“Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.”
-Author: Roy L. Goodman
Lesson Learned: Eastern Europe has many sights to see, history to learn, and amenities to enjoy. It should be higher up on people’s travel bucket lists.
Lesson Learned 2: The roads in Croatia are quite good. We rented a little Opel Astra, which is a nice ride, and have been able to move about the city and country with ease. We found the highways in Greece fabulous, and the city streets and rural country roads challenging. We’ve found the Croatian highways good, and the city streets good as well. We’ll find out about the country roads in weeks to come.
Regrets: None. We are still trying to decide how long we will stay in Croatia. A month sounds good.
Go-Date: Days 74 thru 79, Saturday thru Thursday. April 6 to 11
To Begin With…..!
Congratulations Baylor Lady Bears Basketball – For defeating Notre Dame for their third national championship under Kim Mulkey. Way to go.
Congratulations to the Texas Tech Red Raiders Basketball team – For making it to the national championship game. This is the furthest Tech has ever advanced in basketball. Chris Beard, hang around. I foresee good things in your and Texas Tech’s future.
Travel Route Map Recap
Key:
Green In-bound flight
Orange Intra-Greece travel
Blue Greece – Egypt travel
Purple Greece to Croatia travel
Croatia on my Mind
The days, since we’ve arrived in Zagreb seem to blend together. I’m not sure what day of the week it is unless I pull up a calendar. Nor, do I care much. Sunday was a bit of a bother since unprepared it arrived and we discovered that like Greece, almost everything is closed in Zagreb, including grocery stores. Ellen wanted a tomato for a salad. We did without.
That’s not a bad thing (knowing what day it is, not doing without tomatos). I don’t know if I love Zagreb, but I’ve fallen in like with it. It’s the capital of the country, but its very walkable, rideable, and drivable. The difference between the latter two being it has a very nice tram system which makes it easy to transit from end-to-end. Maybe not as rapid as a subway, but somehow a bit more elegant since you can see where you are going and where you are. Our biggest issue was learning how to clock in to the system.
Note: You buy trolley tickets good for half or a whole hour from the driver or at any street kiosk. Its very affordable (4 Kuna (Kn) for 30 minutes – about $0.61, or 7 Kn for an hour $1.06). Hop on the tram and find a little yellow electronic box mounted on a pole. Take your ticket (which looks like the number slip you get at Basking-Robbins) and slip the blank end into a slot on the face. It punches your ticket just like if you were feeding a time card into the time clock at the hospital (nurses know what I mean). Very efficient, very popular with the locals.
So, what have we been doing this past week? Not much. Oh, we’ve been to a few museums, explored different neighborhoods, and sampling some very good fare, but that’s about it. To be honest, since all the basketball games (NCAA) have been on TV at midnight to 3:30 AM, we’ve been sleeping late. I’m glad the season is over so I can get a full night’s sleep.
It has been interesting though. On the fourth day here we stopped in to a Chinese restaurant across the street from our Air BNB for some of the best dumplings we’ve ever eaten and bumped into a couple of American Ex-pats (Nic and Mary K). Not only did we hit it off during lunch, we’ve gone to their new home (Samobor) which is a cute little village about 15 kms west of Zagreb and will probably meet up with them before we leave. They have taken a leap of faith and moved to Croatia after they retired. Nic, was born here but emigrated to the U.S. when he was 13. He speaks the language fluently, which would be a great help. I will say that we have been able to move about easily, even not knowing the language.
Spoiler Alert! We got tickets to Eddie Izzard on April 15th. We’ve long been fans of his from afar. Every time he’s come to Washington DC the tickets evaporated long before we had a chance to buy them. As we rode into town from the airport, Ellen saw a billboard advertising his performance. We checked in to it, went to the venue and were able to purchase a couple of decent seats, at a decent price. We were so excited for the show that we’ve extended our stay in Zagreb by 3 days.
The weather during our stay started fair and has turned foul. From sunny days of 24 c (75 F) which invited us to stroll down the boulevards to days of rain and drizzle encouraging us to tour the museums of this city. Unfortunately, the next few days seem to bear the same forecast. That’s OK, soon we’ll be headed to the coast and the weather shall improve.
We don’t have a fixed itinerary. We plan on moving first to an old Roman coastal city named Pula, then on to the island of Krk, Plitvice Lakes National Park, Krka National Park, Split, Zadar, Paklenica National Park and then Dubrovnik. This is subject to change depending on what strikes our fancy. We’ll be here until deep into May when we plan to catch a flight to Paris.
If you haven’t noticed……we are having a ball.