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Welcome back. It's a little daunting starting this up again after a few months off, but the past few months have been strange, and storytelling didn't seem to fit in very well. But, we have stories to tell as we took advantage of a little extra time off - more than we had anticipated - to continue traveling stateside. And so I plan to start sharing those stories soon, and trying to keep up with our latest adventures even though they'll be more domestic than 'worldwide'.


Today seemed like a good day to check back in here. We've been in our new apartment 10 days now, which oddly feels like a substantial stretch of time. In the last 5 months, we gratefully took advantage of the generous full board innkeeping of my parents in New Hampshire and Jason's dad & stepmom in Long Beach, which provided short-term constancy. Yet when we look back over the course of the year we have stayed in nearly 100 different places.  It's a rough estimate, one which I'll count at some point, but I believe it's accurate +/- 15%. So after hostels, thatched huts, tents, guest houses, friends' air beds, and a variety of other lodging, we finally have a place of our own to call 'home'.


Since this has proven to be a particularly exciting concept, we decided to stay put for Thanksgiving. We're slowly getting settled, rediscovering our belongings which have been in storage for a year - or in some cases 3 1/2 years since we left NYC. We're putting together an apartment that feels slightly more 'adult' than our last one, in an effort to feel we've moved on although we're living 3 blocks from our last place. And we're taking advantage of being back in NYC, seeing good friends and relishing in the familiarity of it.


Of course NYC on Thanksgiving means the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade! I used to love watching the parade on TV, and the opportunity to see it in person had me all excited. So this morning I dragged Jason and my hungover self down to 54th Street & 7th Avenue to watch the balloons float by. I was giddy. And it did not disappoint. 

Jason was skeptical until he got to pose with Snoopy

He gets Snoopy and all I get is this silly ice cream cone...

... and Uncle Sam. Not fair.

OK this makes up for the ice cream cone.

See more pictures of the parade here - there are some cool ones - like these: 

Back at our apartment we prepared a Thanksgiving feast for 2.  This means we'll be eating turkey til Christmas, but the fact that we cooked it in our own kitchen with our own pans and ate it on our own new dining table in our own apartment made us reflect that we have much to be thankful for. Not these belongings, but the fact that we have had an extraordinary year, that we have incredibly supportive family, and that we have finally begun to embark on our next adventure.

Ω

Even after 5 ½ months on the road it is still amazing how surprised you can be by the ridiculously complicated and time consuming nature of traveling along what should be an obvious route. For example, our trip from Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, to Athens, the capital of Greece, covered 700km (about 430 miles) and took a good 12 hours. Our trip began with the 6am bus to Thessaloniki, the thrice-weekly service which is the only public transport running between the neighboring countries. Our first experience with famed Greek efficiency came at the Thessaloniki train station where there were two ticket windows open, no machines working and general chaos and confusion even though everyone in line seemed to be local and in theory should have known what they were doing. While the rest of the journey was fairly straight forward it almost made me miss National Rail…almost. 

We spent three days and four nights in Athens in a nice apartment a little out of tourist central. With the beautiful, sunny weather, we were able to relax and take in all of the ruins and mawbel cahlums we could handle. (You gotta get some!) 

The Parthenon

Temple of Zeus

Jess's best Corinthian column impression

Each day we visited the large central meat, fish, and vegetable market, a real highlight not only for the great lunches we were able to grab in the area but most enjoyably for the cheap and delicious fresh food we gathered up for dinner. We were even inspired to try cooking squid for the first time, and it turned out really well! I could also hear the voice of my friend Konstantinos ringing in my head each time I had a tomato. He once said to me: If you have never been to Greece, then you have never really had a tomato. I now understood why he would say that… they are huge, cheap, and out of this world meaty. Delish!

So much and so cheap!

Grilled sardine lunch

When in Greece... have olives!

One beautiful tomato

Self-taught squid preparation (thank goodness for the internet)

The final result

Neither us had been to Athens before, so we felt like we were checking off a traveler’s ‘must do’ by visiting the Parthenon and various other ruins. However, by the morning of our last full day as we were exploring Hadrian’s Library, we had the sense that maybe some ruins weren’t worth preserving – that this area would make a lovely park with a nice old arch in the middle. And with that, we decided to end our sightseeing. 

