The End of the Line

As Plitvice National Park was obviously going to be immune to any variant of I-can-top-that-itis, all I have left to do is to tie up any loose ends that always come after the climax of the story. So below is a synopsis of the final day or so of our trip, the oh-so-fun travel day, and the slow recovery from jet-lag that ensued. These all deserve to be chronicled. And so they shall. Can't leave the story 98% complete, now can I? After that I shall speak of the trip as a whole and answer any questions in a live Q&A. Or not. Maybe I'll just channel your questions.

The drive out of the mountains and back to the coast was beautiful. Country roads all the way. Hay bales (the stacks were a Kosovo thing) and goats and wee barns straight out of a children's book and as far as the eye could see. We drove through one military base turned museum complete with enormous tanks posing for the cameras in the morning light, right on the side of the road. But mostly, it was rolling hills in the foreground, and giant Alps in the background. We gaped, we oohed, we aahed, and we just kept driving. No stops until we hit the last town on our list, Rijeka, the third largest city in Croatia, and the one closest to the Slovenian border, which we still needed to cross one last time.

Rijeka from on high.

We only had one afternoon and evening in Rijeka. We needed to high-tail it outa there the next morning in order to catch our flights. And it was once again punishingly hot, like, 98°F hot. But we soldiered on because it would be a shame to melt on our last day in Europe. Our hotel wasn't available for check-in until 5:00, which is crazy. Every other place we stayed in was available by 3:00 the latest. But this one was run by an impersonal property management company that didn't give a crap if people were happy with their stay. So we had to stall until then. Our first in-stall-ment (okay, that is pushing it even for me) was the hilltop Trsat Castle. It wasn't much when compared with all the other castles we'd seen. But it did have a pretty kick-butt view of the town below. I pretty much had the city figured out before we even stepped foot in it. The Cathedral is over there. That thing over yonder is the university. There's the natural history museum... You get the idea.

A tighter view of the important parts of town and of the Adriatic. Note the canal. We will be there later in the post.

You can see the flag on this tower all the way from the sea.

Steps. Always more steps.

Trsat Castle bits

We then stopped for lunch near the castle in a place I found on the net in about fifteen seconds worth of research. Twenty is my limit, so it seemed thorough enough. I was right. It was a great meal, full of local cuisine options, that really felt like a home-made affair. Mark said it was one of his favorite meals of the entire trip. I'd put it in the top ten, which is still pretty good, after 42 days of travel. It was a little family restaurant called Konoba MB that has been around for more than a generation. (If you look it up on Google maps, you'll find it about two blocks southeast of Trsat Castle.) I had Goulash. They nailed it.

No goulash pics, so here's one more castle tid-bit.

We then drove to the parking garage recommended by the afore-mentioned apartment management company. Not sure why they had us park there. It was quite a trek from the apartment and we passed multiple other lots on the walk from the garage to the apartment. It reeked so badly in there that I almost threw up walking up the stairwell. The heat wasn't helping with that. But as we exited the garage, leaving our luggage in Luka, we still had about three hours to kill before the apartment would be available. We texted the company, hoping it would be ready sooner. They gave us the ambiguous: "It might be ready earlier if the cleaner finishes with it. We will let you know." We held out hope, knowing that there was AC in the apartment, and there wasn't in the old town or on the promenade. But they never let us know. At 5:05, I walked into the office demanding the key, sweating through my shorts. Nobody was cleaning the place until the last minute. They just had no interest in throwing us a bone.

That's about the expression I had for most of the afternoon.

So what did we do for three hours in Rijeka? We walked the main, pedestrian-only, shopping street, but were too hot to shop. We stopped for a beer and some shade for a while. But that only took us so far. We visited the cathedral. We bought tickets to go down into the war tunnels built for WWII, which were being used to house an underwater photography exhibit. At least it was plenty cool down there. We took our time heading back up to the parking garage to get our stuff, and then back down to the apartment and the management office. Mostly, we sweated it out. When we finally got the keys around 5:20, we climbed the eighty steps up to the third floor (what we in America would call the fourth floor) of an old Austrian-style building (no elevator) and collapsed in our apartment waiting for the AC to kick in as it was pretty obvious that nobody had been in there for hours and the AC had been shut off the whole time.

