Week... the week Alwin should have died

We landed in Venice and our next move was to figure out where the Flixbus stop was. We gathered all of our stuff and started walking towards the bus stop. My first impression of Venice was… it is, dark, and has water. That’s about all of Venice that I got to see. Waiting around the bus stop was only tolerable due to the bread that I brought with me from the Versailles picnic and the Nutella that Kate had with her. The bus arrived and all the way to Slovenia, I slept soundly. When we got to Slovenia, we did not realize that we had such a long layover. It was about three hours until our bus arrived to go to Croatia, so we hid out in a Slovenian fast food joint for three hours. They had WiFi, which was really nice, and then all of a sudden it was time to go so we boarded the next bus. This bus was packed full though, so it was harder to sleep because I shared a seat section with Nicky. A couple naps and two border checks later, we got to Croatia in manageable fashion. Next goal, get to the airport to get our rental car. We approached a taxi knowing how much an Über costs. We walked up to the cab guy and he gave us a price higher than Über, so we tried to haggle him, but he was not about lowering his price. So, we walked away and ordered our Über. The funny thing was, the Über that we were taking was around the corner. We were about 75 feet away from the cab man, and he saw the Über stop and offered to pick us up. When our Über driver arrived, I looked at the cab man and smiled and laughed as he looked at me with disgust. The driver was really friendly and nice, 5 out of 5. He got us to the airport and we went to the car rental, after brushing our teeth, of course. They did not have the specific car that we ask for, so they just bumped us up to the next one. We expected to have a little Opel like in Triberg, but this time, they gave us a Benz. It was really nice. We all got super excited to ride in the Benz, feeling so fancy and upper class after slumming around from city to city. We then made our way to Plitvice National Park.

I should not be writing this next section, because I should have died in Plitvice. However, I am typing this now, so I somehow survived. We arrived at Plitvice after a really filling lunch, ready to explore. When we got there, there was snow everywhere. And scarily, ice as well. We entered the park and started along. We reached a path that was blocked off with a sign that said “Forbidden”, however, I felt that if it was really forbidden to go there, they would’ve tried harder to keep us out. So naturally, we made our way past that sign and down to the waterfalls. The entire path was snow and ice, which equals slippery. We slid our way down switchbacks and found ourselves face to face with a bridge that was just covered in ice. So naturally, we crossed it, however the next part was pretty sketchy. The next bridge was icy, but it was on the edge of a waterfall, so if you fall in the water, you die. Nicky was not feeling it, so she turned around, but Kate, Alwin, and I all continued on. We made it to the waterfall and it was a sight to see. On the way back, danger struck. Alwin was crossing the death bridge, and he slipped and fell through the railing on the bridge. But luckily for him, we were able to grab on to the rail and he could pull himself back up. I looked at Kate’s face after we saw this happen, and she was just staring, in shock at the fact that Alwin almost lost his life. Later, I was crossing another bridge on the way to this cool cave place, and the ice underneath me gave way and I fell… straight onto the edge of the bridge. About three-fourths of my feet were on the bridge, so if I was one step farther out, I would’ve fallen in and probably died by waterfall.  So by this point, Alwin and I both almost died, but we continued on to the cave, because, why not. After shimmying and inching our way we make it to the cave, up the cave and back around towards Nicky. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Nicky was furious. She was mad because we left her, but we left her because she did not want to go, and we planned on spending time in this National Park. Anyways, she was mad and we wanted to be nice to her, so we got back into the car and drove to Split instead of seeing the other half of the park. I am still salty about it. We got to Split, got dinner, and checked in with Nina at the Airbnb. By the way, Nina ist sehr hübsch. We then called it for the night and went to sleep.

The next day was Split day. We went out to the pier and ate breakfast, then went around Split. We walked around and saw some cool things, even an acapella group. Then we hit up the market scene. We found some fruit vendors and finagled with them, but our real goal was a new fruit bag for Alwin, which we never found. We then decided that we just wanted to go around and go the water front and we headed to a cool beach where we took pictures and stuff. Split was Split, it was cool. We packed into the car, and then headed to Dubrovnik.

Dubrovnik was cool and such. The old town was super old and all cobblestoney and wall-y and such. We dropped the car off at the airport and Übered back into town and checked in to our Airbnb and was pretty much it for the first night. The next day we got up and went around saw all the must-see things in Dubrovnik, except for going on top of the wall. The gelato here was really good by the way. This part of the trip I do not really remember well because nothing really exciting happened so I am just going to skip forwards and mention that we went on top of the walls the next day and it was really nice except for the fact that it was pouring, and that by this time I was super underwhelmed by all European cities and that I really needed to get to the outdoors of mountains and hiking and exploration once again. We spent some time in Dubrovnik, and then went to the airport were we would start our next journey in Italy.