We’re Balkan Fam: a family of travellers, and most of the time you’ll find us in a camper somewhere in Europe.
There are four of us: two parents and two girls. Mom is the strict one, making sure teeth are brushed, hair is done and the right shoes go on before anyone steps outside. Dad is a total “daddy’s little girls” softie: a princess dress in the snow, no jacket, no problem. And when somebody catches a cold, guess who ends up on nursing duty.
Part of our story starts in Canada, and that shaped how we see winter. On 20 January 2025 we set off across Bulgaria and headed south for Greece. People thought we were a bit mad. But honestly, a January day in Greece feels like June back in Canada, and that was the whole idea: empty beaches, soft light, and nobody else at Marble Beach on Thasos.
That first stretch set the tone for the next five months or so. We followed the Enipeas Gorge up from Litochoro under Mount Olympus. We soaked in the hot springs at Thermopylae and Edipsou, and we’ve chased warm water ever since, from the Pozar baths to the steaming pools at Rupite. We rode bikes through Athens, took a little boat into the caves at Diros, stood beside the old shipwreck near Gytheio and looked up at the monasteries of Meteora. Then the road carried us through Bulgaria and Romania, across Austria, down through Italy, Spain and Portugal, up through France and Switzerland, and into Croatia, and it all wrapped up on 12 June 2025 with our flight home to Toronto.
Camper life isn’t glamorous. It’s laundry in strange places, hunting for water and a spot to sleep, the stove giving up at the worst moment, and finding a new playground in a new village every few days. It’s also the best way we know to be together. We wake up somewhere different, cook simple meals and slow down enough to notice things.
This blog is where we keep those days, honestly and in order, the way they actually happened. We write about the places that made us laugh, the meals we still talk about and the odd nights that didn’t go to plan. When a spot really earned it, we’ve left a Google Maps review as Balkan Fam, and you’ll find those linked in the posts.
Thanks for being here. Come follow along on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. There’s always another road coming up.