KurtMeyer:
I have a lot of questions and I have put them on the page itself. Please add to the thread here if you know the answer to the questions.One of the questions I have not been able to work out is the location of the restaurant on the Yugoslav/Bulgarian border which was in a river gorge and had a Douglas DC-3 Dakota parked next to it. Can anyone remember where this was and on which route ? I was with a seasoned overland driver and we seemed to stop at all the major watering-holes along the way, so I imagine this was one.
Hello Kurt, thanks for sharing your story about your hitch hiking days down through Europe and the Middle East, I found a lot of the information that you wrote about very interesting.
I am sorry to see that you haven’t had much response to all the questions that you have asked but hopefully some of the old guys, sooner or later might read your post and give this middle east thread a bit of a boost.
As soon as you mentioned the Douglas Dakota DC-3 I thought to myself, yes I remember stopping there on a couple of occasions in the early eighties.
It had a large parking area and I seem to remember that there was a two inch water pipe coming out of the hill and filling up a stone horse trough so it was an idea place to stop and have a wash. I never walked up the hill to The Dakota which was supposed to be a restaurant and if you drove past the layby fast enough you wouldn’t expect to see an aeroplane parked on a hill so there was a good chance that you might of missed it.
As far as I can remember the layby was only about five miles from the Bulgarian border post at Gradinje on the right hand side heading East and at the back of my mind there was duty free ‘Dollar Shop’ across the road.
So today I have been doing a bit of research and I am fairly certain that this is the layby where the Dakota was used as a restaurant. If it’s not that layby, then there is another layby about half a mile along the gorge where the railway bridge crosses the road. Sadly I can’t find where the duty free shop was and every where now looks overgrown with trees. Obviously, the building which might of been the restaurant after the Dakota was taken away and the tyre garage were not there in the eighties so I wonder where The Dakota ended up ?
The only photo that I can find at the moment is one that was put on Trucknet a few years ago by one of David Duxberry’s drivers and looking at the place on Google Earth I am beginning to wonder if there might of been another Dakota that was parked up somewhere else near a popular watering hole which Middle East drivers used to use.
Hopefully somebody might remember more than I do and put me right if this is not the same place but it’s a start.
google.com/maps/@42.978461, … 312!8i6656
This might bring back one or two memories, not many just one or two.