Because it was still dark and cloudy we all slept in until 9am. Jay had been up until 2:30am - he said "I started watching this show, Outlander, it's awesome". I've read the books and haven't seen any of the show so I thought this was great maybe I can catch up and then we can watch it together - no, he watched 6 episodes!
We checked out of the apartment at 10am and are off to Plitvicka Lakes in KRKA National Park today.
Split is still pretty depressed, it hasn't been revitalized with the exception of the Old Town area with tourism dollars yet. Our Host, Ana, said that all the time new restaurants and shops are opening because of the tourism, so that's good news for Split. The old town square was the nicest we've been to so far.
It's about a 3 hour drive to Plitvicka, so the plan was to get all the way there before stopping for lunch, but Jay started to get hungry after about an hour and a half so the next town on the water we saw from the highway, Maslenica, we got off and drove towards the water to see if we could find a cafe to eat at.
I should mention too that Jay has done ALL the driving this vacation. He who never drives on vacation!
Lunch was good. Jay and I both had schnitzel (I had pork and he had chicken) and Mark ordered the house specialty, gnocchi with beef filet and sauce. He asked the server about the sauce, if it was a tomato sauce?.. The server said he couldn't really explain the sauce but it's the house specialty, it takes them 2 days to stew it and it's very good so Mark ordered it. Then all day he complained that he didn't know it was going to have a beef filet on it. Finally Jay said "It's almost like it should have said on the menu gnocchi with beef filet" and Mark said " I should have just stopped him when he said he couldn't really explain it". We laughed and I commented "Yeah, I'll have the adventure meal". Turned out it was very good, the sauce on the gnocchi tasted like gravy, so the whole thing tasted like poutine..with beef filet.
We arrived at our guest house and got settled and decided to do the lower portion of the lakes this afternoon. I had read reviews that it was best to go into the lakes area right at opening, 7am, or later in the afternoon because most of the tours hadn't arrived yet or had left already.
View from the trail above.
Then down we go in order to get to the lower boardwalk and the "Big Waterfall". I'll mention again my legs are f'en killing me and I'm walking downhill and down stairs like I have a diaper full of crap on. Down is way worse than up.
We finished the lower loop. And avoided most groups, but not all..
At least they were going the other way! I said to Mark "This is the reason why we come late and why we'll get up early tomorrow, because if we had to deal with this all afternoon Jay would be totally done after 5 minutes"
It was so beautiful there, I'm glad we included it in the trip.
After returning to the hotel, Guest House Plitvicka, we decided we would go out for dinner at 7:30, which would give us an hour and a half to relax. Jay hopped on the bed and pulled out his iPad and got the spinning wheel of death trying to load Netflix up.
He finally got it loaded because I gave him my side of the bed, which had better wifi, and I turned to him and asked "When your 7mins is up can you massage my legs?" And when his show was over asked "Can you get the cream?" And when he got the cream asked "Can you warm it up?" That's when I got the "look" I was going for. Needless to say the cream was not warmed up and when Jay put his hands on my legs he said "That's cold!"
It hurts so much. I was giggling it hurt so much. Weird I know. I'm not sure it helped either so I put myself, and Jay, through that for nothing.
We also noticed the architecture here, inland 3 hours, is much different. It's no longer a Mediterranean style but Jay said reminded him of Austria.
We had a really nice dinner at a cafe down the road about 8km. Mark is stunned by TripAdvisor and the internet and finding all these great little places. It is pretty amazing and I'm sure the restaurants and tour places could tell you exactly when they started getting reviews and more and more travellers arriving to their businesses.
After dinner we went back to the house, which has 9 rooms, for bed. It's an early morning tomorrow to get to the lakes for 7am after checking out.
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