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Chapter 14: Don’t Call It Luh-Jub-Luh-Jana
It’s absolutely a cliché for travel bloggers to have at least one post where they commiserate that travel can be hard, and that day-to-day life on the road isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Maybe this is one of those posts? I don’t know; I haven’t written it yet. You’ll know by the end, I suppose. You will recall that Dubrovnik has no train station, so we left the city on our first plane in three months. We flew to Zagreb, then re-entered the Schengen Zone and crossed into Slovenia by train en route to Ljubljana. Now. Be honest. I know you skipped over pronouncing that word in your head, so…
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Chapter 13: Dubrovnik Is Beautiful
The small walled city of Dubrovnik has exploded in popularity among tourists in the past few decades, especially after being showcased on HBO’s Game of Thrones in 2011. It was a shock for us to discover that there is no train station in Dubrovnik; it’s so far down the narrow Croation coast that most visitors fly there. Travel is further complicated because the city is cut off from mainland Croatia. Bosnia and Herzegovina was given a small ten-mile slice of the Adriatic coast after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and all land travel must go through border control to get into Bosnia, then back into Croatia. There is no love lost…
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Chapter 12: Beach Bums
I just got Rachel’s phone synced to my cloud, so I have access to her photos as well as mine. The good news is that now you’ll actually be seeing some pictures of me. The bad news is that, in many of those photos, I likely will not have a shirt on. We left our cottage outside of Zagreb, and moved on to the Croatian coast. A six-hour train ride and a 35-minute Uber took us to Dugi Rat, a charming little beachside town, notwithstanding sounding like the villain from a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon. After trudging up the stairs to our apartment, our full bladders were not appreciative that…
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Chapter 11: Gone Country
Travel Maxim #42: No matter where you go, which city you stay in, how many TripAdvisor reviews you read, how many Expedia points you have, how much money you spend, which mode of transportation you take, who your host is, what languages they speak, which side of the train tracks you’re on, what time of day you arrive, what the weather is like, what floor you’re on, which currency you pay with, what time zone you’re in, how close your neighbors are, or how long you’re staying… …there will always be a barking dog. Zagreb had begun to grow on us after two weeks, but it was time to leave.…
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Chapter 10: Empty Zagreb/Full Zagreb
There’s a yin and yang of travel. Whereas our train ride to Budapest was serendipitously lovely, the journey to Zagreb, Croatia was decidedly less so. The air conditioning in our packed train car was broken, and the windows didn’t open – not the ideal scenario for a 5-hour trip through a 90 degree August day. Twenty minutes into the ride, the car was a hotbox awash in a miasma of sweat and unidentifiable odors. The girls daintily dabbed at their foreheads while the guys removed their shoes and socks and flapped their hats in a desperate attempt to generate a zephyr of relief. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as…
