Last Saturday, we woke up early and walked to the rental car center in downtown Dublin to pick up our wheels for our Irish roadtrip. Thankfully, my friend is a left-side-of-the-road driving professional from her time living in Uganda and India, so we made the two-hour drive to Galway without any mishaps (see my post on our Scottish highlands auto-rescue for a comparison).
Switzerland continued to blow us away with its natural beauty and cultural diversity on our road trip last weekend that kicked off with a four-hour, post-work drive out to St. Gallen in eastern Switzerland. I fell asleep a couple hours in and Gui was a champion, escorting his sleepy wife to the hotel room upon arrival before going to park the car.
After our snowy hike around Plitvice Lakes, Guillaume and I thawed our fingers in the heated car, de-layered a bit and programmed our GPS to get us to the Slovenian border. We had read about delays crossing over — Croatia is in the EU but it is not a part of Schengen, making Slovenia a key gatekeeper to the Schengen zone — but we were still wholly unprepared for the TWO-HOUR queue that awaited us. It’s a good thing we packed snacks.
I know, I know… I’ve gotten terribly behind. Thank goodness I kept a travel diary during our Balkans road trip or I wouldn’t remember what to write about anymore! The past few weeks have been a bit packed with the end of exams, the start of my summer internship and visits from some fabulous guests, but I’m ready to get back on the blogging horse (…that metaphor shows you just how out of practice I am, am I right? I’ll get the hang of it.) So without further ado, let me give you a little taste of the gorgeous Croatian city of Split:
I’m picking back up with Day 4 of our Balkans road trip, which means it’s finally time to share my photos from the breathtaking coastal city of Dubrovnik (!!) A quick word of warning: After perusing this post you will almost certainly want to book a flight to Croatia. No, you’re not convinced? Okay, let’s see…
Our drive from Croatia into Bosnia and Herzegovina was pretty wild — even without stumbling across landmines leftover from the war in the 90s, per Guillaume’s alarming research. Croatia is a member of the European Union but not part of the Schengen open-border zone, and BiH is part of neither, so once we got to the border we had to pass through one booth where a Croatian official stamped our passports to leave and then a second where a Bosnian man stamped them to enter. Shortly afterward, we traded the smoothly-paved highway for a narrow mountain road that was pretty much the opposite, as we wound our way toward Travnik.
Fasten your seat belts! We returned from an incredible 10-day road trip through the Balkans on Sunday night and I’m finally getting around to what will be the first of several posts describing our adventures. Ready for it? Okay, let’s go.
The Plaid Shirt Diaries 