Tag Archives: Krka National Park

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Chasing lakes and waterfalls in Aus-cro-slo-aus… part seven

As I mentioned in a previous post, Bill and I gave serious consideration to trying for a visit to the Krka National Park on Sunday. It was located within a two hour’s drive of where we were staying in Croatia, and we had nothing else planned. But when we went to try to buy online tickets for the park, they were all sold out. I suppose we could have shown up at the park and tried to buy a ticket on the spot, but that would have been a risky proposition, given how far away the park was from our accommodation. We were also considering this plan BEFORE we knew how tired and sore we were going to be on Sunday morning.

What we ended up doing was buying tickets to go back to the Plitvice Lakes on Sunday, only we planned to enter through entrance 2, which is on the other side of the park. To be honest, when we got back to the house late Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t really wanting to go back to the park on Sunday. Duje, the Croatian caretaker, had suggested it. But Saturday evening, I was just really tired, stiff, sore, and hungry. Bill cooked, which put me in a worse mood, not because he’s a terrible cook, but because I had a real craving for barbecue and would have preferred takeout. I love and appreciate Bill very much, but sometimes he’s makes productions out of things that don’t need to be overthought… or overwrought.

We woke up on Sunday to warmer temperatures and clearer skies. I knew I wouldn’t need to bundle up like I did on Saturday. And I also knew that I would not be walking all over the park. Instead, we walked to the boat area closest to the entrance and just sat down on a bench. We listened to the wind and the waterfalls, and watched people set off on the massive hike we did on Saturday from the other side of the park. I watched ducks beg for food, and people rented boats and paddled around. Maybe we should have rented a boat, too, although we were both really sore.

Just sitting at the park, sipping Croatian beer, talking to each other, and enjoying the natural beauty was enough. I realized that Duje was right. It is worth it to spend two days at the park. Maybe it would have been better to do two shorter walks over both days instead of the super long one on Saturday. But, again, I didn’t have a concept of what the park was like until we went there. If we ever go back, I might plan differently. I want to go to the Krka National Park first, though. Check out this scenery…

This video was made by drone. I’m sure the park forbids drones, just as they are forbidden at Plitvice.

I’m sorry we missed our opportunity to visit this park on the Krka River. But now we have a great reason to visit again. We still got some beautiful photos on our second day, too. Have a look.

  • The boats where people are taken to other parts of the park. We knew that if we got on one, we would be committed…
  • And after the seven mile Saturday hike, I felt like I needed to be committed…
  • We still made a show of looking at the map.
  • Look carefully for the waterfall. It was our music.
  • Once again, Bill is moved by the scenery.

It was almost lunchtime, so I decided to have a Croatian beer… As you can see by the first photo, Bill was amused.

  • Some people were rowing. We didn’t see anyone doing this the day prior.
  • In fact, it seemed like the park was quieter.
  • It was a good decision to come into a different entrance, since we didn’t see this area on Saturday.
  • The Croatians make decent beer, too.
  • That K route is a killer…

We only stayed at the park for an hour or so, then went to get lunch at a local roadside restaurant I kept noticing. I took a few parting shots before we made our way to Vila Velabita for hearty, authentic Croatian food.

  • On the way back.

We probably should have gone to Vila Velabita on Saturday, as they had the kind of food I was craving after our long hike. I am glad we stopped on Sunday, so I could try smoked chicken. Bill had sausages made with beef and pork. We finished with an espresso for him, and locally made brandy for me.

  • Another shot of the ruined church…
  • And the mountainside near our rental house.
  • Bill has been studying Carl Jung, so he was delighted to find book by Jung in Croatian in the house. It was inscribed by Duje.
  • More Croatian beer. I especially liked the dark one.
  • Some very fresh local bread served with pumpkinseed oil, a local delicacy.
  • Yum!
  • Bill had pork and beef sausages with red pepper sauce.
  • I had a deboned chicken leg and thigh, smoked, and served with a creamy, smokey sauce.
  • Dessert… 😉
  • They had “veal under the bell”, which I kept seeing advertised. It must be excellent, although I try to avoid eating veal.
  • I’d go back again.

Monday morning, we awoke to a glorious sunrise. I’d had a look at the forecast for Slovenia and figured it might be the last we’d see of the sun for the week, so I took some pictures. We loaded up the car, cleaned up the house, and Bill went over to Duje’s house to hand off the keys. While he was giving the keys to the caretaker, Bill mentioned the Jung book he found, which was inscribed by Duje. He told Duje that he was also a student of Jung’s. Duje smiled and said, “You’ll come back next year.”

Maybe we will… I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Croatia is officially wonderful. Below are a few parting shots of Croatia.

