Rovinj, Croatia

After our two days in Plitvice Lakes, we headed about 4.5 hours west to Rovinj, Croatia.  (Pronounced Rov-een.)

Rovinj is located right on the Adriatic Sea in the Istrian Peninsula and it is still an active fishing port.  For a while it was under Venetian rule and almost 98% of the people that lived there spoke Italian, but is part of Croatia again now.  The oldest part of the town (pictured below) was once an island, until they filled in the canal next to it in 1763.

We ate breakfast at a little café type place overlooking the harbor.  I ordered a hot chocolate and they gave it to me in a Christmas mug.  Haha!  The guy even said Merry Christmas when he gave it to me.  =)  Abbie had a minor major meltdown and had to go back to the car for a bit, but she was ready for a picture with daddy when they got back.  And Ben zonked out during breakfast.

Here’s a typical European breakfast.  They usually have slices of meats and cheeses with bread.  Yes, that is raw bacon in the picture on the right.  I didn’t eat any of it.  Those eggs, however…  I don’t know what they put in them, but they were fantastic!  Abbie ate most of them.

After breakfast we took a few pictures with the good view in the background.  It really is a beautiful city.  The person that took the family picture for us obviously wasn’t big into photography since the old town part is behind our heads and it looks like I’m sitting on a boat.  Oh well.  Better than nothing!

After breakfast we drove around for a good half hour trying to find a bike rental place, which turned out to be 3 minutes from where we ate breakfast.  Go figure.  Abbie loved the bike ride, which was fun, and Ben loved it too, so much that he fell asleep.

The views on the bike ride were beautiful.  There is a huge park just south of old town Rovinj that has lots of walking and biking trails right along the coast.  The coast in Croatia is typically very rocky, but people just go lay on the rocks, which doesn’t look comfortable to me, but it is beautiful.

We decided to stop at this “beach” area to let Abbie play in the water for a bit.

She had a great time looking for the tiny hermit crabs that were everywhere.

And then we tried to get a family photo on the beach, which turned into a disaster.  I didn’t bring the remote shutter release for my camera, so I put it on timer and then ran across the water, trying not to fall on my butt on the slippery rocks, to get into the picture.  First time I didn’t make it.  Tries 2-6 Abbie wasn’t cooperating and I was about ready to strangle her, and then we gave up.  This was the best of them.

After naps, we headed back down to Old Town to check it out.  Abbie lead the way, as usual.

The port was very pretty.  I’m still not sure how they get out to the boats though.  Do they just jump from boat to boat until they get to theirs or what?

I wanted to look at these paintings since Mark and I like to get artwork at some of the places we visit.  Mark didn’t really want to at first, but then he ended up wanting to buy one of them.  They are all original art, which was neat, so we added to our collection.  It’s currently being framed.

This is what the typical menu looks like at restaurants around Rovinj.  Lots of fish since it’s a port city.

Abbie always manages to find the animals and then we have to pry her away from them.

We hiked up to the top of the top where the church is located.  The views on the way up were beautiful, but it was a bit of a hike pushing the kids in the stroller.

We walked down a different way that was more through the town, instead of around the outside of it.  It was neat because the street was all cobblestone and lined with little shops everywhere.

Abbie has to throw money into every fountain she sees now.  We created a bad habit with her when we let her do it once.

Next we decided to eat.  Many restaurants in touristy areas in Europe have picture menus, and then have descriptions in the native language, English, Germany and Italian usually, sometimes French also.

Here’s what we ate.  That salad in the middle is a Greek salad, and I usually don’t like them, but it was REALLY good.  It had some sort of sheep’s cheese, which I always think they mean goat cheese.  But I don’t really like goat cheese, I don’t think, so maybe it is sheep cheese?  Whatever it was, it was amazing and we all loved it.  (My boys don’t look alike at all….)

No one makes him laugh like she does.

After dinner we walked back to the car and took some sunset photos.  Rovinj is a really pretty place and I hope we get to explore more of it some day.

