Family Fun

      Hi all, it’s been a while since I wrote. I did have a pretty good excuse… having lots of fun with family. So let’s see, since I last wrote we had just moved to Milni , just south of Dubrovnik. A very nice small seaside town, apparently a favorite vacation spot for the Croatian army, so it saw , and you can still see  some damage to buildings from the war here 20 years ago. Actually almost everywhere we have been , you can see evidence of war, it’s sort of hard to wrap your mind around the thought that people were dying  here just 20 years ago in a bloody civil war.

   Ok this is how it started, this is so fantastic to me, I am just amazed and glad that we were able to pull it off.  On Tuesday June 17^th, Carrie and I went to the Dubrovnik airport to meet our nephew Tyler Williams from  New Zealand, via Portugal and France. 2 hours later, David arrived from Nicaragua via Norway. The next day we moved to a house in Dubrovnik and Maggie, Sean’s mother from New Jersey met us at the house and finally…. Later that night,  Sean, Erica , Cora  came in from California via Moldova where they had been visiting Kate for a few days, and then hopping on the same plane as Sean, Erica and  Cora, Kate also made her way to Croatia. So here we are 8 adults and a baby, together in this beautiful country, ready to have some fun.

   I don’t want to go into great detail about what we did for the next couple of weeks, and we have posted a lot of pictures on facebook, which I think will give you a pretty good idea of what we were up to. I do want to talk about cooking and eating though. Since there were so many of us and some of us, actually most of us were tryng to stay on a budget, cooking was a good option. Not all the restaurants were expensive, just like anywhere, and you could do some baked goods and a cappuccino in the morning quite inexpensively. All 3 of the houses we stayed in had pretty good kitchens and of course they all had the world’s dullest knives, my total pet peeve. I think we all agreed, the nights we cooked, and everyone cooked, we made better food than we could have gotten at a restaurant for at least half the price.  Mushroom risotto, pasta carbonara ( oh my god the Pancetta here is amazing and well… cheap and the Feta! BOOM!)  Gyros, chicken with gremolata, etc. we all ate very well. For me, to have all our family around the dinner table, eating, drinking and having a great time together, means a lot to me.

   So I am sitting on the upper balcony with Carrie in the house on Vis, and I see a gentleman walk out onto his balcony in the house adjacent to ours. I go to say good evening to him and then stop, because I realize I don’t know if he’s a local or a foreigner, so what language do I use? Meanwhile he is no longer looking at me, so I have lost that opportunity. Carrie, who is sitting with her back to the man, has no idea what is going on, she is talking to me and by this time my attention has wondered slightly, this never happens by the way. So imagine Carrie is sitting at the table, talking to me and I am watching the man on the other balcony, take his shirt off and hang it on the line, look at me..I smile, Carrie is still talking to me. He takes his shorts off and hangs those on the line, no looking this time, I look at Carrie and wonder if I should interrupt, and decide not to right now. I look back just in time to see, yes of course, the man taking his underwear off and hanging those on the line…Ta Dah , naked man on the balcony across from us, does it get any better than that? An emphatic NO Then he looks up at me, smiles , waves and goes back inside, waving back never even crossed my somewhat astonished brain…so I did not…love travelling.

               We did do some diving on Vis, I have to say it was kind of disappointing, I was looking forward to diving in Croatia ( OK let’s be honest, I look forward to diving period) It was cold, but we knew it was going to be, it was expensive, but we hoped we could get some sort of deal … we didn’t. We dove 3 times and went to the same dive site all 3 times..lame. We max depthed or close to it all 3 times…again lame. OK I ‘m getting depressed just thinking about the whole experience, only think happy thoughts, only think happy thoughts…so yeah we did some diving in Vis.

     As I write this. we are going through passport control on the train into Hungary. We have decided to spend a lttle or maybe long , time in Budapest. Last night we took the train from Split to Zagreb and we decided to spring for the sleeper car, an extra $40 each. We got a room to ourselves and of course beds! Neither Carrie or I had been on a train in years and the sleeper car was a nice surprise for us, we thought we would just have a bunk bed in the hall somewhere. We left at 10 last night and got into Zagreb around 630am, we stashed our packs in a locker and walked around town for a bit. Walking through the mall by the train station, I found a McDonald’s, OK before you get all whatever, yes I did want an egg mcMuffin.. and I got one, but the nice thing about McDonald’s, when you travel, is that, they all have free WIFI and outlets so you can plug in your stuff before going on a long train ride to Budapest. OK so the train station is great, and it was built in something like 4000 B.C. , but they didn’t have electricity back then, so they didn’t think back then to run conduit through all the rocks and bricks, for all the electrical outlets they will need, so Carrie and Glen can plug in their Ipods, so they can listen to music.

    We both loved Croatia, the country is beautiful, especially  all the little towns on the coast. It is getting kind of sloppy messy with tourists, so going inland for a while, might give us a respite from all the hoardes there vacationing. On the other hand, we are going to a pretty touristy city, might have to start rethinking our plan if we want to get away from the crowds. Well I think that’s enough for now, we should be getting to Budapest in about 4 hours and well it’s past noon now, so….it’s beer time.  

  OK, one more thing. One day while walking back  from the beach in Split, I was thinking about what to make for dinner and thought maybe some tsatziki might be good and that I should remember to pick up some dill if I can find it in the fresh green market. Finding fresh herbs other than parsley has been close to impossible. Literally 3 steps later, there was some wild dill growing out of a crack in the pavement by the side of the road. Hmm guess I can check that off the grocery list. This place is cool…love travelling.

Love and Warm thoughts from Hungary

Carrie and Glen