  • Golden trees…
  • We were very close to Bosnia.
  • Maybe next time, we can cross the border.
  • I’m not sure the liquor ads make these socialist era buildings any more appealing…
  • We bought cheese and honey at a rest stop. We also bought a mug and a magnet for my collection. I was right about the sun. This was also probably where we should have had lunch…

Stay tuned for part eight.

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Chasing lakes and waterfalls in Aus-cro-slo-aus… part five

Friday morning, we woke up to fog and chilly weather. On Thursday night, I had turned on The Crown, Netflix’s series about the British Royal Family. I had seen all of the episodes, but Bill hadn’t, so we quickly got hooked. While we ate breakfast, we watched another episode of The Crown as we made our plans for our time in Croatia. In retrospect, we should have made more of an effort to make plans before we got to Croatia, but I think COVID and the uncertainty of what might happen at any border, kind of made of reluctant to book ahead.

I knew we definitely wanted to see the lakes, but it wasn’t possible for us to visit on Friday. Visitors can purchase tickets online at least 24 hours in advance or at the gate on the day of the visit– but tickets can only be bought on site if the tickets haven’t already sold out. We had already tried to buy tickets for the Krka River National Park and found them sold out online, which is why we didn’t also visit there during our trip. In retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t buy tickets for the other park. I’ll explain why in the next post.

So we decided to take a drive, eat lunch in a restaurant, and have a look around. That wasn’t a bad compromise, as there were a lot of leaves changing color. There are also some sites nearby that, if we had been more curious, we might have stopped and looked at. I was content to enjoy very fresh trout, likely from the lakes, which I could see were brimming with fish.

First, we had to find a restaurant that was open. We stopped at one place, but Bill said he didn’t have any Kuna, which is the Croatian currency. Although Croatia is a very card friendly place, we found our in Wels, Austria that not every place takes credit cards. The Greek restaurant where we ate was a cash only establishment. So Bill decided to look for an ATM, only to find TWO of them at the first restaurant and at the place next to it. We ended up eating at Plitvice Holiday Resort, which had a huge menu, friendly service, and it looked like a lot of lodging options, particularly for active types.

The cheerful blonde waitress spoke excellent English and happily brought us a couple of Croatian beers while we decided on lunch. For me, it was easy… I was having trout. Bill decided to have pork skewers. Unfortunately, both dishes came with mushrooms in the garnishes. I noticed that the Croatians are very fond of mushrooms, which is not fun for a person with mycophobia. The restaurant at the resort got mixed reviews, but we had a good experience there. We also enjoyed watching the Croatians at a neighboring table. The wine was flowing very freely, even though it was early afternoon.

  • This was just the beginning…
  • of all the beautiful scenery we saw.
  • Lots to choose from!
  • I really enjoyed the fresh trout, which came with potatoes mashed with spinach. I’d never had this side before, but I really enjoyed it. We should try it at home.
  • I liked Bill’s dish, too. The pork was excellent, and I love potato coins, because I’m sad to say that I like plain food.
  • For dessert, I had cherry strudel. Strudel was everywhere in all three countries! But I only found the cherry variety in Croatia.
  • Bill had berries with vanilla cream.
  • Nice place, and we had good weather.

After lunch, we kept driving for awhile, checking out the beautiful scenery and interesting scenes in what was once a socialist country that most Americans couldn’t visit. Having lived in the former Soviet Union, I am kind of fascinated by Eastern Europe, especially when there are still signs of the past. Slovenia doesn’t look at all like it was once part of Yugoslavia. It’s very westernized. But Croatia still has some reminders of the past. As you can see from the photos below, I concentrated mostly on the natural beauty of the region.

  • The pictures don’t really do it justice.

It was almost dark when we got back to the house. It was chilly and the wind was blowing. We were almost out of wood, so Bill went over to the caretaker’s house to ask where the wood was. He ended up getting invited over for homemade brandy. He called me, and I went over to the caretaker’s house. We sat outside, drank brandy, and talked. It turned out brandy was the only spirit the caretaker, name of Duje, would drink. He told us he had once been a pilot for Yugoslavia, and had flown all over the world to places in Africa and South America. He met his wife in Belgrade, and they eventually moved to Korenica, where they’ve been since 1968.

Duje showed us some of his hunting trophies, as well as the chickens he keeps. He has a couple of dogs, a small black one that had a house in his front yard, and a larger black one who was penned up near the chickens. We saw the bigger dog frolicking in the field behind the house one morning. I felt a little sorry for him. He seemed lonely.

