Opatija, Croatia

Heading out today required some coordination: 1) walk some blocks to where we parked the car, 2) use garage-door like opener to get car from behind gate, 3) use pass obtained from gate guardian to enter the pedestrian zone with car, 4) creep along to the hotel avoiding pedestrians, 5) return garage door opener, 6) checkout and load bags into car and 7) exit pedestrian zone.

Safely out of Rovinj, we had easy driving to Motovun (scenic hill town) and figured out how the toll roads operate along the way (get ticket at entry and pay by distance at exit point). Motovun is a charming little place and even has its own film festival. Fortunately for us, most of the "umbrella people" were elsewhere so we had a pretty quiet time of it. At the end, I wandered off and found the town geocache.

One thing you notice when driving through Croatia is that they were not around when you could "buy a vowel". Place names on signs included: Trst and Vrh. Then there are other funny (to us) town names like Slum.

The drive to Opatijia area was easy enough once you stopped trying to hold your breath in the five-mile long Ucek tunnel.We had done well with Google Maps directions on the whole -- the odd wrong turn but quickly recovered -- until trying to reach the hotel in Opatijia. We saw a sign for the Hotel Kapetanovic. There was a big arrow pointing left at a busy little intersection. Down the left road we went -- no hotel found. At that point we got out the big gun -- the caching GPS unit and loaded the hotel coordinates and took another run at the place. Back to the nasty intersection... GPS says you are close so we went right figuring to come at it from the top maybe. No joy -- just getting further away. So we backtracked to the sign we had seen. Sure enough a big arrow pointing left where we had already been ...but wait, there is a tasteful little low contrast gray arrow pointing right into a previously unnoticed little driveway. Rapid course correction up the alley and sure enough, there was the Hotel. At that point we figured out massive fail of form over function -- the giant left arrow we saw was actually a stylized K (e.g. |<) for the first letter of the hotel name and the actual directional arrow was a very tasteful, light gray, understated indicator at the bottom of the sign. See photo.

It was a nice change from the tiny Rovinj room to a nice modern room with a view out to sea. Maybe it's time to get a nice bottle of wine and a good book and just hole up here. Nah, tomorrow we try to enter Slovenia to see the Skocjan Cave, a world heritage site.