Dueling Backpacks

Day 474 (October 15, 2020) – Zagreb, Croatia Agh, why did we leave the coast? was our first thought on arriving in Zagreb. We had taken the train from Split . It was a very modern train, only two carriages long, but it traveled at a decent clip to cover the 250-mile distance. This trip from Slit to Zagreb was the Croatian equivalent of going from sunny southern California to the gray and dreary Northeast. It was cold here. We had to dig out more layers from our bag to keep us warm on the walk from the train station to our Airbnb apartment. This was also the very first apartment of our entire trip that had heating and that we felt a need to use. This isn't, of course, considering all the times we didn't have heating and would have really appreciated  it. We had a good time in Zagreb, but I kept thinking while we were there, we could have been at the beach right now…

Day 470 (October 10, 2019) – Split, Croatia Off mainland Croatia are thousands of islands scattered in a broad arc across the Adriatic Sea. The thing to do in summertime is to hop from one island to the next, which is made very accessible by a huge network of inter-island ferries. We thought about doing this ourselves, but we were a little late in the season. In October, many of the ferry routes were running limited service, and by November many would cease entirely until the spring. We'd also already had our island hoping experience across Thailand’s Andaman Sea , so we felt like we weren’t missing out on too much.

Day 466 (October 6, 2019) – Dubrovnik, Croatia At some point on this trip we got tired of bus rides. When we were planning the last leg of our trip around the Balkans, we were really trying to use train lines to connect the dots on our travel map. We found train journeys more relaxing, entertaining, and convenient than sitting on a bus for hours. So rather than thinking of where we wanted to go, we were instead thinking, where can the train take us? Well, we soon realized that the trains around the Balkans were not like their central European counterparts. It was near impossible to plan an itinerary entirely by train. There are sections of track closed for construction in random places (like the short distance between Novi Sad and Belgrade ), and disputes between countries have effectively closed certain international routes (like the connection between Zagreb and Sarajevo). As a result, we ended up on a handful of buses.

Day 462 (October 3, 2019) – Kotor, Montenegro M ontenegro kept surprising us. Budva wa s beautiful, but Kotor might have been even more so. Kotor was only a short bus ride up the coast and while it didn’t have the beach appeal of Budva, it had some spectacular scenery and a really charming walled town. It was a nice place to spend some time.

Day 458 (September 29, 2019) - Budva, Montenegro It took us absolutely forever to get to Budva, but it was entirely worth the effort. The trip involved a 12-hour train ride, an overnight stop in the town of Bar, and us waiting at a bus station for two hours before finally catching the hour-long bus ride from Bar to Budva.

Day 454 (September 25, 2019) – Belgrade, Serbia In full disclosure, it is the beginning of May 2020 as I write this. Since being in Belgrade, our trip has come to its close, we spent four months at home, and I even started a new job. In some sense, Belgrade feels like a lifetime ago, but then I look back at the pictures and it feels as if it could have only been a few weeks ago. So before our memories of Belgrade and the entire rest of the trip fade too much, I wanted to finally finish up this blog. Now that I’m working, I expect that this is going to take a while, but better late than never.