journey. Once again the resort staff were very good, picked us up in the minibus after a frantic phone call from me and brought us back. The next day the staff negotiated with Hertz explaining that we had got a large dent in the car, ruined a tyre and had now lost the keys of their car all within four days. Hertz brought a replacement car that afternoon. We had a few days of peace and then it was time to go back home. The flight was at 11:30 a.m., so we left our resort at 2:00 a.m., expecting the same trouble in finding the airport as we had experienced in finding our resort. In two hours at 4:00 a.m., we drove into the outskirts of Sofia and at 9:00 a.m., we were still driving round Sofia looking for the airport. The many Bulgarians in garages, hotels and shops we called into with increasing anxiety were all very kind, but as we didn’t speak Bulgarian and they spoke no English the directions they gave us were misunderstood by us. It was then I became hysterical being convinced we were going to miss our flight. I called for Divine guidance which came immediately in the way of a small still voice in my head, calmly and firmly telling me to find a taxi and ask him to lead us to the airport. I stopped the next taxi I saw and after exaggerated arm gestures and a few English words spoken very loudly he agreed to lead us to the airport and we arrived with an hour to spare. I quickly found the flight we were booked for and realised that something was wrong! We had left England via Stansted airport but the return flight was landing at Gatwick and our car was at Stansted. I checked with our boarding passes and confirmed that I had booked on the internet to leave from one airport and return to another without realising it. We arrived in Gatwick at 1:00 p.m., and our 8 day car park ticket ran out at 5:00 p.m. I then found out how good the infrastructure of London transport was. We tore through London on the Gatwick express to Victoria, Victoria line to Tottenham Hale and main line train to Stansted Airport and drove through the car park barriers with 10 minutes to spare.
So that was our experience of driving in Bulgaria. We will book up next year and we can’t wait...
Jean Wilson.