Bonus Post (No Pictures)

This is what you get when you try to remember everything that happened over a two-week trip and cram it all into one post at the end. You forget to add some pictures - which has already been rectified - and you forget some of the stories. I need to address two such stories now, both from our visit to Split.

When I was writing the original post a couple days ago, the WiFi was a bit spotty in our 4th floor walk-up AirBnB in a back alley in Venice. (Jeff and Marico actually had the 5th floor walk-up). I had just written a bit about our tour of Dicoletian’s Palace in Split when the WiFi went out before I had a chance to save it. By the time I came back to it a few hours later, I had totally lost my place.

This should be inserted after the walk around the Marjan and down to the “beach” club in Split

After our walk, we went back to our AirBnB and had a couple hours before we were meeting our tour guide, Darko, for a walk through Old Town and the Palace. After the tour, we were going to walk straight to our dinner spot. The tour was at 5:00 for an hour and a half and dinner reservations were at 7:00. We walked down and met Darko and had a very pleasant and informative stroll through the Palace. For example, we learned that Diocletian actually retired from his job as Emperor of Rome. Apparently, he had way more fun eating, drinking, and being worshipped as a Demi-God in his Palace (which has stood, largely in tact, for over 1700 years). We saw the square inside the Palace where a few years ago, a chocolatier in Split made the worlds largest chocolate bar, literally filling the square with chocolate. In order for the record to be recognized, the chocolate had to be “consumed” within 24 hours. Darko took home 15 kilos. Alas, the record only stood for a year before the rival Slovenians broke it. We also learned that Darko was quite chatty. That is a great feature for a tour guide, but not quite as great when you have a dinner reservation. He acknowledged our time crunch and proceeded to keep talking until we were left with 15 minutes to make a 20-minute walk. We speed-walked through Split and showed up at 7:04. We waited for the hostess to seat the couple in front of us and we had to laugh, because apparently the couple’s reservations were for the previous night. What buffoons. When the hostess returned to seat us, we were still laughing at and mocking the

people in front of us. We gave her our name and were politely told that our reservation had been cancelled, as it was for 6:00, not 7:00. (We did still get a table. At least we were only 1 hour off, not 24).

This should be inserted in the first post before the Not-Quite-So-Great-Wall of Ston

The AirBnB we stayed at in Split was excellent. It was just a short walk from Old Town and was clearly someone’s home. It was spacious and beautifully decorated, with an outdoor patio. What it didn’t have was a real nightstand by the bed. There was a small, skinny table that I could put my phone on, but I didn’t want to put my iPad on it because it looked like it could easily be knocked off. At night I would just set the iPad on the floor at the foot of the little table. Here this story could go in 3 different directions:

First, I could step on the iPad when I inevitably got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night;

Second, I could knock the glass of water from the little table on to the iPad on the floor, rendering it useless; or

Third, I could leave the iPad under the little table when we left Split for the Not-So-Great-Wall of Ston and on to Ljubljana.

At this point in the story, the only people that know what ultimately happened to it are my traveling party and the Backroads guides.

As it turns out, the correct answer was option number 3. We weren’t an hour out of Split when Kelly got a text message from our AirBnB host saying they found the iPad on the floor. Unlike the phone in the cab, the iPad did not contain anything particularly important on it, and so if I never saw it again, I’d simply be out the embarrassment of leaving it behind and the cost of a new tablet. Clearly, keeping track of my electronics was too much to ask of me. After some contemplation, we arrived at the genius plan to have the host ship the iPad within Croatia to our final hotel. I just needed to make sure that the hotel knew it was coming. So I was THAT guy. The one who has just met the leader (Perri) of this trip of 14 people and who had to pull her aside and explain that I’m a special-needs person and could she help me out by contacting the hotel and letting them know it was coming. She didn’t even know my name by that point. But true to form, Backroads did not disappoint and they helped me out of the mess of my own making. I just had to reimburse Marco his 10 Euros that he paid out of his own pocket for the COD charge and everything ended up fine.