Gentlemen Adventurers: A little drive to Yugoslavia

Remembering a journey through Europe seventy years later

In 1955 when my father was a nineteen year old student he joined a group of five others to travel from England to Yugoslavia. They travelled by a second-hand ambulance, a vehicle chosen for its sturdiness. They camped at farmhouses along the way. Their journey, which took 24 days, had covered about 3,000 miles (just under 5,000 kilometers).

I recalled my father mentioning this trip several times when I was growing up and I recently had the chance to go through his photographs and souvenir postcards and talk about the trip. We also managed to contact the organiser of the trip - my father and Mivart had not been in touch for seventy years!

Lyon

the group sur la plage at Nice

Camping at a farmhouse near Venice

Crossing the border into Austria

Map of the journey: Cambridge, Dover, Boulogne, Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Fréjus, Saint-Raphaël, Mandelieu, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Roquebrune, Menton, Diano Marina, Genoa, Bracco Pass, La Spezia, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Venice, Trieste, Rijeka, Kostrena, Zagreb, Maribor, Graz, Vienna, Stadl-Paura, Salzburg, Walserberg, Munich, Bonn, Vroenhoven, Brussels

I wrote about the trip at https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2025/06/10/gentlemen-adventurers-a-little-drive-to-yugoslavia/

When researching the journey I was interested to learn about the many political changes occurring in Europe in the mid 1950s. My father recalled fronting up to borders in Austria and Germany with visas that were no longer valid because sovereignty had changed the previous month.