A Road Trip to Remember

This past weekend I made a trip with a few of my roommates to southeast Europe. I had mentioned earlier about a road trip that we didn't think was going to materialize. It actually happened. After arriving in Bratislava, Slovakia by bus we settled into our hostel and ventured around the city for day before deciding that nothing could be more exciting than renting a car. Our original idea was to take a train all the way to Begrade, Serbia. However, with the amount of time it would take to get there it would give us hardly anytime to spend there. A group decision was made and we decided to rent the car. We drove down six hours going through parts of Austria to get to the capital of Croatia...Zagreb.

As we neared the border of Croatia we noticed numerous checkpoints in the distance. Croatia is not a member of the Schengen group which meant you weren't able to travel freely between countries as you can in the EU without going through a customs inspection. It should've been a piece of cake getting through. Eventually, we made it up to the border post and handed them our passports. The guard asked his normal routine questions and did background checks as he scanned each of our passports. "Where are you coming from?", "What are you doing in Zagreb?", "How long are you here for?", and so on. What felt like a half hour ended up with us getting a request to pull over on the side of the road for a car inspection. Out of every car passing through we were the ones getting the inspection. Each of us were asked to slowly take our backpacks and jackets out of the car. The border patrol office then began a slow, thorough search through every compartment and bag he could possibly find in our rental car. Every type of container, food material, or suspicious looking items he would ask us to open.

So, after going through our car and finding nothing out of the ordinary that he was hoping he'd catch us with we thought we were free to go. Not the case. The border officer had yet another request. To do a bag check through all our items one by one in their inspection office. And so began yet another search through all our belongings with other border patrol officers coming to the assistance hoping one of these four college students would be stupid enough to have something on them. Finally, after baggage instruction and pant-drop search we were free to go. Welcome to Croatia.

After the hour long search and 45 minutes to the capital we got to our hostel. Finally settled. It was a Friday night and we still had some energy left over so we went our exploring the Zagreb nightlife.

Zagreb is a beautiful city with a huge hill in the back part of the city. This makes for long uphill climbs throughout the city and a nice workout as we explored the city during our time there. The city felt very spread out to me and I thought it was much more inhabited than the 1 million citizens living within the city. One very distinct feature about the city is the amount of cafe shops they have on every block. I don't think I've ever seen so many people sitting, drinking coffee within one street intersection radius in my life before. We toured the city by foot mostly and saw many of the historical landmarks. That night we were told that there was a beautiful lake just outside the city limits where people went to have fun on the weekends. After a short taxi ride we decided to hang out at a hotspot called The Mansion. It was an eventful night to say the least with meeting some nice Croatian people in the club to having a not so friendly encounter with some hooligans when we were leaving...

After Zagreb, we decided to go to the seaport city of Reyika and some smaller towns in the surrounding areas. We had our expectations set too high thinking we would have a nice warm beach, sunny weather, and awesome seafood. It just wasn't the right time of the year. We roamed the seaside a bit and checked out the center part of the city.

We decided to take the road trip back home that Sunday and drove through Ljubljana, Slovenia and Gratz, Austria on the way back. Both were very beautiful cities.  In Slovenia we stopped by to see the castle and some local delicacies which were scrumptious. In Gratz we strolled through the old town and ate a quick dinner before hitting the road again to Bratislava where we had to have the car back that night.

Once we made it back to Bratislava we returned the car and made out preparations to go back home to good ol' Prague. Nothing seemed better than home after such a long and eventful journey.