The "shopping street"

The Cathedral

The inside of said Cathedral

The caves were literally cool as well as figuratively. At the moment, the literal part was more important.

The photography exhibit was very impressive. I couldn't stop taking photos of the photos. As you shall see below. Remember, none of these underwater photos are mine. And I can't give credit as I didn't record who took them. Though some of them have a visible sticker at the bottom. Like this first one. So nice photo, Danijel Frka! Anyway, please enjoy, but do not reproduce in any way. I'd be worried that I could get into trouble for reproducing. But since I only have about eight readers, I'll take my chances.

But we couldn't help wondering, couldn't they make better use of this space?

I mean, they had hundreds of meters of prime real estate right below the heart of the city.

Turn it into a dance club. Add a few strobe lights. It could be rockin'.

The air flow is great. You could even put restaurants down there. 

Or maybe a bazaar? People would definitely use it to get out of the heat of summer.

This dude approves.

Cool, but wouldn't sea water be really bad for a violin? I don't think it would sound the same either.

When we had finally cooled off due to full power AC in the apartment running for about an hour, we then went back out to enjoy the town in the evening when temperatures had dropped to the balmy mid-80's. We saw some pretty cool architecture. We ogled some crazy yachts in the marina. But we only had about an hour, because Carol had to work that evening so we made sure to feed her before that would happen. She chose an incredibly posh dessert-only establishment on the promenade. Of course she did. Have you met my wife? Carol's dessert was a chocolate cake decorated to look like an hallucinogenic mushroom. Mine was a Dubai-chocolate cake thing that is apparently all the rage these days. I'd never heard of it. But it was yummy. Pistachios in the chocolate. Michelle got an orange-flavored chocolate thingy I didn't care for, but everyone else gobbled up. Mark and Quincy just ate from our three plates, like hyenas. Order your own damn dessert, you free-loaders! Just kidding. All six of us have been sharing meals the entire trip. Well, five of us. Remy is a vegetarian, so she pretty much had her own thing most of the time in this very meat-centric region of the world. In any case, there is no way I could have eaten that whole dessert on my own. Too rich.

I bet the Botel Marina lets its tenants in before 5:00 p.m.

A selfie in Rijeka

Architecture in Rijeka

Feels a little like Vienna. That's because Rijeka was an important port town for the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the 1800s.

The beauty was in the details.

If you look closely, you can see the Trsat Castle that we visited earlier in the day. It is at the top of the farther hill, just above the left side of the orangish building in the middle of the picture, behind the canal. And this is the canal you can see from the pics at the top of this post when we were in the castle. Funny how that works, huh?

Carol's dessert.

After dessert, I naturally went back to the apartment to make dinner. The goal was to use all the stuff that we had left in the feed-bag which we'd been dragging all over Europe. Lentils and garlic and carrots and some crazy seasoning packet thingy that Michelle bought five weeks earlier, and anything else I could find that wasn't in jelly form or made of milk product. Not the greatest meal of the trip. But I hate wasting food. Unless it's apricots. Those things can go eat themselves. Or eggplant. Decide. Are you dairy or are you vegetable. When you decide, maybe I'll eat you. Until then, auf wiedersehen, aubergines. Yes, I had to look that up for spelling assistance. Sorry, no eggplant emoji here. ;) 

We played one last game of Ganz Schön Clever, a German dice game that has been keeping us entertained for much of the trip. Well, it and the three sequels I also own. Then we went to bed, knowing we'd have to get up and get on the road by 7:00 a.m. to make the drive to Ljubljana airport. In the morning, it was one last check to make sure we didn't leave stuff under the bed or in the shower. One last key drop in the box at the door. One last hike to the parking space where Luka awaited us half a kilometer up some hill. This was it. The six week adventure was finally over. 