This arch is nice.  The rest... well... not so much.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at our apartment relaxing and packing up for our brief return to jolly old England. We celebrated the tossing out of the stinkiest pair of sandals ever, and we loaded up our bags for one final journey. We found ourselves glad to be finished, because it meant a return to normalcy (i.e. sleeping in one bed for an entire week!) was near. But we also sensed the nostalgia that always comes with an ending – a graduation, a house move, or, apparently, the end of an amazing journey.

Of Mountains, Old Men, and Odd Macedonia

Having been off the road about six weeks now and with the focus on re-adjusting to the rigors of the real world it seems past time to wrap up the last 17 days on our tour of the former Yugoslavia (aka, the Baklans). After visiting Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, we spent a wet but enjoyable week traversing the truly unique landscape of Montenegro; ticking the box on visiting the region’s largest city and the former Yugoslav capital, Belgrade; and taking in the strangely engrossing oddity that is Macedonia.

Our journey took us from BiH into the tiny country of Montenegro which is slightly smaller than Connecticut and has a population of less than 650,000. Despite its size the country has a ton to offer visitors from a beautiful coastline along the Adriatic to a mountainous interior that looks unlike anywhere else we’ve visited (but, as we learned, probably most closely resembles Romania, as they have the same type of forest there). It really is one of those places that must be visited, although do it quickly because it is starting to appear on the radar of western travelers.

Bay of Kotor - beautiful here, incredible on a clear day

Sveti Stefan just down the coast from Kotor & Budva

When we visited the Montenegrin coast during our previous trip to the region nearly two years ago, we took one look at the Crna Gora / Monte Negro / Black Mountains behind us and decided we must return to explore the interior. We picked up a car in the capital city of Podgorica, put our hiking shoes back on, and spent the next week driving around the country at an extremely slow pace as the speed limit rarely tops 40 mph and there are police everywhere. We spent two evenings in the south east in former capital city of Cetinje, another two nights in the north eastern skiing / hiking village of Kolašin and our final three nights in the small northern town of Žabljak in Dormitor National Park. Some of the highlights included visiting the Njegoš Mausoleum perched on a 1650m peak in Lovćen National Park ...

Njegoš mausoleum

The mausoleum is perched on Jezerski Vrh, second highest peak in Lovćen NP

"Am I in paradise, or on the moon?" - George Bernard Shaw, on seeing this view

... exploring Biogradska Gora National Park virtually on our own ...

Lake Biogradska

Foggy forest in Biogradska NP

Up in the hills, resting for lunch before the rain

and taking in the enormous Tara Canyon from ground level and the peaks above (and having our attempt at a hike of some altitude being thwarted by unmelted snow – yes, this was the end of May!). 

The Tara Canyon (deepest in Europe) from Ćurevac

Hiking in Durmitor NP - the final trail marker we could find...

Rainy lunch at Lake Jezero in Durmitor NP - and our faithful hiking companion

Despite a consistent and surprisingly accurate weather forecast predicting “variable cloudy with rain” we really enjoyed the time outside and our three unique guesthouses which allowed for a lot of creative home cooking (our own) and enjoying of the local wine and beer. Our time in Montenegro also provided one of the more memorable (i.e. stressful) moments of the trip as experienced the joys of being pulled over in developing foreign country where we don’t speak the language. Thankfully our tactic of shrugging a lot and the police determining we were tourists and not here on business (what difference this makes is beyond us) ended in a dismissal with no ticket issued and more surprisingly no greasing of palms. 

From Montenegro we flew to Belgrade. While the flight was only 45 minutes long, flying over mountains through an electrical storm made it the bumpiest flight of the trip. You know it’s bad when the big burly looking guy across the aisle starts crossing himself. We arrived in one piece and spent three uneventful days in the capital of Serbia (save for the few minutes we spent running from the mob attending a pro-Mladić demonstration – the fugitive chief of staff from the 1990’s conflict had been captured a few days prior to our arrival). The city doesn’t offer much to distinguish itself in terms of sights or architecture and its renowned bar/club scene isn’t exactly up our alley. With the highlight of the stay being a visit to Tito’s mausoleum it is fair to say Belgrade wins the prize of the least interesting place we visited on our travels. 

Comrade Tito's final resting place - not nearly as creepy as Ho Chi Minh's

We saw some really bad 'art'.  I call this composition "Where's Jason?".

This nude Meštrović creation was not allowed in the center of the old town.
So, he stands on a hill and shows off to the new town across the river.

