Buckets,Brushes and Broomsticks (Back to Breb)

Buckets, Brushes and Broomsticks (Back to Breb)

Most of our friends thought we were mad when we announced that this year we would be replacing our road maps, spanners, screwdrivers and bicycle repair kits with buckets, mops and toilet brushes. For three weeks instead of planning, testing, riding and/ or guiding mountain bike tours, we had volunteered to clean and maintain the showers, toilet facilities and hostel on a Romanian camp site. It may have been even more surprising for them to discover that it was my idea. Yvonne would claim that I don't clean very much of anything and even when I do, I don't do it properly.

Ah - but I'm always looking for new challenges and, let's face it, cleaning toilets is further outside my comfort zone than, say, cycling through the Caucasus or Kyrgyzstan!
To tell the truth both of us had our doubts but we did have a pretty good idea of what we were getting ourselves into. We had visited the campsite on a previous occasion. It is small and in idyllic surroundings. As far as we could recall the sanitation block and hostel were compact and in good condition. Oh, yes, and we knew that the busiest period of the year started about the time we were planning to move on!
Our recollections proved to be accurate enough except that the owners turned out to be even friendlier, nicer and more relaxed than we remembered. We arrived on a Friday evening, Saturday they insisted we should settle in, Sunday was our day off, so it was Monday before we started working!

When the season really begins, we were told, things can get hectic, the campsite can become (over) full and the facilities are stretched to the limit, needing almost constant attention. However, although the number of campers varied greatly from day to day, during our tour of duty it was generally not very busy. Our official working days involved about 1½- 2 hours of intensive labour, although we rarely could or would manage to work without interruptions; there would be somebody wanting a last minute shower, others wanted advice or directions, some stopped to chat about the weather, 'grandma' , the original farmer's wife who came with the property, wanted her chickens let out or a buckets carried. Our bosses, for want of a better word, were very strict, we were not allowed to work on our day off, nor were we allowed to do more than our allotted chores , sometimes they forced us to take an extra coffee break or drink beer and watch football with them in the evenings.! One day they even made us take an extra day off! We were encouraged to socialise, play music, drink palinka and generally have a good time with the other camping guests!

Yes I know it sounds tough going.....but it just had to be done!
A few things that did conspired to make life just a little more difficult.
Firstly a group of 4x4 enthusiasts from the Czech Republic who thought it was okay to clean their muddy clothes, boots and equipment in the showers. Then there was the weather, the second week it rained a lot, and often, turning the path to and from the sanitation block into a muddy slide...and thirdly, the owner himself, who insisted on mowing the grass during the drier periods so that the camping guests could have some creative fun decorating the floors with grass cuttings!

Before returning to Breb we wondered if it would have changed much in five years. Would this quiet, picturesque, unspoiled rural village  have become more of a tourist attraction. (https://onlyalso.blogspot.com/2018/01/breb.html) It is, after all, often mentioned in tourist guides. But we need not have worried, nothing much had changed. The village centre had not become a huge car park, in the weekend there were not coachloads of day trippers, and some of the old farmhouses had not been converted to gift shops or tea houses. There were still just three shops and none of them had any souvenirs or post cards. There WAS now a proper road sign on the main road pointing down to the village. There was a little more activity based around the one guest house in the village and a few more local farmers offering home cooked meals or selling jam and handmade craft.
One new initiative, across a field and up the hill from our campsite, was an al fresco bar & restaurant which opened the day we arrived, when the weather permitted we became regular visitors. After all the rain in the second week, there was the added attraction of wading ankle deep through a stream to get there. Which brings me to another thing that had definitely not changed. Our first visit was in late August, it had apparently been a long hot, dry, summer. After just two days it started to rain, heavily and frequently. This time we arrived in the middle of June. It had been an unusually hot and dry spring, it had not rained for six weeks but just two days after we arrived.............................