Europe 2019 – Plitvic to Split via Zagreb

The next leg of our journey took us past Zagreb so we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit the capital.

In our minds this would be a coffee drinking adventure, slowly meandering from one street cafe to another, chatting to locals and soaking up the atmosphere. Obviously the reality was a little different.

One of the additional challenges we have with finding city centre parking is a trailer with 4 bikes making the van very long, and pretty tricky to squeeze in to on street parking and it’s also just too high for most car parks which seem to have height barriers around here. So after what felt like an hour of searching we found a space that worked outside the police station.

Zagreb is impressive and definitely worth spending more than a couple of hours exploring.

We did manage to make it for coffee, though Ollie announced he needed lasagne and as it had been a few days since he’d eaten anything other than cereal and jam sandwiches it seemed like a good idea. Tom of course had to join in with pizza so a quick coffee stop turned into a full lunch stop.

And yes that is a gravy boat with ketchup.

We managed to do a bit of sightseeing, the market was usual bags, scarves & flip flops (I know someone that would suit very well 😉 JD). The cathedral is massive, the tallest building in Croatia.

Another tram trip back to the van (we are accomplished tram travellers now) and we’re on our way again.

Plitvic lakes national parks next stop, our campsite was something else. Part of the national park it was stunning. Lagoons and wooden bridges between the different areas of the site.

Crazy golf for the boys

A giant hammock over the lagoon to just lie on and study the water underneath or the forest canopy above.

And open air cinema to complete the chilled out bliss of this site. If we’d known how special it was we’d have done more than a stopover!

Early start the next day. Throwing everything in the van to get to Plitvic lakes. You really need to book 2 days in advance with one hour time slots but we hadn’t planned that far ahead, live availability was showing a few hundred tickets available at 9.00 so off we sped. It turns out a few hundred tickets isn’t enough so we gave up on Plitvic and headed south!