Pag and Opatija

On Monday we picked up our rental car at the Split airport and began our driving adventure. Typical of our experiences in Croatia so far, picking up the car was a breeze. The car rental agent walked us out to our car and oriented us. We're driving an Open Astra estate -- a free upgrade from the tiny car we reserved. It has plenty of room for us, but very little power.

We were able to navigate well enough that we never got lost. We headed for the island of Pag, which is famous for special sheep cheese, hand-made lace, rotisserie lamb and its generally barren landscape. Our first impression, as we got onto Pag, was that Croatia's premiere natural resource must be rock! You could hardly see any vegetation growing anywhere. In fact, there were valleys that were quite green, but overall the island is well-suited to raising sheep. **Did you know that the limestone to build the White House came from Croatia?**

We walked around Pag town. It didn't really have any touristy stuff and very little English was spoken--we used the Croatian the girls taught us. We're pretty bad, but people are very patient with us. This is the first place where we've encountered many people who didn't speak English.

We had lunch at a recommended restaurant. They had lamb roasted over a spit in a big BBQ by the road (sorry, Brie and Mark). We had that with salad and pomme frites-it was really good. We then drove through more landscape that looked like the moon, following the directions to the ferry port. It was in the middle of nowhere.

We caught the ferry to the mainland and drove north along the coast toward our next destination--Istria. The road was beautiful and in great condition with lots of cute little villages, but slow. We drove through Rijeka, a big port town with oil refineries. We ended up going through the town instead of on the highway-very stressful, especially after all our time in time little medieval towns. We encountered our first traffic light since starting our drive over 200km ago. We made it through without problems and decided to spend the night in Opatija. We found a room with a terrace and sea view in the hills above the town. The guy at the agency said it was a 10 minute walk to town. We made our way down the hill to the riva and walked around-the town didn't look anything like we expected and a lot of the big mansions were in very poor repair. We finally figured out, we were on the outskirts of the main town so we decided to just have dinner at a restaurant overlooking the sea and go to bed. Back at our room (this was a room with a bath in some peoples' house), Kim asked the landlord for some more toilet paper. He went into another room and came out with the bag of cheese we bought in Pag and asked them to store in the fridge. Kim asked again for toilet paper and he went back in the room and came out with a bowl. Kim asked again and tried to explain, he smiled and came back with a spoon :). Kim went back to the room and brought out the roll of TP--he cracked up, went into a different room and finally got what we needed. It was really funny.