Duje’s wife, whom he called “Babba”, was adorable. She brought out cookies and made Turkish coffee for us. At one point, Duje shouted for her attention. He muttered that she doesn’t hear so well anymore. But she does make a hell of a fire. After we visited, she came back to the house with us, helped Bill gather wood, and made us another roaring fire in the fireplace! We got back to watching The Crown and enjoyed Croatian wines and snacks, since lunch filled us up. Maybe we should have tried to do more on Friday, but there’s something to be said for resting and soaking up the atmosphere… especially since Saturday was the opposite of restful!

I love how, on our travels, we somehow always manage to meet interesting people. When we lived near Stuttgart, we heard many stories from Greeks who had prestigious careers before they came to Germany and opened Greek restaurants. Our old friend, the late “Mad Scientist” in Entringen, had been an engineer in Canada before love brought him to Germany. And the proprietor at the Greek restaurant at the Sportsplatz in our old town of Jettingen had been a pilot for Lufthansa. He had a Korean wife. Probably met her in his flying days… but who knows?

Anyway, Duje and his wife are now country folks who are lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of Croatia. We were glad to meet them and share brandy with them. We probably would not have had that experience at a hotel in a bigger town.

Stay tuned for part six, which will feature beautiful photos… and many complaints about my aging and aching body.

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trip planning

Chasing lakes and waterfalls in Aus-cro-slo-aus… part one

So much natural beauty… almost all to ourselves…

I may live to regret titling this particular trip series as I have. At the moment, I’m having trouble coming up with a snappy name for my latest vacation blog series. It might be because my brain is still scrambled by the whirlwind of four countries Bill and I have traversed since October 26th. It could also be because the time has changed. Additionally, I’m still a bit peeved about today’s lunch, which I’ll probably bitch about on my other blog, since I like to keep the travel blog somewhat “PG-rated”.

People who regularly follow this blog may know that Bill and I finally took our 2021 vacation. It was not a small undertaking to plan this trip, or even decide where to go. Gone are the days when we could just choose a destination on a whim. These days, we have to pay attention to COVID-19 rules and regulations, which seem to change daily, as well as infection trends. I feel like I’m back at South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control, working for the Bureau of Epidemiology, where it was once my job to translate the results of chronic disease trend statistics into laymen’s terms. Thanks to my current career as an “overeducated housewife”, those days are long behind me… or, at least I don’t get paid to do them anymore.

As of about an hour ago, our vacation ended, as we walked into our house and I caught a whiff of the rotting avocado and mozzarella cheese in the refrigerator. At first, I was afraid someone forgot to flush the toilet before we left town! The dogs will be picked up in a couple of hours; hopefully, they are both fine. I sure have missed them… I really mean that, even though taking them with us on trips isn’t exactly easy to do, especially now that we have big Noyzi, and Arran has become a cranky old codger.

So how did I choose a trip to Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia, then back to Austria? At first, it wasn’t in the plans. Originally, I had been looking at going to The Netherlands. I kept getting enticing ads on Facebook, particularly for a very upscale looking property in Zeeland. I must admit that the prospect of enjoying some legal weed was also somewhat appealing. But then I started thinking about how much I’d like to go to France and Belgium, too. I started trying to design an itinerary that would allow us to get the most bang for our bucks and the time Bill got off from work. I kept getting bogged down in and frustrated by minutiae, as I realized that the places I wanted to go weren’t all that convenient to each other. Accommodations were also kind of pricey. And then, I had a sudden flashback to 2015, when our return to Europe was still new and exciting…

Several years ago, when COVID-19 was a mere nightmarish fantasy in the back of a mad scientist’s or Hollywood screenplay writer’s most warped mind, I saw an enticing video on YouTube made by a user who called herself heyannalise. She made entertaining clips about traveling in Europe. Back in May 2015, she made one about her visit to the Krka National Park in Croatia. I was enchanted by the scenery in her video, which I am sharing below…

No… this is not where we went. I tried to get us tickets to the Krka National Park, but was unsuccessful. You have to buy them at least a day in advance, and all of the tickets were sold out for when we were in Croatia and had time to go… We will try to come back for an experience like Annalise had.

Somehow, even though I was enthralled by Annalise’s video, Bill and I never got around to visiting Croatia, even though we’ve now been in Europe for ages… I kept meaning to go, and we did once take a “joyride” to Pula, Croatia while we were visiting Trieste, Italy in May 2016. But we never managed to actually book a real trip there that involved staying overnight. Time moved on from 2015, and I pushed thoughts of Croatia to the back burner, even though my Croatian friend, Boris, who organizes trips to Croatia, kept wanting me to go and blog about the experience. The timing just never seemed to work out for us, or there was somewhere else I wanted to see that was more pressing or convenient.