The drive was uneventful. We waived good-bye to the Adriatic. We were a little worried about the border crossing with our Gandalf-esque "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" in Macedonia, and our "What the hell are you people doing at my border crossing?" guy on the last trip into Bosnia-Herzegovina; not to mention the two-hour ordeal into Croatia from Montenegro. But our fears were unfounded, as we didn't even have to stop. It is E.U. on both sides of this particular border. But in our newly established paranoid state, we found on the net that even the Slovenia-Croatia border can involve random checks that can be painfully slow. So we left super early just in case. But we flew through and landed at the airport with about three hours to spare for the Allens and over five hours until our flight.

"Quick! Take a picture! That is the last time we'll see the Adriatic!"

We parked Luka for the last time. We said our teary good-byes. Mind you, we weren't sad that we didn't get to spend more time with our beloved van, but we were sad that we left him with too much diesel in the tank. (That stuff is pricey. Our final fill-up was in Croatia where we spent 90euros, or over a hundred dollars for half a tank worth of diesel.) We only needed to leave it 5/8 full, just as we found it. But I was a bit too conservative in my guess and it was at more like 7/8. Ah well. At least the Alamo rental return parking lot was free. Fun story: Carol and I approached the Alamo office with the van keys in our hands, ready to close out the rental agreement. We were greeted outside the office by two nice young men who asked us how the trip went and if there were any problems with the van. We didn't complain about the fact that no sane person would ever willingly drive a vehicle that large in the places that we needed to go. We told them about the blown tire in the back. We suggested that they include instructions about the whereabouts of the spare and especially the tools required to change the tire. We handed them the keys and went to the airport terminal. We cleared security and browsed the duty-free shop for gifts for our lovely in-laws (Josh's girlfriend's parents) who so kindly took care of Gromit for the last week of our trip when Josh had already moved out to Irvine. We ate breakfast/lunch/certainly-not-brunch at the one "restaurant" that was open in the entire admittedly small airport. Then Carol had an epiphany. What if those guys, to whom we gave the keys to the van, didn't actually work for Alamo? They weren't in any kind of uniform. They were not actually in the office. We might've just been scammed. They could be joy-riding Luka around southern Austria by now, and we might soon miss our flight while having to file a police report. Crap!

Luka back at the airport.
Oops wrong Luka. This is just a book I saw at the airport.

Carol texted the Alamo office. I went back to security and asked if I could leave and then come back. They were skeptical. Finally, one security guy said my boarding pass would not work to let me through security a second time, but he'd remember me and he would be there when I got back. So I trusted him and left the airport to go back to the office to make sure we hadn't just blundered big-time. Just as I was through the turnstiles, Carol texted me saying all was good. They actually did work for Alamo. But I was already through, so I decided to double-check and went all the way back to the rental car offices despite Carol's assurances. The dude who took our keys was sitting in the office with another person actually in uniform. They assured me all was copasetic. Thank goodness. I turned around and marched the half-mile back to security. When I got there, sure enough, my boarding pass did not work. The guy at the entrance didn't know me. I had to explain my situation and have him find the guy who said he'd be there to let me in. He wasn't there. How do I get myself into these situations all of the time? At least I didn't blow a tire this time.

Long story short, I eventually convinced the guy of my innocence. It took some real sweet-talk. Not my specialty. He grudgingly let me through, and as I was putting my belt back on, the first guy shows up. He belatedly vouches for me to the second guy, who was still watching me intently, even while helping other people. Do I look that sketchy? Is it the receding hairline or the definitely-not-receding waistline that makes me appear to be an international criminal? I know they are just doing their job, but if was going to hijack a plane, why would I want to go through security multiple times?

Here we go. See how he doesn't even fit in the spots provided specifically for him? Dude needs to get in the weight room and shed a few.

