Croatia Trip

My 6 week working vacation is officially underway!  The countries I will be visiting include Iceland, Scotland, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Hungary (with potentially brief visits to Italy, Bosnia, and Slovakia).  Just to clarify, my requirements for "visiting" a country are very simple: 1) an alcoholic beverage of some sort must be consumed in that country (preferably a pint of Guinness) and 2) the beverage must be consumed at a bar outside of an airport.   Unfortunately, although my journey home takes me through Oslo, my layover is too short to satisfy requirement #2) so I had to strike Norway off my list.

I'm sure you're asking yourself why this collection of countries and why a 42 day trip?   Let me give you some background.  To begin with, it all revolves around my step-daughter Claire (as she would happily admit most things usually do) attending her first semester at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.  Being accepted into a word-class college overseas is something she's worked extremely hard at achieving so my wife Stacy and I were more than happy to travel to Scotland to see her off.   Unfortunately I booked my flight a few months after Stacy booked hers so we were unable to travel together with the result being Stacy flying to Edinburgh via Amsterdam and me flying to Edinburgh via Iceland (with a one night layover in Keflavik Iceland). While researching Keflavik, I happened to notice that it had an Irish pub, so trying to make the best out of this depressing situation of travelling without my spouse, I knew I could drown my sorrows in this pub with the sole benefit of being able to cross Iceland off my list of countries I've visited.

After the night in Iceland, I'll be flying to Edinburgh, then taking the train to Dundee where I'll be reunited with Stacy and Claire as well as our good friend John who lives in Newcastle.  We will then have a few days together in Dundee/St. Andrews before Claire heads off to school and Stacy and I head down to Edinburgh.  Unfortunately, the night in Edinburgh will be our last together for 5 weeks as the next day as Stacy travels back to Sacramento and I'm off on my Central European adventure.

Of course, this begs the questions as to why we're travelling our separate ways.  The reason is that Stacy recently started a new job and has no vacation time, whereas I have recently gone out on my own and have the ability to work remotely.   Since I was already in Europe, and travelling within Europe is dirt-cheap (thank you Ryan Air!)  I decided to pick a place that was inexpensive to fly to and a place I've never been to before.  So, hello Zadar Croatia and thank you Ryan Air for that $95 flight!  My original plan was to stay a couple of extra weeks, but Stacy enthusiastically encouraged me to stay longer (hmm... maybe a little too enthusiastically) so two weeks became 3, 3 became 4 and then eventually 5 with the result being Slovenia, Montenegro, and Hungary added to the mix of counties I've will be visiting.  And given that Italy and Bosnia were only a sight detour out of my planned driving route, I hopefully will be "visiting" Italy and Bosnia as well.

So the trip is now officially underway as I'm about to check in for my Wow airline flight from San Francisco to Keflavik.   Hopefully my next post will be in Keflavik.