I'm not sure what to really write in this final post ... hmmmm
I thoroughly enjoyed ever minute of the entire holiday. Not once did I feel like I should have done something different and/or needed more time in a place. It all worked out perfect. This blog will bring back good memories when I look at it in years to come.
Just as a reminder this was the route I did.
Logistically everything worked out as expected on my travels. There was the odd small hiccup here and there but nothing that made a massive difference to anything really. all the cities and everything I did was fantastic. Some people have asked me "what is your favourite city?". That's a super hard thing to answer. Everywhere had different cool things that made it very unique, but if I had to pick I would likely choose Ljubljana (if you include the day trips) with Dubrovnik being a close second. Those 2 because of the wide variety of things to do there. Mostar was the cheapest place and Dubrovnik the most expensive. I kept track of everything I spent, so one day I'll maybe add it all up to see what the trip cost me end to end, but ... what ever it is, it is - I don't really care. I didn't skimp on stuff if I wanted to do things, I didn't go wild with spending either. Language was not a problem, pretty much everyone everywhere (except the odd person) was able to converse perfectly well in English, I knew a few words in Croatian which covered me for all the places I was as those words were the same in Slovenian/Bosnian.
I'm not massively into buying stuff when on holiday. I bought quite a few presents for people back home from various cities. I bought a good number of fridge magnets as memories I can see all the time. I've still got to sort where I'll put those so as not to interfere with all of what I have on my fridge already. I bought myself 2 nice T-Shirts in Dubrovnik as presents to myself (when I wanted to get them their card machine was offline and I wasn't sure if I could get, thankfully the next morning it was online and could get the 2 as only had about €15 in cash left). Regarding the T-Shirt shop ... what I found was very useful was to take photos of things in the shops and then to find it again you could just locate it in the photos app on the map so no need to write down street names etc. From Zagreb bought myself a small artificial bonsai to add to my tree collection.
Artificial Bonsai
T-Shirt shop
My 2 T-Shirts
I didn't buy these things on my holiday but got before I went. Both worked really well for when I was swimming.
Water shoes (for the rocky/stoney beaches)
Protection for phone (testing in sink)
It felt like I walked and walked and walked all over most days. I had my Apple Watch (I forgot my watch the one day, I felt all naked without it to look at for time and message notifications etc.) and iPhone which both track the my steps and with an app it shows me the approximate km per day. This didn't include elevation. I tried to do the odd thing using Strava but often forgot and/or didn't wanna sacrifice battery life with it running in background. This is what the steps/km looked like:
| Date | City | km | steps |
| 23-Sep | Cape Town/Zurich | 5.10 | 7261 |
| 24-Sep | Zurich/Ljubljana | 19.00 | 27053 |
| 25-Sep | Ljubljana/Bled | 32.10 | 45668 |
| 26-Sep | Ljubljana/Postojna | 17.70 | 25082 |
| 27-Sep | Ljubljana | 14.10 | 20053 |
| 28-Sep | Ljubljana | 11.90 | 16935 |
| 29-Sep | Ljubljana/Zagreb | 14.70 | 20835 |
| 30-Sep | Zagreb | 20.80 | 29510 |
| 01-Oct | Zagreb/Plitvice | 16.60 | 23627 |
| 02-Oct | Plitvice | 26.50 | 27700 |
| 03-Oct | Plitvice | 15.70 | 22373 |
| 04-Oct | Plitvice/Zadar | 15.40 | 21951 |
| 05-Oct | Zadar | 17.50 | 24893 |
| 06-Oct | Zadar/Split | 14.80 | 21001 |
| 07-Oct | Split/Hvar | 23.10 | 32780 |
| 08-Oct | Split | 20.70 | 29448 |
| 09-Oct | Split/Mostar | 11.80 | 16794 |
| 10-Oct | Mostar Day trip | 15.00 | 21381 |
| 11-Oct | Mostar | 15.50 | 21968 |
| 12-Oct | Mostar/Dubrovnik | 12.70 | 18091 |
| 13-Oct | Dubrovnik | 16.80 | 23861 |
| 14-Oct | Dubrovnik | 16.60 | 23527 |
| 15-Oct | Dubrovnik | 22.00 | 31253 |
| 16-Oct | Dubrovnik/Zagreb/Zurich | 10.80 | 15408 |
| Total | 406.90 | 568453 | |
| Daily Average | 17.47 | 24400 | |
I managed to acquire some stuff on my travels, I'm not meaning stuff like I was given at the Olympics Festival, I mean more stuff that people left behind or something. This is the stuff:
I think this blog pretty much summarises the holiday quite extensively. I took just over 5000 photos and videos on the trip, I used just over 20% of them in this blog. Wow - didn't expect it to be that many.
My DENT mobile eSIM/data worked flawlessly everywhere. I think I used maybe 1.5 - 2GB of data on the trip. I didn't think about it really if I needed to use the phone and data I just did.
As I said in the introduction post ... 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.