Croatia

Slow down, you move too fast!

We never considered Hrvatska as a vacation spot, (a dollar for anyone who has ever heard of Hrvatska). After weeks of one fabulous Middle European spot after another we decided to crash for a week near water. Hello Croatia (I mean Hrvatska)- with over 1000 islands on the Adriatic Sea. We only needed one island and randomly picked Uglian from booking.com. What a wonderful random choice it was! 

I mean really, we can all rail against that new fangled Internet thingy and complain about kids living on it and social media ruining life as we know it, but come on - push on a little app, pay for an unseen pension-hotel, have directions sent to your phone, have your phone tell you where to go, pay tolls with your credit card, check the ferry schedule online from a city you never heard of before, find a tiny town at the top of an island on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and you're going to complain? Not I.

We spent an entire week there, swimming about 4 or 5 times per day in the glorious sea. I love all oceans, what New Englander doesn't? But right now the Adriatic is at the top of my list. I'll probably change my mind when I get back to the Atlantic.

The coast was rocky in Uglian, but it was OK because there was a ladder right outside the hotel that went strait down to where you could easily just start swimming.

Stairway to paradise

I'm not complaining about this, but there was no air conditioning. The air was breezy and so fresh that I was fine without it. Not everyone in the room was as fine with it as I was however. I'm not mentioning names. 

Room with a view

But we really got into the routine of having breakfast, walking, swimming or sitting in the sun until one-ish, maybe having a Croatian beer and then doing the absolutely brilliant activity of taking a siesta. What mastermind invented that practice? Get up, have coffee, swim walk around sit on the pier and watch the boats come and go. Decide on one of the four places to eat dinner, walk around some more. Really tough living.


The host and hostess at Hotel Styvon were very sweet. Again no English, but you can't really hold that against them. Fortunately Svend and his German were handy. I didn't mind making him do all the ordering and paying. 

Most of the fellow hotel guest were Italian and to be honest their English is just so-so as well. I do think though, that of all the ways to say "good morning" - "bongiorno" is possibly the prettiest.

After a few days of rarely getting into the car, we noticed some "rocks" in the parking area. Turns out to be the ruins of an olive press from the 100 years before Christ. (That's BC or BCE to the scientific crowd) We really need to pay more attention to our surroundings!

We did take the occasional forays to the other towns on the island which were charming and had things like grocery stores and beaches. But we were happy to return to our hamlet of Muline at the top of the island. On one of our outings, we did witness a fire on the mainland being put out using planes spraying water. That was something new. It was very dry there and hadn't rained much at that point.

Croatia was also a surprise because of it's ultra modern roads with beautiful tunnels going though the mountains. Svend had been there as a kid in the 60's and at that point the all the roads were one lane each way going through the cities and towns and up and down the mountains.  This time we went through many very modern tunnels up to up to seven kilometers long. This is another example of the EU benefiting the more developing part of Europe. Thank you EU.

Note to travelers -if you are driving through mountainous Europe and you see a sign that gives you a choice of "scenic" or "direct" route, know that "scenic" is a buzzword for "scary hairpin turns going up and (worse) down a mountain. Now this is not to say you should not take the "scenic" choice, because yes, that's right it is BEAUTIFUL!

 I try to rely on my eyelids to protect me from scary driving situations (no, not when I'm actually driving) When Svend is driving I sometimes use my eyelids on normal roads But in the Dinaric Alps my eyelids betrayed me many times. It's just too gorgeous not to look. SO in the end - when it was over, I was very glad we took the "scenic" route

So a week of R&R from our general life of R&R.

(Does that sentence make sense to anyone besides me?

Next stop - the amazing Medjagore in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Slovakia and Hungary

Where is the Post box?

