Trains, Planes, and Automobiles.

*SPOILER ALERT* This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with planes. Unless you count the plains we passed by on our ways to Croatia.

First things first: I can't believe I forgot to post this video of us harvesting potatoes! aren't potato plants fun?? :D

Anywho, so we took a train out of Tapolca down to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia (called Hrvatska by the Croatians themselves), which should've been about a four-hour ride.... Until there was a malfunction on one of the rails at the border of Hungary and Croatia, and we were told to get off the train so we could take a bus to another station..... DEJA VU. Remember that train ride from Prague to Vienna that lasted all day long? We groaned and exited the train, expecting the worst after what happened in the Czech Republic. But instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find a whole fleet of buses waiting for us. We were on our way within minutes.

However, it was roasting hotnin the bus, so we hung my two jackets on the curtainless window curtain rod to block the sun, and I forgot to take them back down when we left.

UUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.

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Lost & Found Items List:

Lost (or otherwise discarded):

- One dress, left behind at an apt in Kiev, Ukraine.
- One tank top and three pairs of socks, donated to the WWOOFer clothing stash at the farm in Hungary.
- One longsleeve shirt, dirty and discarded at the farm after I cut out the soccer tournament logo for use in the soccer memories quilt I'm going to (eventually) make.
- One pair of undies, lost in the laundry or something, gone forever.
- Both jackets I brought with me, left on a bus somewhere in Croatia, never to be seen again. :'(

Found (at the store....)
- Two dresses, which I bought in a bout of retail therapy while mourning for the dress I left in Ukraine.


So why is my backpack still soooooooooo heavy????? :P

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When I realized I left my jackets on the bus, Steve jumped off the train we had just boarded and sprinted to the front ofnthe station where the buses dropped us off, but unfortunately came back empty-handed as the bus had already left. [And while I appreciate my sweet husband running off as soon as I said I had left my jackets behind, in hindsight we realized it was perhaps not the best idea because what if the train had left without him????? Whew.]

And the one-hour delay caused by the train-bus(this is where the automobile part of the title comes in)-train extravaganza meant that we arrived right in time to check in to our hotel (a real hotel!!!) rather than having to kill time for an hour since Arcotel Allegra was right across the street from the train station. Whoo.

And let me just say... It was sooooo nice to walk into a very clean, very classy, air-conditioned, fly-free room after a month of playing in the dirt all day long at the farm.

We booked an overnight train to Split for the next night, so we made haste to see all Zagreb had to offer in the very short time we were there. It is a pretty little city, with lots of parks (have you noticed that most of the major cities we've gone to have lots of parks? Can you even find a single park in Los Angeles?) and not too many tourists.

Zagreb also has lots and lots of museums, so if you're into museums and not getting run over by tourists, Zagreb is a good place to visit. WE ALSO SAW BULLET HOLES ON SOME OF THE BUILDINGS! For those of you who don't know, Croatia was at war with Yugoslavia just over a decade ago, and bullet holes have been left in some of the buildings as kind of a reminder to the people that they fought hard to win their independence.

That beach scene above is made out of BREAD! We saw it in a bakery window and couldn't help but take a picture.

After about a day and a half of wandering around through the giant farmers market and renaissance fair booths and debating on whether we should go into any of the many museums (which we didn't because we aren't really museum people) and watching the new Pixar movie Brave (in Croatian!) to get out of the heat for a while, we hopped on yet another train down to Split, a city on the coast.

Someonenplease remind me next time to book a sleeper car. Sitting in a seat in a compartment with five other people is not the most pleasant of overnight experiences. My butt was the only part of me that managed to get any sleep, at least until I found an empty compartment for us to take over on my way to the bathroom. That gave us about two hours of stretching out across three seats for some actual sleep

(look at how cute Billy is!)
before we arrived here:

Split, Croatia. 6am.