Little Footsteps in the Big World

Last year my husband won two free tickets to enter Paklenica National Park. Sadly, we never managed to visit Paklenica until the end of the validity period of the tickets. As we're very sorry to never make it to visit Paklenica with the free tickets, we decided to commit ourselves to visit all eight National Parks of Croatia, at least one park in one year. Earlier this year he won (again!) two free entrance tickets to Krka National Park, so we decided to start the national parks adventure in Krka. While summer vacationing in Nin in mid August, we took a one day trip to Krka NP which was around an hour drive from the coastal town of Nin near Zadar. When I googled about Krka, Skradinski buk attracted me the most. I thought, that was what I wanted to visit in Krka. Following our 6-year-old outdated GPS, we ended up in Roški slap entrance of Krka. We parked the car and consulted with a young girl at the ticket sale point about our destination. She checked the tickets my husband won...

Most Europeans spend two or three weeks on their favorite coast for a relaxing summer holiday. This year we decided to break our summer vacation to three parts because we wanted to "save" vacation days from work and spend as little paid-vacation-days as possible. This way, my husband could stay longer (probably three weeks) when I give birth in the end of this year. Our summer vacation this year looked like this: three days (long weekend) of Lovran, three days (long weekend) of Moščenička Draga and five days (extended long weekend) of Nin. All destinations were of course, Croatian coast (the first two in Kvarner, the last one in north Dalmatia). These were our third year taking babygirl to summer vacation, and here are some tips we could share:   Learn what your child likes, and it's probably sand After many beaches, if there is anything we learned, it's one thing: babygirl loves sand. She prefers sandy beaches much more to pebbly ones. As much as we love cryst...

Six years. One child. Seven countries. 120.000 km. This is a story about our little red Chevrolet Spark. Which we sold today. This morning we signed a contract with the buyers and we handed the beloved car to them. And I'm feeling very, very emotional about it. Not many people feel so emotional about a car. It's just a car. But I love cars. I watched Top Gear more than I ever watched Friends in my life. Or Sex and the City. Or anything like that. My mother used to work in a car industry and my father is a car maniac. It's genetics. We got our Spark six years ago, brand new. We didn't have much money so we got a small budget car for our daily need. The car was mostly rested during the week -except for regular house errands- because we take trains to work. But we'd go to road trips and weekend getaways whenever we could. It's been to beautiful places. It witnessed the growth of our family, and now as we're growing even more, we needed  a bigger, stronger c...

So my husband and I met when we took a Master study together in Nice, France, seven years ago. We both graduated in summer 2010 and are still in contact with some of the friends we studied with back then. Several months ago we agreed to all meet in Vienna for a weekend in July this year. Friends were coming from all over the world to meet up, so we decided to drive to Vienna for a weekend getaway on the 9th of July. Unlike our Paris trip ( read here ) this Vienna trip wasn't personally designed for babygirl. An itinerary was offered by a friend and we followed his lead (which was great, but is very different from our usual toddler-friendly plans). And because the idea of the trip was to see and talk to people we hadn't seen in a while, sightseeing was not our focus. We wanted more of conversations-over-drinks kind of thing. And we ended up eating all the time :) We left home early on Saturday, around 5am. Babygirl was asleep so I just moved her (in pajamas) into her carseat...