The majority of EU countries charged road tolls. Manned toll booths were not as common as they used to be – technology allowed electronic number plate recognition so, once registered, you were automatically charged for your motorway miles.
In most Eastern Bloc countries you had to purchased a vignette either on line or at a booth on the border. It cost us about €12 for ten days travel and each country required their own vignette. If you didn’t have a valid vignette you could be stopped by the police and fined heavily. I wondered why the UK didn’t use a similar system to charge foreign cars and lorries to use British roads.
From Poland our route south took us through Czechia and Slovakia where we bought diesel fuel for £1.18 a litre. We didn’t feel the urge to linger in either country. Folk didn’t seem geared up for foreign visitors and rarely was English understood. Had we been able to stay at a camp site we would have been welcomed by a host interested in tourism but all the camp sites were closed for the winter, although it was late October and 19°.
We stopped overnight in a town called Malacky in Slovakia in a public parking area adjacent to a busy duel carriageway. There was a long concrete footbridge that crossed over the dual carriageway and an adjacent railway track, the route to Lidl’s. As we walked over the footbridge we noticed a group of teenagers taking a well-trodden but hazardous shortcut by jumping the metal motorway barriers, running across the carriageways and on through a break in the fence before casually crossing the busy railway line. A train thundered by a few minutes after we watched them cross safely – we felt we were in a lawless country.
One pleasure of heading south was that it began getting warm enough for us to sit outside and relax in the evening sunshine – first time in six weeks. We were very comfortable inside the truck but much nicer to sit out and watch the world go by – especially with a cuppa or a glass of wine.
