It has been a "while" since I did some travelling, my last trip being my cycle one in 2022, the blog is still online incase anyone is interested to go back and read. In June-August was helping a friend plan a trip to Europe, mostly places I had been to so was nice to relive some memories and share my experiences about things in various cities (mainly Prague, Vienna & Budapest), found some nice gems to see and do, even some I didn't do either because they were new (unlikely) or I didn't know about them when I travelled to those places in 2014.
After doing all that I felt the travel bug again. My UK passport expires in Sept 2025 so with the "you need 6 months on it to travel" I thought "maybe I should do something this year", or I could otherwise do next year and just renew the passport earlier but I hate loosing time on it ie it would then be a 9.whatever year passport vs a 10 year one.
So it then came to ... what, where, when? All the important questions.
I had a few ideas about what I maybe wanted to do but wasn't too sure. This time I decided I wasn't going to do a cycle trip as I did before, it would just be a "normal" holiday.
I had always fancied a trip to Croatia so that's where things started. I looked at various options and entry and exit points in Europe and then figured out my plan of action.
For the flights, this time, I didn't have the services of Johan to help me out as he is taking a break from the Travel Agent business for a while. So I decided to do it all myself. I started by looking at flight options using Matrix Airfare Search and also Google Flights. I found some stuff on Matrix, but like with my friends, sometimes the flights didn't match reality. So I then used Google Flights more. I started saying "sometime in x month for y no of weeks" and then looked at destinations that could work. Then I narrowed it down to the specific cities. Thereafter I went direct to the relevant airline (from the other sites info) sites and checked what they had as ideally that's the final place you would want to use to do the booking. I initially was only planning a 3 week trip but due to flight prices (being good) and availability it has ended up being a tad longer. I am away from Monday 23 September 2024 to Thursday 17 October 2024, so 3.5 weeks.
To cut a long story short this is the route I'm going to be doing:
I'm going to be visiting these main places:
This blog is to document all my travels to share with family & friends (any anyone who is interested really). Also, I really enjoy going back and reading the blogs I've written from my previous trips, it brings back so many good memories. I'm going to do it city by city, in some cases like Ljubljana will be a little out of sequence with events in the city as sightseeing was either side of day trips, but that won't matter. In my research (which AshleyR [miss you buddy !!] always used to rip me off about, but I do like to know what I'm doing where and how and don't want to waste precious holiday time), which was pretty extensive. I made lists, from videos (believe me I watched so many city, sightseeing, food and other related ones) and reading, of meals I'd like to try in the various different countries. By the end of my travels I had ticked off pretty much every "bucket list" food item, which was pretty cool. I'll include a post about my meals after each city.
I have resized all the photos to be much smaller than their original size so that they load quicker, they are now approx 150KB vs 3.5MB per photo. They should be still perfectly clear to view. If you want to see something in detail in any of them, just ask.
If you want to share this blog with anyone else feel free to do so. If you have any questions about anything I did or have any comments you know how to find me via email, WhatsApp, social media etc.
I am going to be travelling outside of EU summer, so call it on the shoulder season, after summer heading into autumn, where things should be quieter, but then also there could be the chance of cooler weather, not anything like winter but maybe just not guaranteed super warm each day, which is fine. I will go prepared for the good the bad and the ugly (weather wise). I ended up not even touching maybe 30% of the things I took. All of my internal travels will be with bus (apart from the final flight from Dubrovnik to Zagreb), on investigation rail wasn't massively popular/prevalent/present in the places I'm going to be in, so bus it was. This all worked out well in the end.
This is what the final calendar looks like. I always make a calendar like this as I find it so much easier to see how things look etc. I created this using a template from the Calendars That Work site.
Quite a few people have said "I have had to Google every single place you are going as I've not heard of them" - LOL, that is funny. Before my travel route planning I didn't know about a few as well, but most I knew about, if only by name but not what was there.
So for us older folks ... we will remember the name Yugoslavia, this is how it got broken up and made into the new countries I'm visiting (Hrvatska is Croatia). For reference, the "boot" of Italy is to the West/South West. At one stage in my initially planning I was maybe going to fly into Venice and go via Trieste and then to Ljubljana, but that didn't pan out cost wise in the end.
I was thinking of what to call this blog. I had my METACA22 blog from my holiday 2 years ago. So thought let me come up with something for this one.
On the internet all countries have a Top Level Domain (eg ZA = South Africa, DE = Germany), so thought along those lines ... so where I would be
So put those together and you get SIHRBA then add the year 24 and ... SIHRBA24 (yes I know I go back into Croatia [Dubrovnik] at the end but not counting that). So the blog and my notes/folders on laptop etc. all took on that name.