As I was planning our most recent trip, thinking about France, Belgium, and The Netherlands, I couldn’t help noticing a nagging thought in the back of my head, reminding me how much I had been wanting to visit Croatia to see waterfalls and lakes. Since I managed to nag Bill into taking a lot of days off work, I realized that we finally had enough time to really enjoy ourselves and see a lot, and that meant it made sense to finally take the plunge and go to Croatia. I also knew I could break up the trip into manageable and affordable blocks, and that was a real plus. My days of wanting to drive eight hours straight to cram in life experiences are long done, and I don’t need much encouragement to overspend on fancy hotels. I also have no desire to fly during the age of COVID-19 unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.

By the time I was ready to go to Croatia, I had forgotten where Annalise had actually gone. I went on Google and started searching… and somehow, instead of Krka National Park, I wound up finding the Plitvice Lakes. Now… there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with going to Croatia just to see the Plitvice Lakes. They are stunning and mesmerizing, and you will definitely get plenty of exercise and fill your camera with exquisite photos of magical scenery. But we were down there for four nights, and Krka National Park is only about a 90 minute drive from where we stayed. It would have been nice to combine the two experiences, although now we have a good reason to visit Croatia again and do a LOT more exploring. It really is a beautiful and easy to travel country, especially for English speakers. And… we haven’t been to the coast yet, to see all the towns that tourists flock to during the summer months. We have a good reason to go back to Croatia, now.

Anyway, once I’d decided on Croatia, it was time to plan for a visit somewhere else within proximity. I recalled that while we were visiting Trieste in 2016, we also visited Lake Bled in Slovenia. I remember being totally enchanted by beautiful Lake Bled and the other areas in Slovenia we visited on that trip. I also specifically remembered Slovenians telling Bill and me that we should visit Lake Bohinj, as it was even better than Bled is, and less touristy. Realizing that Bohinj was maybe 4 or 5 hours from the Plitvice Lakes area, I determined that it would be a great second stop on our trip. We could spend another four nights there.

The cities where we chose our visits in Austria were mostly down to being practical. We decided to stop in Wels, Austria on the way down to Croatia because it was about halfway to where our final destination would be, and Bill and I didn’t want to stay in Linz or Passau, which are cities we’ve both already visited. Ditto to our stop in Salzburg. Every time we’ve gone to Slovenia– we also went to Kranjska Gora, Slovenia last year to pick up Noyzi— we’ve stopped in Salzburg, because it’s convenient. It’s also a great town to visit, although on our other two trips, we’ve only spent a night there and neglected to properly enjoy the city.

  • This is the very delicious ham and asparagus meal that I ate in Salzburg in May 2012…

We did take a day trip to Salzburg in May 2012, when we did our very first military hop, and we got to see the city on that trip. But we visited Salzburg from Munich instead of staying there overnight, and that sharply limited our ability to see a lot. I also remember getting caught in a sudden late spring thunderstorm that day, so we ended up ducking back into the restaurant where we had lunch (ham and asparagus with Hollandaise Sauce), and drinking lots of beer and Schnapps! I remember the proprietor was quite pleased with us giving him more business. I think that restaurant has since closed down, which is a pity. We sure enjoyed going there.

Ever since that day trip in 2012, I had been wanting to go back to Salzburg. Russian buskers had made me cry there, and I saw some beautiful Friesian horses… But every time we’ve stayed in Salzburg overnight, we’ve been rushing to or from somewhere else, so this time, I decided we’d spend two nights.

With all of the cities chosen, I went looking for places to stay. Wels, Austria, it turns out, is a very pleasant and attractive city, but it’s not particularly exciting or noteworthy. I noticed they had catfish there. There are museums to see, and the downtown area is nice. But I didn’t find any cute places to rent. Consequently, we ended up booking Hotel Ploberger for two nights, which is supposedly the best hotel in town. I was amused by their very aggressive sales tactics, right on their own Web site. For the other three stops, I booked homes privately managed by hosts I found on Booking.com. Not only was that safer in terms of COVID-19, it was also more convenient. Lake Bohinj and the Plitvice Lakes areas are both chock full of apartments and homes to rent. I would say there are more private residences for renting than hotel rooms, although they do exist. And in Salzburg, I chose to rent a place owned by a musician/music producer. That was mainly because I am myself a musician. I will write a lot more about all of the properties as the series gets underway… and as we were gone for twelve nights, it’s bound to be a long one.

We had a fantastic time on our trip, and I look forward to detailing the blow by blow, even if Bill and I are the only ones who read it. So, now that the introduction is done, on with my blog series on the trip down to Aus-Cro-Slo-Aus. Hope you enjoy the ride.

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