The plane rides were fine. One stop over in Munich that wasn't too bad. The airline made us check our carry-on luggage. We made sure to pack into things we could carry on so we didn't have to deal with baggage claim. Best laid plans, once again! So when we got to San Francisco, we had to wait for just long enough at the baggage carousel to miss two Airporter shuttles. They come every half an hour at that time of night. We waited for our bags for forty minutes. The sad part is that we have Global Entry, because without it we almost missed a connection in Dallas with a three-hour layover last year. So we flew past the considerable line in customs. But all of those people made it through the line and into baggage claim and were long gone before our bags finally showed up. Best laid plans indeed.

So once we finally did catch an Airporter and then an Uber, once in San Rafael, we arrived at our front door exactly 24 hours after we left the apartment in Rijeka. We left at 7:00 a.m., Croatia time, and we arrived home at 7:00 a.m., Croatia time. But that correspondes to 10:00 p.m., California time. So we were just in time to go straight to bed and get a good night's sleep so that jet-lag wouldn't be a problem. Well, it has now been five full days and nights since we got back, and we are still recovering from jet-lag. Carol and I both fell asleep in different rooms at 7:00 p.m. last night (evening?) The kind of I'm-so-sleepy tired, that there is absolutely no way I could get up to go upstairs and brush my teeth and go to bed properly. I did eventually peel myself off the couch around midnight, but then woke up around 3:00 a.m. and never really was able to sleep again before getting up this morning to go to jury-duty in my zombie-like state. We got back five days ago! Why is this so hard? On the way into Europe, I took maybe one nap. I was good to go by day two for sure. But this always happens coming home. Today neither of us has napped. It is almost 10:00 p.m. as I type this. I am determined to sleep like a normal human being tonight. But you my dear readers, will never know if I succeeded, because this is my last post. So my story is that jet-lag is over, and I am sticking to it.

It is nice to be home.

So what are my final takes from the trip? What did I learn? How did I grow? What words of wisdom can I impart now that I am seven weeks older and wiser than I was when I typed that first post on the way out the door? I'm so happy you asked. Because I planned to tell you either way.

I learned that driving in Europe is hard. Especially in the countries that don't have the infrastructure budget to build roads wider than a single passenger van. I learned that it is even harder to park in Europe. There are never enough spaces, and the spaces that do exist are never accessible unless your car is a Mini-Cooper or a SmartCar. I learned that making plans is essential for a long road-trip, but that nothing ever goes according to plan. I learned that middle-of-nowhere, un-researched roadside cafes will often be the best meals of the trip, despite hours of research for the best restaurants in town. I learned that although everyone knows that the bigger the group of people, the longer it takes to get anywhere; what not everyone knows is that the graph of said time vs. group-size data set is exponential in form, rather than the expected linear situation. Enough said about that. I think I actually already knew all of these things before this trip. Hell, I'd driven the Amalfi coast in Italy. I definitely knew some of these things. But a not-so-gentle reminder is often necessary.

I grew as a navigator. Michelle and I both got international driving permits and were the only ones on the rental agreement who could drive the van. I expected to do maybe 30-40% of the driving. But Michelle insisted upon doing 99% of it. She prefers it, she says. The only time I was behind the wheel was when we needed to dock the beast and when that involved backing up and negotiating tight turns. Except for the couple of minor trips when Michelle wasn't even on the adventure, I don't think I ever drove Luka in anything but first gear and reverse. So that meant I was always the navigator. It was a job I took very seriously. Google-maps took it less seriously. It was always suggesting alternate routes, unless I actually needed one because the primary route meant going on a goat-path or the wrong way down a one-way street. Without it, we would have been lost most of the time. With it, I was just frustrated most of the time. But we made it, and I am the better man for it.

I also grew as a researcher. Normally Carol does the bulk of that. It is in her actual job-description after all. It is what she does for a living. She excels at it. I do not. But she had to work most of the trip, so I had to do most of the planning. Mark helped a lot. But I planned the entire route. It was my brain-child from the get-go. We were seeing what I wanted to see. We were taking the route that I had plotted out. And the details of what to find and where to find it in each town was left to me and to Mark as well. I still stink at it. But I am growing up slowly in that regard.