Macedonia, officially the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia due to a fight over the name with Greece, was our last stop in the Balkans. We bussed from Belgrade to Skopje, rented a car and set out to explore some of the more off-the-beaten-path parts of a country which is, on the whole, off the beaten path. (For the curious, the beaten path in Macedonia is basically the capital Skopje in the north and Lake Ohrid in the south west.) We spent three nights in the southern city of Bitola, the second largest in the country, partaking in a little hiking near Prilep, checking out the roman ruins of Heraclea Lyncestis, and enjoying our evening beers along the city’s surprisingly vibrant pedestrian-only main street.

In the hills above Prilep

Bitola - a very happening little town

We then made a trip to the wine region, visiting Bovin and Popova Kula wineries near Negotino, staying the night at Popova Kula’s onsite hotel. While Macedonia is producing some flavorful, quality wines at great value, the business aspect falls a little short. This was especially evident at Popova Kula, where they have a hotel and restaurant but no tastings or tours. Needless to say we found a way to sample a good amount of wine and even managed to take in a little culture visiting the impressive Roman ruins at nearby Stobi.

We shared a huge lunch and several glasses of wine with one of the winemakers at Bovin

Beautiful Popova Kula winery

A pre-dinner bottle: delicious chilled Muscat Ottonel

Roman ruins at Stobi

After some uncertainty of how to spend the rest of our time in Macedonia we decided on the path of least resistance and drove to Lake Ohrid, which we had visited previously. We stayed three nights in a great guesthouse up in the hills of Elašin on the lake’s eastern shore. Our charming yet chatty host, Anita, filled us in entirely and then some on the details of the Macedonian government, as the parliamentary elections were going on during our stay. It was some how appalling yet unsurprising to learn how corrupt the government is, mainly shown through power plays like the fact that the incumbent government arrested the opposition party leader on some sketchy charges the day after winning the election – just to show who’s still in charge.

View from our balcony in Elašin

Having explored the city of Ohrid on a previous trip, we spent one day hiking the hills above the lake and another day visiting Sveti Naum monastery near the Albanian border and checking out a newly-opened reconstruction of an Iron Age village. 

At the top of the 2 lakes hike - a view of Ohrid and Prespa

Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest lakes in the world

16th century Sveti Naum monastery

"Bay of Bones" - a reconstruction of the 1200-700BC lake town of Plocha Michov

We spent our final evening in Skopje, resting up for our multi-leg trip to Athens the next day. The nice thing about Ohrid and Skopje is you don’t get stared down by locals at every turn, as you seem to in the rest of the country. Of everywhere we’ve been, Macedonia continues to top the list of most ‘interesting’ places… which we mean in the most English of ways.

Last Balkan lunch: burek & yoghurt drink

The rapidly evolving city of Skopje

Remember This

Over the course of our travels, I have learned something about myself: I’m not as bad at or as disinterested in history as I once suspected. Rather, during History of Europe 1217 to 1539 (or similar) I had exactly zero context into which I could put all those strange names and dates, and history class was thus a series of memory exercises rather than real learning and understanding.  This is probably the reason the only history class I ever found interesting or enjoyable was Colonial America, having grown up in the heart of where the action took place. Travel has changed this for me, and I have found that once I’ve visited a place, its history becomes much more meaningful and – at its best, which is often its worst – fascinating… especially when the history is recent enough to not even really be considered history yet.

Having come to this revelation in Southeast Asia (the most I really knew about Vietnam prior was some combination of Robin Williams movies & Billy Joel songs), I was particularly looking forward to our 5 day visit to Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), where we spent two nights in Mostar and three nights in Sarajevo.  This country and the Balkan region has been a battleground over the centuries as the Ottoman Turks pushed from the east and the Roman Catholics pushed from the west, getting all knotted up with Orthodox Christians and a few Jews along the way. This is an extreme oversimplification of an extremely complex and tumultuous history which Jason & I have been learning about through reading Dame Rebecca West’s 1930s travelogue tome about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. However given I have taken a break from this to read Tina Fey’s hilarious Bossypants, this is all the detail I can really remember (still not good at reading history, apparently).

