JUST LIKE HOME, ONLY DIFFERENT Croatia, Saturday 22^nd October

Now we know why windsurfers and kite surfers love this peninsula.

Thursday afternoon, I’ve not long finished my last blog post and the sea turns a funny murky green. The sky in the east goes dark and we think it best to unhook the van from the electric supply.

We’re used to the occasional thunderstorm in Lairg and have weathered a few good-going gales, but it feels different inside a van on the edge of an unfamiliar bit of coast. The pine trees next to us grow at odd angles, like the ones in Harris. This should have given us a good indication of what the weather can be like here.

The first fat raindrops bounce off the van and I think, ‘Oh good, the rain will bring the wind down.’ But it doesn’t. During the afternoon, everything intensifies, lightning flashes and thunder booms overhead. The hillside above the van runs with water, loose rocks and pine cones rearranged into long channels.

Flora, Hector and I fall asleep reading stories in the big bed which is actually quite a small bed if you are taller than 5ft 4. I’m not, but Sam is. The upshot of this is that Sam sleeps diagonally across the bed and so to be entirely comfortable, I would need to be about 3ft 2. The noise of the rain on the van is deafening. Sam finishes another Icelandic crime novel on his Kindle. I text Tommy to see how the boys are getting on and he replies with a message saying it snowed for a couple of hours in Lublijana that morning so busking has been postponed for the time being.

It’s so windy we’re reluctant to open the side door. When we do, the effect is like being in a wind tunnel: my hair stands on end and loose bits of paper and baby wipes get sucked into the vortex. Rain is finding its way into the van. Our map of Europe, glued to the inside of the side door, is wet through and looks a hundred years old.

We make sock puppets to entertain Flo and Hector. We drink some wine out of melamine cups decorated with cartoon animals. We marvel at the tenacity of the Austrians and Germans camped out on the tip of the peninsula in caravans and campers, buffeted by the full force of the gale. We marvel again when they take to the water the minute the rain stops and the thunder passes. Hardy lot, the Germans. And contrary to what I might have expected, they’re not young-uns. They’re middle-aged windsurfers, in their fifties or older. We feel like land-lubbing wimps. Sam says he would like to be a beach bum and do a bit of kite surfing but we fear he has missed the boat because he didn’t buy a pair of man-sandals in Germany.

Friday is sunny again, but still windy. Sam spends all day working on the brakes. By the time it gets dark, the work is done, the van is back together again. We eat a weird mix of couscous, cabbage and soya mince for supper. Happy.