Today we are on the move again. We have reservations in Zagreb for Thursday night, and we have one stop to make in between. After breakfast, we spent the morning leisurely walking around town.
We shopped and chatted with a few shopkeepers, and one wished we had come into her shop the day before so she could have invited us to dinner. She had just made veal peka for friends the day before, which is a method for slow cooking the meat under a lid with hot coals on top. Sounded delightful, and she really seemed to like it. She was about our age, perhaps younger and she talked about living through the war and hiding in the basement. Wow.
We hopped on board our bus at 1:20, for a nearly five hour trip to Plitvice Lakes. The first half of the ride was up the coast from Primosten to Zadar, then we turned inland. The Dalmatian Coast of Croatia no longer bears the visible scars of war, but inland there were plenty of abandoned homes with bullet holes where the previous occupants never returned after the war.
Our bus driver was a man about our age, and he repeated all of his announcements in English for our benefit. During one of the rest stops, we showed him the Plitvice stop we wanted to get to (there are 3, spread a couple of kilometers apart) and he said he’d tell us when to get off. Once off the bus, we had to find our lodging, which sometimes is a trick. Lucky us, it was literally THE house behind the bus stop. We checked in, got oriented and set off to find dinner.
Plitvice is inland and at a higher elevation than we had been on the coast. We were hoping for cooler, more bearable temperatures. A chance to wear pants, maybe? It was slightly cooler, especially with the rivers of sweat running down my legs. Are the pants still breathable when they’re drenched with sweat? With humidity that must have been close to 100%, we trudged around our little village to find the market, footpath to the park and the one nearby restaurant for dinner. Ah, small town life.
We didn’t have high expectations for our dinner, what with no competition, and the wide variety of items on the menu, but it was actually pretty good and everyone seemed to be enjoying a good meal. Bonus, the deck of the restaurant looked out over a tiny green ski hill.
Back at our lodging, we intended to plan for the upcoming day, buy bus tickets online and write this post. And that’s where it all went down hill. First, our room is great. It’s run by a friendly woman, it is clean, and its decor was modern for what was basically a house in a Minnesota forest. However, it’s a bit of a culture shock to go from our light and airy Primosten beach apartment to this damp, heavy wooden room that smelled of sewer gas.
A few times this trip, my tablet won’t be able to ‘see’ the Wi-Fi. Mostly it’s been at cafes, and you can always buy another coffee or wine at a new cafe to get connected. Now, we can’t get connected in our room and there’s literally nowhere else to go. It’s after 9 pm, and we need to buy bus tickets for the popular Plitvice to Zagreb route. Big sigh. I guess we’ll have to buy the tickets on Nathan’s cell phone. What a pain. After finding the route we wanted and entering in our names and credit card numbers, the worst happened. Transaction denied. I repeated the process, hoping I had miskeyed something. No bueno. Expletives, and Nathan shushing me so I don’t bother the neighbors through the paper thin walls. How you can hear so many sounds through a stone house is beyond me.
My tablet can’t connect, so if my credit card emailed me about the transaction, I don’t have access to it. We called Chase toll free. They didn’t reject the transaction. Big sigh. I still need bus tickets and now it’s closer to 10. More expletives and shushing. So we emailed a few of Nathan’s coworkers to see if one of them could buy the tickets for us and email us the pdfs. Mari came through in our time of need and for that we are eternally grateful.
We went to bed. Or we tried to. Nathan shut the bathroom door to contain the sewer gas. I tossed and turned with my damp legs. Seriously, is my bedding wet? I’ll never know. Sleep eventually came.