On Sunday morning in Zakopane, we were looking for a post box to mail some post cards before leaving lovely Poland. Suddenly after going through what we thought was roadwork but was in fact a border crossing, we were in Slovakia. A new country for both of us and one that doesn't recognize Polish stamps, or use  Slotsky as their currency. Obviously not the hugest deal, just a small surprise.
We drove a couple of hours through the lovely countryside and distant mountains of northern Slovakia.

Is Dracula home?

When I was a kid, there wasn't even a Slovakia, just Czechoslovakia. But of course the great break down of the Soviet block changed eastern Europe quite a bit. That was in 1989 and the less then 30 years has seen a huge difference in the lives of people from those countries. The traveler  benefits from the change by way of better roads and travel opportunities in general.
There is still a look of the former Soviet style apartment buildings which can only be described as boring. But as someone said, before getting one of these warren like apartments in the 50s or 60s, many people lived in a place with no running water and an outhouse in the yard. So to them it was a great step up.

We spent an overnight in Zvolen, a small city in the center of Slovakia. The most memorable factoid about that stay was that for dinner I ate rooster! (tastes like chicken😏¨only better) 
There was a wedding in the square that evening, where the quests and wedding party walked to the church in a happy procession. The statuary in the square commemorated some unknown (to us), soviet era dignitaries. It was a pleasant looking area with a wide open boulevard\walking street, a castle at one end and a lovely church at the other. Not very crowded on a Saturday night and a nice outdoor cafe that only served (gasp) juice! We survived, the juice was actually good. Otherwise at was a nice stop on the way to Budapest.

Should have stood in bed

We made a booking at a farm pension outside of Budapest that was owned by an English expat and his Hungarian wife both of whom were lovely. Of course we gravitated to the Englishman who was able to give us directions to the commuter train and a good restaurant nearby. There were goats, sheep, fowl, dogs, Dutch people, Poles and us in residence for those few days. The room was great, breakfast -just OK (don't forget we are used to Danish cheese and rugbröd, an amazing rye bread, which can't be beat.)

Classic beauty (haha)

Now Budapest; you've seen pictures, or been there. It's just such an elegant and beautiful city, both Buda and Pest on either side of the Danube . That amazing building that you see in the Viking River Cruise ads is not that old. Wouldn't you think it's some 17th century castle of a decadent royal family? But it's the parliament building built in the late 1800 early 1900s. That surprised me. 
Another surprising fact is the original settlement with is now Budapest was settled by a Celtic tribe some where in the first century BC. I bet you even Alex Trebeck doesn't know that!

From our farm B and B, we took the commuter rail into the city, very efficient, it took about a half hour and we were in the heart of the city. We did a lot of walking combined with one of those hop on/hop off bus tours and were immersed in that beautiful place. Lunch along the Danube, viewing the city from a point above the river, taking a  sight seeing boat ride along the Danube at sunset - tourist heaven.

The only glitch to the day was when we went back to the efficient train station to take the efficient commuter train back to our bucolic farm - there was no train. Ha ha suddenly we're in the middle of a travelers nightmare. I have stated before that it's almost embarrassingly easy for English speakers traveling through Europe these days. Most Europeans are fluent in English, but this does not apply to mature railway workers at 10 pm in Budapest. Who knew?  Svend and his four languages to the rescue. There was a woman who spoke German and Hungarian nearby and we corralled her to get the skinny from the railway worker. It turns out the train was not coming, but there will be a bus. OK, great - when will the bus come? They weren't sure but one thing they did know was it wasn't going to be there. We had to find the subway station, take a train a few stops, walk a few blocks to a deserted looking street and wait half an hour. And voila - it came, we went and eventually found our way to the car. The bus driver was as confused as we at first, but with a little help from the collective passengers we came to the dark lonely parking lot. Finally farm, sweet farm. Just a few hours out of our lives. We did a lot of relying on the kindness of strangers, and kind they were.

Where is our train?

We had a great couple of days in Hungary, but the pace of our great European trip was getting out of hand. One beautiful medieval city after another! cathedrals, castles, forts. It was time for a break.