Each year we take a family vacation to Italy. This year we had a European double-header as the family shot over to Italy in June for my in laws 50^th wedding anniversary (details here) and Croatia in August for a close friend’s wedding. Croatia was beautiful. The wedding was a blast and perfectly suited the bride and groom. We had an opportunity to catch-up with many friends that we don’t see often while spending some time on the east side of the Adriatic – we visited Abruzzo on the west side of the Adriatic earlier in the summer.  Feel welcome to hit delete. What follows is mostly nonsense and the first time I’ve shared observations from a trip outside of Italy.

Split: A beautiful and walkable port city with great restaurants and a bit of high-end international airport vibe. It was hard not to notice the number of tourists wandering around the old city in basketball or soccer jerseys, and some were even wearing a full kit. There also appears to be a turf war brewing between the Froggy Land and Duck Boutique stores; it looks like the ducks current have the upper hand. Finally, there were a number of monster yachts with basketball and pickle ball courts being the amenities ‘de jour’.

Vis: A small island, with lots of reminders that Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again was filmed on the island. I had ABBA stuck in my head for the entire time I was on the island. I think that ABBA might have been constantly playing at subaudible levels throughout the entire island, constantly loading songs into my subconscious. The wedding venue, Fort George has spectacular views. The towns were delightful. If you like fish, the restaurant Pojoda in Kut was one of the best meals I can remember.

Trogir: The old city was a great bookend to our quick Croatian adventure. The old city may have the highest concentrations of gelato shops I have ever seen in my life.

Lighting Round

• This trip was the first time in a while that I haven’t recognized anything on a wine list in restaurants where we were having great meals. I was mostly picking wines based on staff recommendations or using price as a quality indicatory (not a great strategy). The wines were excellent relative to their price points and like Abruzzo, it felt like wine production is transitioning from a volume to a quality focus. 
• The boat trips, beaches, bays, and caves were worth visiting.
• The water couldn’t have been bluer and the beaches couldn’t have been rockier, more accurately about 99% small stones and about 1% peach/nectarine pits.  It’s relatively easy to get into the water, and a lot more effort to navigate the stones on the way out.
• In Vis, our twenty-year-old skipper turn a twenty-five-foot boat with an outboard motor in a submarine tunnel that might have been thirty-five feet wide. I’m still not sure how it’s possible.
• I was clearly in touristy areas, but breakfast was much more North American than in Southern Europe.
• My Italian is comfortable and I have a reasonable ear for conversational/situational French and Spanish, but not Croatian where I struggled to catch even the odd word.  When trying to read Croatian, it would take a few runs at many words before I could even guess at what the potential pronunciation might be.
• The Croatian radio stations we encountered (Ubers/taxis, shops, …) played folksy Crotian music with an occasional ABBA interruption.
• All that is needed to create outdoor seating for a bar is a pillow and a step.

I hope you've enjoyed my nonsense. If you'd like to read observations from previous years, you can find them here. I'm a very guilty vacationer, so I welcome you to reach out to catch up.

I hope summer is treating you well.

All the best.

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