I grew in empathy for the people touched by war. And not just those in the Balkans, but everywhere and in every time. War has always been an academic curiosity of mine. But I have never felt personally touched by it. It was always something that happened elsewhere and before my time. I know a lot about the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War, and WWI, and WWII and Vietnam, based on what I learned in school. I probably know more than most, not including actual historians and Civil War buffs and such. But learning about it was all dispassionate for me, other than maybe the Holocaust, which is difficult not to get emotional about, with all of the stories of the horrors being drilled into me as a good little Jewish boy. But seeing the war damage first-hand, and hearing stories from people who lived through it, and remembering events from my young adulthood, when they were actually happening, brought the atrocities of war to me and into the here and now, more than I ever had experienced it before. 

I can't speak for the other five people in my group on this trip. They seemed less interested in the history and less moved by the stories. Though I am pretty sure everyone who visited the Museum of War and Genocide in Mostar with me was pretty substantially moved that day. But for me, this was a large part of the reason for taking this trip to Sarajevo and Kosovo and Mostar; places I've heard of in the context of war and genocide, but needed to experience for myself. I guess I purposefully put myself in the necessary frame-of-mind to get the most out of that part of the experience, whereas my five traveling companions were in different mindsets. There is nothing wrong with that. Nobody was forcing them to entrench themselves in the history of the places we were visiting. Mark, for example, got much more out of visiting the Greek and Roman ruins than I did. That was where his focus was. We all grew in different ways. But this is my blog, so all I can do is share my own growth.

That brings me to words of wisdom. Not easy for a guy who cannot take himself seriously. But I'll try. Do not follow Google Maps blindly. If it takes you across a border, research the hell out of that particular border crossing. If you rent a car, be sure to ask about the spare tire situation including the whereabouts of the jack and the lug-wrench. If you aren't sure about a certain road, don't take it. And no, you won't fit in that space, don't even try it. Triple check that you and your spouse have not double-booked yourselves in the same city for the same nights. When paying with PayPal, be sure to check the friends and family option if you don't want to get destroyed by fees. Never attempt to match wits with a Sicilian when death is on the line...

Eight countries. Twenty different lodgings. 3525 km of driving. Almost as many bureks (a savory pastry thingy that is ubiquitous in the region). Four planes, five trains, a kayak, a funicular, maybe ten boats, five or six buses, a dozen or so trams, a towed raft, one scooter, dozens of elevators, an underground slide, and around 600,000 steps, at least a few thousand of which were of the up or down variety. What else could I possibly have gleaned along the way?

I guess what I came away with is the same thing I always come away with. Travel is expensive. Travel is exhausting. Travel is stressful. Travel can be scary. But travel is always, always, always worth it. I came away with more lasting memories in six weeks than I do from six years of sitting at home. The good memories are great. The bad ones are sometimes even better, knowing that I lived through them and can now laugh about them from a distance. Being high up in the mountains can be an almost religious experience. Taking in the mountain air. Seeing all of creation laid out before you. Being near the sea can feel the same. It makes you feel so small. But at the same time it makes you feel like a real part of something so large. Being in a place like the Balkans where you get the mountains and the sea all at once, can be transformative. And watching people of different cultures and backgrounds and religions all thriving in their own ways, is eye-opening. Feeling the distant past seamlessly meshing with the present and being a part of all that, well, it's enough.

Thanks for going on the journey with me, even if only vicariously through words and pictures. Being able to share it brings it even more alive for me, and helps solidify it in my failing memory. I hope you enjoyed reading. If you didn't, well, sorry, that was an awful lot to read. If you did, perhaps, just perhaps, I will have inspired you to share some of your own travels to places I've so far only been able to dream about. Until the next adventure!

The view from Ljubljana airport, and the last bit of nature on the trip. Tears well up...