Just Hours Away!

We are about to head off into unknown territory again. Thought I might give blogging another shot. Not sure why this particular adventure gets to be documented when Guatemala, Belize, Grenada, Fiji, Ireland, Iceland, Istanbul, South Africa, Spain (twice), Portugal (twice), France, and probably others that I am not recalling presently, never got their chance to shine on the blog. Perhaps it is because this is a six-week trip, so it feels a bit more significant than those others. But whatever the reason, I am making a stab at it. Hope I am not the only one who ever reads what I write here.

We are going to eight countries in all this trip. Three that we have already been to, but have perfectly good reasons to visit again: Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. We are going to Austria to visit our friend Katharina, who I met in Iceland, and then hosted for a couple of fantastic weeks here in Northern California, showing her every conceivable spot we could manage in fourteen days. Now she gets to return the favor for five or six days in her own home country. She lives in Vienna, her hometown is Salzburg, but we are meeting her in Graz. We'll do Vienna again too, through the eyes of a local this time. Slovenia is where the driving part of the trip starts and ends, as it was the only country where we could find a car that would fit six people and let us drive all the way to the northern Greece border and back. And we are doing Croatia again, because we only saw a small sliver of that country last time and we have much grander designs this time around.  And no, we are not actually going to set foot in Greece. That is a different trip, for a different time. But we will be close enough to throw stones, and I just might. :)

Before I list the other five countries, I need to answer that nagging question in the back of your mind: Six? Sadly neither Chloe nor Josh can join us on this trip. Chloe is a working adult with no chance of taking a long vacation. Josh is moving to Irvine, CA to look for his first job out of college. He just graduated with a degree in "Creative Technology and Design" from CU Boulder, and therefore has no shot of actually finding a job in Irvine or anywhere else, as technology jobs are at a ratio of about 1/1000 in terms of availability versus jobseekers. :(  But try he must, and his girlfriend is moving there for law school so it is as good a place as any to hit the pavement. So "who are the other four people on our trip?" you politely ask again, as I annoyingly digress. None other than our good friends, the Allens, who also went on the South American adventure with us, which is apparently the last trip that merited a blog. They won't join us until we hit Slovenia, so the first week in Austria is just Carol and I. Carol and me? I never could get that straight. "It is I!" sounds weirdly correct. But "It is me" also seems right as "me" is the object of the verb is, and I thought "me" is for objects and "I" is for subjects. Anyway. It is just the two of us visiting Austria, and Katharina makes three.

Okay, so the drive takes us from Slovenia, through Croatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Kosovo(arguably part of Serbia), Montenegro, North Macedonia (Why the "North"? It's not like there is a South Macedonia. I will have to look into that.) and Albania. Eventually we will make a loop of it, and get back to Slovenia to drop off the car. Assuming there is a car. This is the first bit of drama for the trip. We booked a seven passenger minivan. The problem is first that such a car was nearly impossible to find. We were on the verge of giving up on even trying, when this offering magically appeared at the eleventh hour. We had tried in at least four separate countries, even adjusting plans to include Italy for a bit. And worse, when we tried to change the date of the booking, we found that such a car also did not exist (not just wasn't available) to be booked for any day from anywhere in Slovenia. We called the booking agency, and they couldn't help us. They told us that if the website said we had a minivan, then we had a minivan. We left the reservation as is, but are now quite iffy about whether the car we reserved even exists. If it does not, and we are left standing at the rental counter with an empty reservation and no recourse, we will have to drive two separate cars the whole way. That would stink poopies. Way less fun, not being all together. Way more expensive in terms of gas and parking. Way more stressful, as we would have to find extra parking, not to mention, each other for 33 days in a row. Just poopies. But we can't think of anything to do other than call them for reassurance that the minivan will actually be there as we booked it when we get to Slovenia.  Fingers and toes are crossed. 3000 kilometers of driving fun are dependant upon the existence of that van! There are no trains that we could use for this itinerary. We have seventeen places booked. It is "Our way or the highway!" Wait, the highway is our way. We definitely may be screwed.

But first, Graz, Austria. We leave home in about two hours. Carol is desperately fixing the new watering system in the backyard that she just installed, hoping beyond hope that things are still alive when we return. I am dropping Gromit off at the pet-sitters. Thankfully he only has to be there for five days now and few more at the end of our trip. In between, Josh will be here with him. But he is in France with his belle for now, and will be in Irvine by the time we get back. Hopefully, I will post again when we have arrived. Until then, "tschau"!