Road Trip to Varaždin

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Lesson Learned: McDonalds, they are everywhere. From the time when I worked for McDonalds (my first real job when I was 16) till today, I’ve always thought McDonalds produced a very pedestrian product. This ranged from their frozen beef (so they claim) patties, to the caulk-gun condiment dispensers, griddles large enough to sizzle 100 patties at a time, frozen potatoes, and computerized drink dispensers. This will be the first restaurant to deep six humans in favor of robotic grill masters (in my opinion), so that they can sell trillions of burgers, they are already half way there today. Bad food is what we deserve if we patronize its producers.

Croatia has swallowed the McDonalds marketing bait hook line and sinker. Kids love this place. If you enter a McDonalds and find it empty, be assured there will be 200 12-year-olds in there before you leave. The food? Its even worse than you’ll find in the US. The fries taste the same, but everything else defies common dining sensibilities. I gave ‘em a try, and I’m done with the international version of Mickey D. We also found them to be expensive compared to other low-cost eateries, as well. It is sad that this is the part of America that has taken seed in Croatia.

Regrets: Not really a regret, but I wish the weather would turn nice. This is day 3 that Zagreb has been cool and rainy. We’d like to get out and take a hike without sloshing through mud wishing we’d packed a heavier jacket. Every time we land in a country the weather is great. By day three, the clouds roll in and we are involved in full on sweater-weather. Even in Egypt, who would have expected rain and cool winds blowing in off the Mediterranean? We only had one sweltering afternoon in Luxor, everything else was London cool.

Go-Date: Day 81, Saturday. April 13

After too long in the city we start to develop a case of City Fever. City Fever, much like its better known cousin Cabin Fever, and niece Island Fever is just nature’s way of telling you its time for a road trip. It is often brought on by extended periods of crappy weather where you don’t care too much to wander around the city streets.

We decided to hope up the road to a little town called Varaždin. In a lot of Croatian words there are odd characters such as a couple of dots above “a’s” or in this case a “carrot” above the “z”, but I’ll be damned if I could find out how to do that in MS Word so I did a cut and pasted out of Wikipedia. Varaždin is a nice little town of about 50,000 people with a medieval town center anchored by a castle and lots of old churches and public buildings. Croatia, like Egypt, has a church/mosque on every damn corner. The town was founded in 1181, which is about 630 years (give or take a few years) before anyone hung up a city limits sign in Alexandria, VA….and I thought that was old. In the 12th century the Ottomans were hassling the locals, so they built a castle with a moat and draw bridge and all that Prince Valiant kind of stuff, which is pretty interesting, even if they’ve drained the moat.

In 1756, the Ban Ferenc Nádasdy chose Varaždin as his official residence. He became the king of Croatia, and Varaždin became the capital of all of Croatia, so it used to be a big deal in these parts. We were told that not too many tourist visit the town because everyone heads directly to the coast, especially Dubrovnik so they can visit the film site for Game of Thrones (King’s Landing). The Reformation and the counter-reformation periods had a great influence on Varaždin and a lot of churches and other buildings were built in the Baroque style.

It was a fun little trip and the roads we took to and from Varaždin were beautiful.

A note about our road trips. We like to stay close to the center of town a lot, and the ancient roads can be crazy. You always find streets and intersections that the locals just scratch their heads and say “that’s just the way its always been”, tourists are so happy they have a bus driver, visitors wonder what idiot thought this was a good idea, and Texas Aggies take notes to bring to their civil engineering class as examples of “fresh” ideas.

Me, I like to explore how wrongly I can navigate these unique traffic flows without denting the car, killing a pedestrian, or ending up in jail. Ellen yells at me a lot, points out how many wrong turns I take, and turns lovely shades of white, red, green and purple. So, very entertaining. She claims she still loves me, but with hesitation. Man, I’m pumped about driving in England again. The last time we were there we had a wreck.

In addition to our little road trip, we’ve visited a couple of other museums. We’ve seen a couple of Renoirs, a Monet, a bunch of old glass and ceramics, and rooms full of medieval religious works. There’s a nasty rumor that many of the works in the Mimara Museum are fakes, but the jury is still out on that. The weirdest museum we saw was the Museum of Torture (pictures were not allowed). It is a tiny private place with a bizarre collection of really nasty devices people used on each other. Very Game of Thrones, if you know what I mean. We are off to Eddie Izzard tomorrow night and then to the coast the day after that.

I don’t know if I mentioned it previously, but while walking through a Zagreb park on our first day here we found a mob of people lined up outside a cloaked gazebo. Seriously, at least 300 people lined up in the middle of a wooded park while the theme song to the HBO fantasy show blasted the city over loud speakers. I knew what was going on (men with shields and chain mail gave me a hint) but Ellen didn’t.

Circling the dias we found a reproduction of the “Iron Throne” protected by more broad sword-adorned footmen with the line feeding subjects to sit and have their picture taken (for a nominal fee). The line was at least an hour long, so we didn’t hang around. This country is goofy for this series. Ellen has never watched it, so now we are binge watching the entire 8-year series to catch up. More news to follow M-Lords & Ladies.