I was not disappointed.  In BiH, history lives on every corner.  We admired from every angle the graceful Stari Most (old bridge) in Mostar which had sustained centuries of war, only to be blown to bits in the 90s conflict. We stood on the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated next to the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, triggering World War I. We spoke with a guy in his early 20s who served us lunch in his family’s restaurant, and he told us about how his mother took him at age 5 and his 2-week-old brother to safety in Germany in 1992 while his father stayed behind to fight; it would have been shameful for him not to. We stood on a hill above Sarajevo and were astonished at the gleaming white pillars of the Muslim cemeteries that dotted the city, all with dates 1993-1996.  We visited a museum where the exhibit on children’s lives during the 90s conflict made me wonder, “What was I worrying about in 1993?”  Certainly not about snipers as I crossed the street or having my house rearranged by bombings.

So much horror has happened here – in the country and region – over the years recent and past, that what was really surprising to me was how beautiful and lively the country is. In my mind it would be grey and desolate, with people wandering about the streets all down and out. But these half-ruined / half-rebuilt and very vibrant cities are nestled in lush green hills cut by winding rivers. The café scene is unparalleled: there is so much socializing it made us wonder if anyone does anything other than drink coffee, smoke, chat, and strut up and down the street all day (this question remains unanswered).  It is probably an unreasonable dream to expect this peacefulness to remain in this highly charged region forever, but in Mostar, at least, they want to remember the past so as to not let it be repeated. 

Stari Most, Mostar

More than a few pretty islands

Our tour through the Balkans (or the countries of the former Yugoslavia) began on May 10 with a brief stopover in Ljubljana on our way from Italy to Croatia. We enjoyed our previous visit six years ago to Slovenia’s capital but our visit this time was more of a logistical necessity for reaching Croatia than a desire to undertake any sightseeing. We were content to enjoy the nice sunny day at one of the many riverside bars.

Jess enjoys Slovenia's finest, Laško Pivo

It was my third visit to Croatia but I had yet to see much of the country having previously visited the capital, Zagreb, for less than 24 hours and spending two nights in the beautiful but completely over touristy Dubrovnik at the very southern tip of the country. Jess had spent nearly two weeks sailing the islands off the Dalmatian coast after business school and loved it, but the popularity of the coast and islands as an English / German holiday destination and the country even appearing on the radar of American travelers has given me apprehension in the past when thinking about visiting.

After a 2 ½ hour scenic train ride from Ljubljana we arrived in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. While the city lacks the sights or architectural charms of other European capitals, there was much more character and life than I had remembered from my brief visit six years ago. We spent some time wandering around the small old town and had a tasty lunch at a čevapi shop just outside the large open air vegetable market. Our day and a half definitely served to change the somewhat indifferent opinion of the city I had formed on my first visit. That said, there isn’t any change to my opinion that Zagreb has one of the least interesting main squares of any large city I’ve ever visited.

View from clock tower over Zagreb's old town and cathedral

Trg Jelačića - Zagreb's main square

I really don't get it.

From Zagreb we took the bus south 170km to Plitvice National Park for some outdoor time. The highlight of the park is sixteen different lakes of different sizes that cascade from one to the next creating a series of unique waterfalls, covering a distance of 8km and an elevation change of more than 400 feet.

Waterfall in the upper lakes

Enjoying the peacefulness

Two connected lakes

We also were able to get off the well worn trail around the lakes and go for a nice 10km walk through the surrounding forest. While not as picturesque as the lakes, the serenity of walking through the forest and the fact we encountered a total of two people over the entire walk made for a nice afternoon.

Through the woods

Jess shows off her amazing balancing skills

We had planned on spending a few more days seeing some of Croatia’s national parks but not having a car made this logistically challenging so we headed on the bus to our final destination in Croatia, the coastal city of Split. We stayed for two nights, exploring the tiny, charming old town (formerly Diocletian’s Palace) after our arrival and ended up stumbling on two weddings clashing with rowdy Hajduk Split football fanatics as we were trying to visit the cathedral.

Bell tower of the Split Cathedral

We were thankful these didn't ring when we were up!

Spot the bride - and the crazy football fans with their flags

Our second day was spent exploring the small hill of the Marjan peninsula overlooking city where we happened upon a little street fair where we enjoyed some excellent čevapi for lunch, after enduring one of the most disorganized line processes I’ve ever experienced; it was worth it in the end though.  (Editor’s note: Patient wife queued while exasperated husband bought beer and moved as far away from chaos as possible.)

Mmmm čevapi

Monastery in the mountainside... nobody was home

While we only ended up spending five nights in Croatia it was much more enjoyable and less touristy than I had feared and I’m definitely excited to come back in the future.

South of Split on our way to Bosnia