Saturday, September 27, 2014

Stamps in your passport

   Hello Everyone ! I say this, like there are more than 10 people that actually read this blog...ohh well Hi everyone!
   Just a couple things first off before we get started, I still can't help but feel that every time that we get into a taxi, we're just getting ripped off. We have had some very nice taxi drivers and I'm sure all of them are not ripping us off, but I really wouldn't be suprised if the majority of them were.
  I spend at least half of the time when we are walking around places, watching where I am stepping, cause... there's lots of dog poop everywhere. I wasn't sure at first, not about the poop, but about the amount of pet dogs people have here, and maybe people walk their dogs more here. But lots of dogs, no bags...lots of poop..excellent.
   Ok, so we are in Ljubljana, yeah try to pronounce that one, the capital of Slovenia, we just got here yesterday, it's all very pretty so far. But Glen how did you get there? What's been happening since you last wrote? What exciting things have been happening? I'm so happy you asked. So when we last spoke, we were in Kotor. So we hopped on a bus there meaning to go to Dubrovnik, but the bus was actually going as far as Split, which is where we wanted to go, so cool. We got off the bus, walked around the corner to the ferry dock and caught the boat to Trogir.
  We had done a day trip earlier with the kids to Trogir, but we thought it might be nice to stay for a few days and explore a little more. Ok soooooo... one of the people that actually reads this blog is Carrie, and I'm not sure how much of this I disclosed. One day in Trogir, we decided to rent a scooter. I have never driven a scooter before, much less with 2 people on it, but I mean it's just basically a bicycle with a lawnmower engine in it, how hard could it be? Ok it's not that hard, but whew! I was nervous. So we are going down this hill, that is basically straight down and of course dead ends. So Carrie gets off the scooter and I start   to turn the scooter around and all of a sudden there is a solar flare and the magnetic field on Trogir shifts and the scooter falls over, embarrassed for the solar flare, I quickly pick up the scooter, and gun it up the hill. Back on the scooter we drive to the end of the island and stop at a beach. We open up the compartment on the back off the scooter to get our stuff out and.... ta dah no stuff, money, id, bus tickets, lots of good stuff not there. Minor panic episode, ok get back on the scooter, drive back to the site of the solar flare, get lost momentarily, find our way, back down the hill and ...ta dah just like we had left it there, all our good stuff... whew. Not the most relaxing day ever.
  So from Trogir we took a bus to Opatjia and then hopped a bus the next day to Mali Losinj, an island off the Croatian coast. Mali Losinj is a very beautiful small town, lots of touristy stuff to do, but to be honest I was looking for a place to dive. So we checked out the 2 dive shops, only one was going out on dives, so that made the choice easy. Nice dive, nice people, good shop, that's all you can ask for.
  From Mali Losinj we made our way to Pula, on the mainland of Croatia. Nice town, but for me, it was the first place where they had parking spaces that people used and no one parked on the sidewalks, amazing.
  So we hadn't planned on going to Italy, but what the heck, on a 5 hour bus ride you can go from Croatia, through Slovenia and into Italy. I'm all in baby, so off to Trieste we go! Trieste is wonderful, expensive, which is sort of what we expected. By the way, this whole low season, cheaper prices thing, where ever it is, it's hiding from us. I spent a whole day there looking for a dive shop, lots of exercise, no diving. So back inland for us for the last couple of weeks, we actually spent the day at the underground caves at Postojna, totally amazing. I'm going to post some pictures on facebook, it will give you an idea of their amazingness.
  Just a couple of other things that I noticed; for some reason we couldn't find ramen in Kotor,only in Croatia do they charge you to put your luggage on the bus, does nobody eat celery here? not that we looked for it all the time, but it was scarce. I don't really want to know why this is... but yogurt in all the countries we've been to except Italy and Slovenia, has been pretty liquidy. I remember meeting this guy in Budapest and he was saying how Budapest was OK, but the best thing about the city was the free subway system they had, which of course, just meant he wasn't paying for the subway. I have noticed most of the public transit systems here are "honor system" unlike  Canada and the US, I wonder why that is?
  OK that's all I got for now, love and warm thoughts from Ljubljana

Carrie and Glen



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