Croatia -- Day 1

Friday night in Budapest was a rowdy affair, as are pretty much every UDS closing party.  As usual, we rented a bunch of musical equipment and hired a sound crew and the UDS Allstars Band jammed late into the night.  I played bass on High and Dry (Radiohead), Wagonwheel (Old Crow Medicine Show), Hard to Handle (Otis Redding), Soulshine (Warren Haynes), and guitar on the epic American Pie (Don McLean), as well as a couple of random jams (and other songs I didn't really know).

Anyway, I stayed up way too late and had a few too many Hungarian beers, so it was a bit of a slow morning on Saturday.  I did manage to get up early and drag myself down to the spa to try out these Hungarian baths, on my very last morning in Budapest.

A few hours later, Ante (my friend and colleague who also attended UDS) picked me up from the hotel, and we drove roughly 3 hours from Budapest to Zagreb, Croatia.

We crossed the Hungarian/Croatian border here at Gorican, about halfway between the two.

In Zagreb, I rented a car and picked up Kim who flew all the way over to Croatia, to hang out with me on vacation for a week :-)

Directly from the airport, we followed Ante to one of his friend's 30th birthday party.  It was a gorgeous scene, like something out of an Old Navy catalog.  There was a picnic table in a field of dandelions and a bunch of young people hanging out in an evidently traditional Croatian way.

As usual, the guys maintain the fire and the grill.

Kim and I quickly learned that Ante was the master chef in this group of friends, so within a few minutes, he had taken over the meat cooking responsibilities.

It's here that I was first introduced to Ćevapčići, a delicious Croatian sausage.

I ate it on a small bun and it was excellent.

Everyone here spoke a good amount of English, and even as uninvited guests, we were made to feel very, very welcome!  We landed plenty of advice on things to see and do in our coming days in Croatia.

The land that were were enjoying actually belonged to the family of one of the girls at the party.  On the property stood an enormous villa, built in 1806 by her ancestors as a weekend home outside of the capital city of Zagreb.

 
The house and property had recently been donated by her family to an estate, which was in the process of renovating the interior and turning it into a museum.

Our friends gave us a brief tour through the house.  Kim loves this kind of old stuff!

After a lazy afternoon, we set off for our 3-hour drive across the Croatian countryside.  It's surprisingly mountainous!  We climbed a few thousand feet, several times, and passed through countless tunnels.

And right about sunset, we actually made it to the coast, with the sun falling behind the Adriatic Sea.

Ante lives on the island of Murter (lots more about that in the next post).  It was just a little after dark by the time we actually made it to his place and settled in.  We took a short, 5-minute walk from his house to the beach, where Ante was quite surprised to see that an enormous portable building was actually standing on his beach!  It seems that a (very expensive) local wedding had commandeered the beach for the weekend.  We peered into the action for a few minutes and decided against crashing our second party of the day :-)

Needless to say, Kim was whipped by a very long day of travel (Austin -> Newark -> Frankfurt -> Zagreb), but she was a trooper making it this long.  While not jet lagged, I was pretty beat too by a jam packed week of working hard in Budapest.  It was time to crash :-)

:-Dustin