When my husband and I decided that we should celebrate our
tenth anniversary by going Europe, we initially were looking at places like
London, Paris, Tuscany, Prague, and Berlin. We also discussed Scandinavia. In
the initial shopping around phase, we tried to find good deals and packages
that would make the whole trip easy. We found a lot of great stuff, but nothing
that made us ready to jump and buy tickets. In the midst of googling around and
day dreaming about our trip, I can across a blog somewhere (I have not a clue
where) that mentioned Croatia as a “top ten place to visit before you die” or
some such dramatic headline. It looked beautiful and sounded intriguing, so I
immediately started collecting information on it.
To be frank, I was not even
sure where Croatia was located. I learned as much as I could, and decided to
try and convince my husband that it was a good plan. I showed him pictures of
beautiful beaches and read descriptions of the landscape and cities. While he
was skeptical at first, he eventually agreed that Croatia sounded like it might
be fun.
Next came booking the trip. I had dates in mind, so I used a
great website called Hipmunk to track flight prices. As it turned out, most
flights to Croatia from the United States are kind of shitty, meaning that they
take a very long time due to layovers of ten plus hours. That got me a little
nervous. Persistence did pay off, though. I was able to book a great flight
(very short layover, which I will discuss more later) in Zurich, then on to
Split, Croatia. While it would be easier to return from a different Croatian
city, the best deal was to fly back out of Split. It was cheaper and easier for
us to fly out of Boston, but anyone from this area should look at both Boston
and New York when booking Europe as prices do vary.
We were initially very unsure on where to stay, what places
to visit, and how to approach Croatia. We had no clue about things like whether
to rent a car, what type of accommodations to look for, and how long to plan
for each destination. We thought that it might be easier to use a travel agent
for that, so we did attempt that. I will not mention any names here, but the
agency was a mixed bag. They did offer services which sounded appealing, such
as having someone available in Croatia to handle any problems that come up. But
it was just not a love connection. The prices were higher than what I was
seeing online, and the agent was not supportive of our plan to rent a car. He
was a bit critical of the time we planned to go, as well as of our plan to fly
into and out of the same city.
After extensive hemming and hawing, we decided
to book everything ourselves and to stick with the rental car. I felt bad because he had priced out the vacation twice for
us based on our changed plans, and I ended up telling him that we had to
postpone our trip, rather than confess that I did not want to book with him.
Hopefully the internets will not bring him here to this tiny blog, but if it
does, I am sorry!
Some of the most helpful resources for planning were the
Rick Steves book on the region, another travel guide called _, and Trip
Advisor. Once I became familiar with these, I felt much more like I could plan
this myself and be fine. While we were committed to the rental car, I was still
very nervous about it – luckily, ,y worries proved baseless, and I will
give more details on that below. Unless you are really short on time before
your trip, I would encourage you to book yourself because there is a ton of
good information out there to guide you.
Our itinerary was
as follows:
Day One: Arrive at 2pm, rent car, drive to first hotel in
Brela.
Day Two: Drive to Dubrovnik
Days Three to Five: Stay in Dubrovnik with some day trips
Day Six: Bosnia
Day Seven: Drive to Krka National Park; sleep in Trogir near
airport
Day Eight: Return home
Each day will be discussed in a separate post.
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