The Road Less Traveled

Friday, July 8th, Rijeka to Plitvica Lakes

After morning coffee, we go with Kate to visit Evan, her woodworker friend who we met last night. His workshop is impressive and he is renovating an immense stone farmhouse that has been in his family for generations.  Art is most interested in his tools and his projects and we take an extensive tour of the property, climbing ladders to the second floor and admiring the stacks of lumber he has milled for the renovation.

Stone farmhouse and workshop

Woodworker, Ivan Juretic Milano

Second story view

Tools

Milled and stacked lumber

From there we drive into Rijeka and visit Eva in her archival print studio where she repairs and archives important documents for the state.

Eva's Archival paper studio

Document storage

Eva's Archival paper studio

After dropping Kate off to pick up her car, new gas tank installed, we go to lunch in Rijeka. The restaurant is just off the waterfront and we eat piles of fried fish and sardines before saying our good byes and piloting our rental car towards the Plitvica Lake district. We find the toll road from Rijeka towards Zagreb and speed easily along the well signed and beautiful super highway. Unfortunately, we exit too soon and after much confusion and arguing choose the road that John and I believe will be a shortcut along back roads, through Ogulin and onto the lake district. We wind country roads, some of which feel little more than cow paths. The tension between us rises when the computer directions that Kate has printed fail to match our road map and we each have an opinion as to the correct route to the lakes. Happily, the scenery is so bucolic that we get caught up in the beauty of the countryside and we begin to enjoy the journey. Tidy farms and picturesque stone houses dot the countryside and families picnic in their gardens and farmers tend their land in the cool of the late afternoon.  Everything is lush and green and if I didn’t know better, I might think that we are driving through rural, Alpine Austria. When we arrive at the outskirts of Ogulin and stop at a small café for a cappuccino, I see a smile escape Arts scowl.

 

Ogulin Cafe

It is late afternoon when we enter the national park and we pull over at several view points amazed at the beauty of the lake below. Tomorrow, we will spend the day hiking the trails but this breathtaking, sneak preview view is all that we get today.

Late afternoon view of Plitvica Lakes

We don’t have hotel reservations for the night and we enter the national park from the back side. After inquiring at a few fully booked guest houses, we find a cluster of restaurants and family run inns a few miles from the park. A two story chalet has two rooms with a shared bath available for two nights and we pay the modest price of 100 kuna per person, about $45 for the three of us and settle into the immaculate rooms.  In broken English the owner recommends one of the two restaurants across the street for dinner and we walk the quarter mile down to the suggested one. Although we must wait for an outside table on their patio, the ambience is lovely and our dinners and the wine is good.