The Adventures of Svend and Nancy: 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