Somewhere between the fourth gelato of the day and the boys racing each other up another flight of Dubrovnik’s limestone stairs, it hit me: we’d stopped checking the itinerary. Fifteen nights, four very different corners of Croatia, and at some point the trip just started running itself — the way the best ones do.
We began in Dubrovnik, where the Old Town looks so much like a film set that it takes a day or two to remember it’s a real place people actually live in. We climbed the walls in the kind of heat that makes you newly appreciate gelato as a food group, took the ferry out to Lokrum to hunt for peacocks (successfully, and one even danced for us), and watched the sun go down from Srđ with the whole peninsula glowing gold below. Evenings were slower — kayaks pulled up on pebble beaches, stones skipped across still water, a night we happened into a string orchestra playing in front of St. Blaise’s under lights of red and green.
Then a ferry across to Korčula, Marco Polo’s reputed birthplace and a town that deserves more attention than it gets. We climbed the belfry for a good view over the rooftops, ate our way through a cheese platter that even Sahil — not exactly the family’s cheese evangelist — asked for seconds of, and watched the Moreška, a centuries-old sword dance performed in a floodlit courtyard. Pržina beach gave us a memorable evening: rocky shoreline, a moody pink sky, and the boys building sand reservoirs until the light ran out. Looking back, I’d clearly add a day or more here over the time we spent in Split.
From there we turned inland to Plitvice, which photos and other people’s stories only partly prepare you for. Turquoise lake after turquoise lake, waterfalls threading through green in a way that looks almost too saturated until you’re standing right in front of one. What I didn’t expect was how the boys slowed down for it — crouching at the water’s edge to watch damselflies skip across the surface, tracking a pair of butterflies working over a spray of wildflowers, actually taking in the symmetry of the place instead of just walking through it. It was also, unsurprisingly, the day the kids’ patience wore thinnest elsewhere — a long restroom hunt, a sprint ahead that needed regrouping, more ice cream than strictly necessary at 2pm in the heat. We made it back to the Airbnb sun-tired and happy, and closed the night with pool and table tennis, which felt like exactly the right way to end a day spent walking that much.
A quick stop in Trogir on the way back was cute and artsy, best appreciated in theory since it was over 100°F and we were mostly just trying to get by. Then Split itself: Diocletian’s Palace, a whole city still living inside the walls of a retired Roman emperor’s palace. We’d planned an ambitious back half of the trip — Klis Fortress, the Omiš zipline, kayaking in Makarska — but Croatia in July had other plans: 95 to 104°F most days, and we cut all three rather than fight the heat. We wandered the substructures instead, watched a storm roll over the Adriatic and give way to one of the best sunsets of the trip, and let the boys loose on a floating aqua park in the sea (more nerve-wracking for me than for them).
Good food carried us through — some of the freshest, flakiest fish of the trip, Fig Split’s burgers more than once (easily the best I’ve had), a memorable korma, and some unique pizza to close out a few late evenings.
Fifteen nights, four regions, and more gelato than I’m willing to count. This is the first of a two-part series — Part 1 covers Dubrovnik and Korčula in full; Part 2 picks up in Split, Plitvice, Trogir, and back to Split again.