Sunday night, EURO 2016 final, France-Portugal, and Her Ladyship is having hot flushes with the excitement – in spite of the fact that we’re watching the match on HRT2.

Monday was a lazy day – I think the Oldies needed to recover from the overdose of soccer – but the next day there was a flurry of activity. Much as I’d like to believe otherwise, there’s no doubt now that we are preparing to move on, blast it! My owners are indeed planning to drive up to the Czech Republic as I’d suspected. The caravan is all packed up and hitched to the new (second-hand) car which His Lordship bought especially for touring. Farewell beautiful Adriatic! It breaks my heart to leave…

Haha! I can’t help it, but I’m having a serious bout of schadenfreude: we’d only driven about 70km and weren’t too far past the border into Slovenia when we broke down! And guess what? We’ve been towed (caravan and all) into Koper – on the Adriatic coast, I might add – and it looks like we are going to have to stay here for a couple of days. I can’t believe my luck. An extra two days by the sea!

Koper is wonderful. It is a large and busy port – I could just stand and watch the cargo ships being loaded and unloaded all day long. Fascinating. Further along the coast, closer to the old town centre, there is a beautiful marina and beach and the locals are out in force, swimming, walking, cycling, rollerblading, eating ice creams, watching street (or, in this case, harbour wall) performers. The atmosphere is wonderful.

I can tell that, much as they may be loath to admit it, my owners are enjoying every minute of their enforced stay here.

Day two: the Wingless Wonders spent most of the afternoon exploring the old town centre, partly still displaying its former glory, partly crumbling but still charming. The Oldies were pleased to see that there were bookshops everywhere; I was intrigued by the profusion of hairdressing salons. There was a ‘Frizer’ on practically every corner, or so it appeared to me. You humans are badly designed. With a few nicely oiled head feathers like mine, you could be spared all that trouble and expense.

Later that evening, my owners felt the need to walk off their pizza and shrimp risotto, so we set off along the seafront, enjoying the beautiful evening light. Map Man led us a merry dance: he misread a map in Koper and declared that Izola was ‘only just around the corner’, then ‘only just around the next corner’ and so on. We never actually made it into Izola. It was getting dark as we arrived on the outskirts of the town so we had to turn back. By the time we arrived in Koper we’d covered about twelve kilometres, the feet were throbbing and Herself was giving Himself a hard time about his map reading skills. But a couple pints of ‘Laško’ soon put all that to rights.

I fell in love with Koper. A real gem of a town and not at all overrun with tourists. A must visit in my book.

Hang on, if you lot all go there, then it will be overrun with tourists. Scrap that last bit.

Whatever you do, don’t go to Koper. You won’t like it at all.