A drive through Croatia

Croatia is another hidden gem in Europe, much like Slovenia.  It is an absolutely gorgeous country with rolling mountains and a beautiful coastline.  I took all of these pictures from the car.

The sign below is how the Croats say Croatia.  “Hrvatska”.  I had NO idea prior to entering the country.  Learn something new every day I guess!

I just couldn’t get enough of the beautiful scenery.  Everywhere you looked there were breath-taking views.

We were stopped on a country road waiting for construction and I snapped this photo.  I really like it!

These were the views when we were driving through Rijeka, otherwise knows as the Croatian Riviera.

Driving through Europe is fun because there are lots of tunnels and big bridges all over the place, and Croatia was no exception.  Abbie likes to scream “Tunnel!!” every time you drive through one.  It’s great…

You can see lots of quaint little towns from the highway, and we passed over a few rivers on our way to Plitvice Lakes also.

So then came the fun part.  Thank God I had printed off driving directions before we left, thinking our GPS might not work in Croatia since it’s been a few (4) years since we’ve updated the maps.  Our GPS ended up being a lot of help….  Not!

It was tough even with the directions printed because the distance on what I printed were in km, and obviously our cars trip odometer is in miles.  So it was a lot of guesstimating as to how far we had to go before the next turn.  And we were thinking we’d be on fairly decent roads since Plitvice has LOTS of visitors every year.  At least ones with lines painted on them.  Wrong.  We were on this road for about 40 miles.  It was very narrow and curvy and it was a little scary when you met an oncoming car.

Our driving directions had told us to turn (vs go straight) so we turned on to this road that was literally not much bigger than a cow path.  We were really wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into at this point and we weren’t sure we’d ever make it to the park.  And the ENTIRE time Mark and I were trying to figure out where we were and where we should be going we had Abbie in the back asking rapid-fire questions.  “Where are we going?”  “Why’d you turn here?”  “What are you doing?”  “Why are we turning around?”  “Why are we going this way?”  “We already went this way.”  “You need to turn there.”  “Go faster.”  As you can imagine, it definitely helps your concentration and nerves to deal with that on top of being lost…

The upside of being lost is that we got to see some more even prettier scenery.  There was a small house overlooking this little valley with the stream running through it.  I wonder what it would be like to live in such a secluded area, but be surrounded by so much beauty.

At this point we knew we were completely lost, but we wanted to see where the road lead, so we continued on until we came across this sign warning us of land mines.  We decided that was a good time to turn around.  Apparently during a war, Croatia was just coated with land mines and it will take lots of years for people to de-activate them all.  We saw quite a few signs on the curvy road that we were on saying beware of the land mines.

Sidenote:  My husband is probably one of the calmest guys on the planet when it comes to being lost (or in general).  He’s always up for an adventure and he never gets crabby when things aren’t going according to plan.  He’s a lot of fun to travel with.  One of the many reasons I love him to death.

As I said in one of my previous posts, Croatia has LOTS of sinkholes.  I’ve never seen landscape like this.  There were parts where it was just one huge sinkhole after another, but they all were old and had grass in them.  But they’re almost perfectly round so they look like a bunch of empty ponds.  It was interesting.

We passed lots of abandoned houses and buildings on our drive on the country road.  Most of them were made of the orange brick and it was hard to tell if they were building them or if they were really old at first.  And then we saw one with a huge hole in the roof so we’re assuming that was from a bomb from the war.  We probably passed 30+ of these houses that were abandoned.

We also passed buildings with lots of bullet holes on the side of them.  It was interesting and eerie to see history up close like that.  I guess I don’t think of past wars that often, accept when I’m passing buildings that have been destroyed by them.  Sad and fascinating all at once.

I truly hope we get to go back to Croatia before we move.  I would love to go to Dubrovnik sometime although that’s 10 hour drive from us, so I’m not sure the kids would do too well being in the car that long.  Maybe someday!!