Marci and Steve Go Back to Europe

An Islamic Call to Prayer on Yom Kippur Turkish Airlines, how exotic. Flying to Istanbul and expecting to feel a bit like crossing Gibraltar to Tangiers years ago. We fly in a roomy Airbus, and are served lunch on a two hour flight! We arrive and for the first time ever, we are looking for someone holding up a sign with our name and we spot him, a young man, and the sign says Marli Schwartz. We are whisked to a car, complete with a small Turkish rug, and forty five minutes later we arrive, near but not quite at our hotel. We are stuck close by in a traffic jam.   Our driver makes a quick call and then stops. The driver opens our door and the bellhop from our hotel magically appears, to carry our luggage and walk us to the hotel about a block away, no use waiting for traffic to clear, it could be while and there is an entire BIG city waiting to be explored. As we register, we are served apple tea and the requisite Turkish Delight , juicy and pistachio laden. We quickly dump our stuf...

Plitvice Lakes,  Rainout and Blackout About 90 minutes into our drive from Zadar to Plitvice Lakes, we are up in the mountains again, this time, the interior of Croatia. It is green and beautiful as we roll past some old tanks from the war and wonder again, just how close are we to all of those unexploded thousands of land mines still left lying around.  The mountain scenery is a bit eerie with smoky, foggy, misty looking clouds with the mountain peaks popping out above making us feel on top of the world, albeit not a sunny one. We roll into Grabovac, right up to our Turista Hotel which turns out to be half hotel, half campsite. There are tents and camper vans and RVs and wooden cabins, #118 just for us.  >>>Stock Photo- NOT this nice day when we arrive! Our reception hostess walks us to our cabin, opens the door and as she is leaving casually remarks, 'oh, tomorrow we will have no electricity from 8 - 5, the whole area had a problem and they need to fix it'. It ...

The Magic Bells of Sukosan (and stayed tuned below for the WTF #7 Answer) Tuesday night , a quick walk around the harbor to recon the two pizzerias in town for dinner. We choose the 'green chair' Mjav and share a plain with onions vowing to make the next few days a bit lower key for food. I even goes sans alcohol before we head home (which we can see from our dinner table) and fall asleep, setting the alarm for  seven am . Sleeping like a dead person, as usual, Steve wakes me  at two am  to the sound of the church bells, only 100 meters away, ringing loud and clear and non-stop. We step outside to lots of lightening and thunder and the bells keep ringing. We have no idea what is going on. We think perhaps there is an emergency, a fire, or another Balkan revolution, but the baker next door is hard at work on his bread and pastry for the morning, so we figure nothing is really amiss. And the bells keep ringing and ringing and ringing, so LOUDLY that I am not sure how we act...

OK - It's been a while...time to play the "Guess WTF This Is". CLUE: seen only in Croatia. Some are plain, some are fancy....  Here's a plain style: And here is a fancy one: And another: Here's the rules: 1- WHAT is it, and why are they needed? >>>>>>>Must answer both parts <<<<<<< 2 - MAX of 3 guesses 3- Contest ends when the first person correctly answers both parts, or 48 hours after this game posts. PRIZE to winner of a jar of Croatian Honey......mmmm, mmmm. Thanks in advance for playing. Steve Schwartz

Rogozvica in the Rain This morning, for the first time since our early days in Paris ( 15 weeks ago..!), we wake up to cloudy skies and a forecast of rain. We hop on the free bikes at our villa and bike into the harbor, maybe a kilometer away, for some coffee and breakfast. While waiting for my omelet, the very light drizzle starts, and the awnings are unfurled to keep us outside and dry.  We watch as a boat pulls in and docks. It is a small cruise, maybe 20 people, with the top deck filled with bicycles. We watch as the passengers, in bike shorts, hop off and the three bike valets hand each bike down over the rails. We watch the bikers climb on and take off and then we watch the boat pull out. Hmmmmm... We figure it out and we love it. Not a van supported biking trip but a sailboat supported biking trip. The bikers are off for the day to later arrive in a new small port, the boat there ready and waiting. Probably a late afternoon sail and swim and then an evening in a small town w...

Traveling Big, Seeking Small There are so many ways you change over four months of travel. Some are permanent, some fleeting and some....last a bit before you fall back into your 'normal' life, I am guessing. One of the most unique things about BIG (long and lengthy) travel is how over time you seek smaller and smaller places, with less and less tourists, until you find you are seeking a tiny town, on a tiny beach, with only a lone beach bar. Perhaps it is because you can't do museums and metros for 120 days straight, you don't want to gain twenty pounds from one star Michelins, and you no longer feel like a tourist, so why be with so many. And so we have reached the point in our journey, 100 days in, where although we are this moment ferrying into Split, Croatia, we will drive our car off the ferry and immediately head west to find some small village with a b and b, a simple konoba for dinner and hopefully a deserted beach. For the first time, we have no hotel and no p...