Caves and....Croatia!

Hello again to all...I'm writing tonight from a teeny cafe in a teeny square in a Croatian harbor town I'd never heard of before this trip - Sibenik. Erin I. is sitting across from me with her journal and her Fanta, and children are spinning and squealing on old-school playground equipment in the center of the square. Its about about 85 degrees out, but the sun at least has gone down so that it's no longer glaring off the bright white marble that makes up the buildings, streets, steps, and just about everything else. Croatia so far has been a delightful surprise.

But first: yesterday.

We left the little farmhouse and on a last-minute whim, decided to go to the Skocjan caves, which are on the way into Croatia and the largest underground caverns in Europe. (A guy with a Berkeley t-shirt on our tour there asked where the largest ones were in the world, and the guide said, in perfect Slovene-accented English, that they were in Kentucky and New Mexico.)

I wish I had better pictures of the caves, but we weren't actually allowed to take them so I have just this illegal photo I took of a stalagmite that's most likely a few hundred thousand years old:


Here are a few other photos, mostly taken as we were in our last little bit headed towards the exit and then hiking back up to the visitor's center:


Then, it was time to hop in our (very hot) car and head south. We've nicknamed our car Poky, as it's not the most powerful model on offer, especially when headed up long inclines and being tailgated within inches by impatient European drivers. But here's one thing that makes us, well especially me, I suppose, VERY happy about Poky:


I brought that cord just in case the car might have an aux input - I've never rented one that did - and lo and behold, there it was. So great. So is Euro Mix 6, by the way - thanks Sissy and Pete!

We crossed the border without incident; at one stop we literally waved our American passports as we drove slowly by.


At first, Croatia and Slovenia seemed exactly the same - pine forests, some farms with rocky fields and rolls of hay, cute villages with people that waved at us as we drove by. But some of the villages did start to have less of the alpine style houses and neatly-kept fields and more abandoned brick homes - or often a mix of both.

typical brick house, roadside cheese and honey stand, mountainside memorial

We got stuck behind two very slow campers and thus had lots of time to look around as we wound our way to Plitvice National Park. We stayed in a small guest house, and almost as soon as we pulled up and got settled we were asked what we wanted for dinner by the host and her daughter. We chose trout and settled in to watch the World Cup pre-game, which in Croatia consisted of a wedding-dress fashion show and some kind of trivia call-in game...cutting to the actual game was more of an afterthought, it seemed. Erin I. was pretty happy when Spain finally scored, especially since she'd been wanting to go to bed almost since the beginning of the game...

Dinner, Croatian pre-game show

More tomorrow before we head down to Dubrovnik!