Charlotte: Today we departed Mali Losinj, one of the northern islands, and headed south to Makarska (pronounced Mah-CAR-skuh). It is a small, beautiful city on the southern coast of Croatia, just down the road from Split. We spent almost all of the day traveling, but at least the drive was interesting. In order to leave Istria and enter Dalmatia, you have to pass through a tunnel that had to be at least 2 miles long. Those of us that play the "hold your breath until the other side" game didn't last too long. Once we were on the other side though...wow. I am so happy that this is where we will be spending the next 8 days of our trip. The Dalmatian roads we took along the coast offered some breathtaking views of the Adriatic.
After a few more hours of driving, we finally reached Makarska! We unloaded all of our luggage, waved goodbye to our faithful bus driver Franjo, and slowly checked into our apartments on the outskirts of the city. Once everyone was settled in, we regrouped at our new base of opperations, the restaurant Roma, and had a wonderful dinner. I already have a feeling we're going to enjoy this city.
Ben: We did spend the majority of today driving, but aside from the breathtaking views along the roads, we encountered one more thing that I believe is worth mentioning: the Croatian drivers. I've had some pretty close calls in my life while driving, but nothing compared to what I witnessed in Croatia. The coastal roads in Dalmatia are very narrow and very windy (and windy too - sometimes the wind coming off of the mountains is so strong they have to shut the roads down). There were countless cars and motorcycles that zoomed past our bus on these roads at just about the worst possible moments, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic by mere inches. If only we had been filming, we probably could have sold the footage to Hollywood for some new high speed chase action movie. It was very intense.
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