Central Europe: September 20 1998

Krk, Rijeka, Maribor

We spent the bulk of the day exploring the tiny medieval village of Krk, which consists of very old narrow stone-cobbled paths winding about amid tightly packed small stone buildings. The paths went up and down hills, snaked to and fro in a very organic manner. I'd have worried about getting lost if the village was not so small.

The "streets" of Krk

Venice also had relatively narrow paths and canals, but it was a very grand city and Krk is anything but grand. It was bursting with homely charm though.

In addition to walking around the village, we followed the edge of the marina around to a public park with a seemingly forgotten playground. It was probably nice at one time though, there was even the remains of a concrete minature golf course.

Towards dark we had dinner at an outdoor cafe and then got rid of the last of our kuna (Croatian currency) at an ice cream shop where Eva saw a Giant Schnauzer (giant schnauzers look like really big schnauzers if ya didn't know). Anyhow, it was a good thing the toll booth on the bridge leaving the island took Schillings since we did not consider that before splurging on ice cream shaped like spaghetti and meatballs.

The fabled playground of Otok Krk

The princess in front of her castle

Part of the marina

You are now leaving Krk

On the way to Slovenia from Krk we stopped in Rijeka to investigate a fortress we saw high on a hill (Little known fact about Europe: there's lots of fortresses on hills). We had passed through Rijeka on the way to Krk but it was night and we could not see much more than the smokestacks and "Neubauten" (dilapidated high rises) that rose over the city.

The landscape in this area is very drastic, deep gorges amid high hills running right to the sea. We had seen the fortress towering above us as we zipped around steep winding roads and through tunnels and it was a bit of an effort to turn back and find our way up through the hills. After bad choices that brought us to the wrong hill or to villages too far below the fortress we finally came upon it.

Luck was with us, it was open to the public so we were able to go inside and walk around a bit. There was a very nice center court which had been turned into an outdoor restaurant and garden with some sort of pub in the fortress walls. We went up the tower and caught great views of the surrounding area. This site has a cool RealVideo clip of the fortress.

There is a web site which serves some old Rijeka post cards (so old that the name of the city was still "Fiume") that I thought were kind of cool. I like this one because it fits my impression of the town. Although it was in a picturesque landscape, the town itself was very industrial and blue-collarish. I don't think I've ever been to Pittsburgh, but it made me think of Pittsburgh for some reason. Sort of like a Pittsburgh set up in West Virginia with a sea thrown in ....if you can imagine that.

Cool hippogriffin statue at Trsat

The side trip to Trsat had us running late again so we quickly got back on the highway heading north towards Slovenia and Austria. We were meeting Eva's parents in Maribor which is just south of the Austrian-Slovenian border. They were taking the train down from Weiz so we had to pick them up at the station. We managed to get there a little early according to the scheduled arrival; this was good because we needed to clean out Herr Jettmar's car which was a bit trashed from the remnants of several days travel. It didn't work out that way though, when we got to the station we found that Eva's brother had driven the family and Mary down in "The Duck" (a Citroën 2CV) and they were already there! We had to just push the trash to the side, oops!

It was good to have the whole family together though, as this was the last opportunity for the full crew to get together before our departure. We ate dinner at a restaurant which apparently doubles as a bordello (prostitution is legal in Western Europe). It was a bit strange as it was a nice family-style restaurant, but there was an upstairs door near our table with a red light above it. Sometimes the light would go on and an employee would open the door for a woman and a man to pass in or out. Same woman different man, on occasion. Ah, it's good to get out of America sometimes.

After dinner we had hoped to catch some rides at the carnival set up outside, but it had closed while we were dining. I wasn't too disappointed though as I was pretty tired (Eva was seriously disappointed however).

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