Istria and Moving On

First, check out this album. We'd like to post our camera photos into the body of the blog, but Blogger forces us to edit the html to do this, and we HATE that on our own dime in the internet cafe. So our posts from our iPhones work beautifully for embedding photos, but the camera photos...not so much. Anyway. Onward.

Neither Lloyd nor I relished leaving Korčula, though we agreed it was time for our adventures to continue. Our stay there was close to perfect, and our incredibly kind hosts sent us a touching email after we left telling us that they would reserve a room for us and our baby on our next trip to Korčula.

Sniffle. (And no, grandparent- and auntie-hopefuls, this does not mean that Lenni and Periša know something you don't. They're just being cheerfully anticipatory, like you).

Anyway, as you can see from Lloyd's post on Plitvice Lakes National Park, we did move on to something fantastic. I told Lloyd that Plitvice is most certainly where all the world's unicorns and fairies hang out. Though our photos are lovely (and Lloyd just linked to our entire photo album, above) they don't quite capture the awe, the magic. We both feel as though we've seen one of the earth's greatest natural treasures. What a cool sidebar to our otherwise seaside-urban honeymoon.

Now we're up in Rovinj, on the Istrian peninsula - land of truffles (the mushroom kind), honey, and true Italian culture. We hear more Italian than Croatian spoken here, and this once-Venetian peninsula seems rather dedicated to preserving its Italian roots. My favorite demonstration of the Italian influence is in the food. Even our simplest meals explode with flavor - a well-applied truffle here, a perfectly dried prosciutto there. The rest of Croatia's food, while tasty, often lacks variety or a good punch of spice. Not so in Istria. During our first meal (fettucine with truffles and pork tenderloin in a wine sauce), Lloyd and I barely spoke at all - just smiled at each other between bites.

Our first day, we oriented ourselves to Rovinj and saw its one main attraction (besides the great Old Town, fascinating dual-culture and thriving nightlife), the Church of Saint Euphemia. Her remains washed up in Rovinj in a huge sarcophagus centuries ago, and they have celebrated her here ever since. The sarcophagus is on display in the church, but we weren't allowed to photograph it. We did, however, take photos of Rovinj from the bell tower.

Lloyd has forced me (he will say "encouraged") to climb every bell tower we see. Some have been terrifying. Euphemia was the was the most terrifying, with rickety wooden steps angled downward, something between an inclined ladder and a staircase. I almost died and had to engage in every self-soothing behavior I could think of at the moment, including singing the Sesame Street theme song to myself like my mom would do when I was scared as a child. But the views, admittedly, were fantastic.

The next day we went on a road trip to Poreč, to see the famed Byzantine mosaics in a cathedral there. The photos don't do it justice, because there wasn't enough light and we haven't bothered getting to know our camera well enough to photograph in the dark, but hopefully you'll get the feel for it. After Poreč, we headed to Grožnjan, a tiny artist hamlet on a hilltop. We had a wonderful meal of homemade sausages and a truffle frittata there. The frittata, oddly, came scrambled instead of frittata-ed, like our fellow diners received. I truly believe the waiter saw that we were American and thought we might like scrambled eggs instead. No matter, they were perfectly wonderful. We spent the rest of our time in Grožnan wandering around the tiny town, trying to picture ourselves in the 14th century. Not hard to do with no cars, narrow cobblestone streets and original limestone structures everwhere.

The final stop on our Istrian road trip was Motovun, another town perched on a hilltop, where Mario Andretti was born. Such perfect irony - no cars in Motovun, you have to park and hike up to the Old Town. It's surrounded by walkable ramparts, so we took a surprisingly brief stroll (due to the miniscule town) around them, admiring the pastoral scenes below.

Today is our last day in Istria and, alas, in Croatia. We're off to Ljubljana in Slovenia tomorrow for the final leg of our journey. We are still having a blast, still discovering, still having mighty adventures. We're also building in a good amount of lazy time, which I think might be the hardest to leave behind. Now, off to take a boat adventure or to swim in the Adriatic. Definitely to get some gelato.