There's a lovely town on the Istrian coast that you might like to visit: red-roofed houses rising steeply out of the gorgeous Adriatic, winding up towards an imposing church tower. A classic southern European scene: at siesta time I wandered through the narrow, cobbled streets, where, high above, clothes were hung out to dry.
In between the clothes lines, I started spotting the signs. These weren't written in the local Croat or Italian, or even in German, though most of the tourists here are from Germany.
They were in English: 'For sale.' Forget souvenirs: some British visitors want to take home nothing less than the deeds to a beachfront home.
From A Year in Provence to A Place in the Sun, the idea of moving abroad is a long- established dream; who wouldn't be tempted to settle for good in a summer paradise?
But plenty of émigrés might be disappointed when they find the new neighbours turn out to be the Brits they wanted to escape from, and the tapas bar starts doing fry-ups instead. Or, as in Wales or Cornwall, to see that picturesque coastal village turn into a weekday mausoleum, populated for brief sunny spells by the visiting second-homes brigade, with the locals priced out of town.
Now we're exporting our domestic obsession with property ever further. One of countless websites helping the rush of buyers, pragueproperty.co.uk, advises that the market there is moving so fast that many of the homes advertised are already sold. Meanwhile, via visit-croatia.co.uk you can read that, while the homes for sale in many places have been snapped up, some predict a 300 per cent rise in prices in the next two or three years.
The key phrase that recurs is 'investment opportunities'. We seem to be less in love with abroad than in the grip of collective greed; a distinction masked by the slew of TV property programmes. Homeowners who made a mint on property here are now encouraged to do the same in every last unsuspecting corner of Europe - even before the paint was dry on the new EU signs.
While the Brits panic about a few more migrant workers coming to pick our veg, we swan over to occupy their best bits and rent them back out.
When Ryanair's French routes briefly looked threatened last year, you'd hear anxious reports of the plight of people who'd bought second homes in France. Is it just my stony heart that was unmoved?
How to drive away the lounger lizards?
In my Croatian hotel, the managers were taking proactive steps to resolve that age-old problem, the race to the sun loungers . The welcome pack warned that reserving a place was strictly verboten : 'Pool boys are instructed to remove the towels.'
Pressure off, I thought, but peering out at 9.30am, I was worried. By the time I got to the pool, it was like World of Leather, with drooping overtanned bodies spreading territorially everywhere. I wandered disconsolately round, before - miracle - finding one defiantly pristine lounger resisting occupation. For half an hour, I lay in the sun before being driven away by the Boris Yeltsin lookalike on the neighbouring lounger rubbing sun cream into his crotch.
Full marks to the hotel for trying: but this battle of wits goes on.
Hard cheese if you don't like it
A few weeks ago, I wrote about one of Greece's more underwhelming attractions, the Valley of the Butterflies, which features neither valley nor butterflies.
I felt it wasn't an experience I'd match in a while but I'd reckoned without the Museum of Slovenian Cheesemaking. On arrival, visitors are given a typed history covering five pages of A4 paper to peruse, including the alluring line: 'An important turning point in the history of alpine dairy farming at Bohinj was the year 1873...'
Can readers beat this? We'd like to hear of other attractions they should strike from the brochures: email us at escape@observer. co.uk.
· Gwyn Topham is travel editor of Guardian Unlimited
